Chemicals in Products

Everyday we are exposed to harmful chemicals through air, water, food, soil and consumer products.  This exposure is increasingly linked to chronic disease such as cancer and asthma.

There are literally thousands of chemicals in the many different household cleaning products on the market today.  Each product can represent a toxic chemical cocktail, and when used in combination with other products can have dire consequences for our health and the health of the environment.  And we often combine them, both inadvertently and purposefully.  We clean the toilet and then deodorise it.  We use different cleaners on tuff stains thinking the combination with work doubly well.

There is a vast amount of information available about these chemicals.  There is so much it can be confusing, and time consuming to access and understand it.  If we know the individual chemical we can look it up in the chemicals table.  Manufacturers in most countries are not obliged to list the ingredients of household cleaning products, so we may not know what is in the products.  In this case it may be more useful to start with the broad categories of products or the category of action as a starting point.