Is Bleach Superbad For The Environment? You?
Is common household bleach a threat to the environment? Can it kill you?
BACK TO BASICS | Call me a freak, but putting on rubber gloves and plunging my hands into my own toilet bowls to clean them with a scrubbing sponge doesn’t bother me at all. What does bother me is that no matter what cleaning products I use, the bowls of my newish toilets look dirty again in days. Frustrated by the ineffectiveness of Vim, Ajax, Lysol et al., I turned to cheap, common household bleach.
As a test, I poured bleach around the sides of one toilet bowl and put some directly in the water then waited an hour before flushing. OMG! I was shocked by how effectively it worked without elbow grease and at how long the bowl stayed sparkly clean—easily two weeks.
Now I bleach and disinfect my toilets twice a month; between applications, I scrub, swish and flush with no product at all, and my toilets look fabulous.
Still, for all of its good qualities, bleach is not without haters, and it should be used with caution. See below.
Bleach: The Fear Factor
Google “bleach and the environment” and you’ll turn up plenty of antibleach articles. You’ll also find just as many reports that household-variety bleach isn’t a scourge to the environment. A jug of household chlorine bleach is composed of water with three to seven percent sodium hypochlorite. After use in household cleaning, sodium hypochlorite breaks down into salt and water. When the remaining traces of sodium hypochlorite enter the water system through the household drain, municipal water filtration plants remove it handily with no harm to the environment.
Google “bleach and health risks” and you can see why it has detractors. While the sodium hypochlorite in household bleach does not contain carcinogenic dioxins, toxic gases can form when bleach comes into contact with acids (like vinegar) or ammonia.
This is why I use household bleach for just one task, cleaning my toilets, and why, to be absolutely on the safe side, I never couple it with any other cleaning agent. Nothing. Nada. Zip—plus I leave my doors and windows open wide when I’m using it. Also worth noting is that bleach combined with urine, which contains ammonia, can also be dangerous. So alert everyone in your family when you’re bleaching the toilets (put a paper band across the seat?), or better yet, do it when no one is home.—Ruth Rainey
Photo: Shutterstock
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