Look under your sink or in your laundry cupboard: most likely you will find a cocktail of detergents and cleaning sprays.

Common Toxins

Ammonia, bleach, chlorine and formaldehyde are poisons commonly found in cleaning products. Just putting your hands in detergent while washing the dishes will cause chemicals leaching through your skin and into your blood circulation. Toxic fumes are released by all these products and are inhaled by you and your family. The Environmental Protection Agency has reported that toxic chemicals found in every home are three times more likely to cause cancer that other air borne pollutants.

Back to Basics

Cleaning is designed to remove, rather than kill, micro-organisms. It is the physical removal of organic material or soil from a surface. So physical action and complete surface coverage are important, as is avoiding soiling clean areas in the process of cleaning dirty ones.

What about Vinegar?

Did you know? Using vinegar to clean is still using a chemical compound and isn’t actually helping as it only provides one part of the cleaning process – the acid. For total cleaning system you require an acid and an alkaline.

How Do Microfibres Work?

Microfibre products designed for cleaning, clean on a microscopic scale. According to tests using microfibre materials and water to clean a surface leads to reducing the number of bacteria by 99%, whereas a conventional cleaning material reduces this number only by 33%.

Microfibre cleaning products also absorb fat and grease and their electrostatic properties give them a high dust-attracting power. Microfibre products used for cleaning are generally constructed from fibres of polyester and polyamide. This material can hold up to eight times its weight in water and traps dirt and bacteria until rinsed out. This means with microfibre you clean and disinfect in one step only, saving time.

During the cleaning process, millions of extremely fine special fibres loosen even the most stubborn dirt and grease, which are then bound together by the fibres and water.

How Effective are Microfibres?

Tests conducted in Australian laboratories show microfibres to be as effective as chemical sanitizing systems in the reduction of micro-organisms on contaminated surfaces. Additionally the microfibre products were shown to simplify cleaning as they remove dirt particles at the same time as removing bacteria. Tests also showed there was little ‘carry over’ from the cloths, that is the bacteria and organisms remained trapped in the fibres and were removed easily when rinsed in water.

Using microfibres not only cleans surfaces and picks up dirt and bacteria, they also dry and polish. More importantly they remove the need to purchase expensive, noxious chemicals and have these chemicals go down the drain.

For more information about microfibre products, see CISC member Ha-Ra

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