Cleaning at home, How many products do you use?
limpieza y desinfeccion
How many cleaning products do you use at home? How many pollute and can be very harmful to your health, children and pets?
Sostenibilidad, ecología, evitar desperdicio, alimentación sostenible, limpieza sostenible, productos de limpieza en el hogar, marketing, zero rsiduo
Cleanliness is critical, and marketing takes advantage of it
We use an average of five cleaners per household (kitchen, bathroom, furniture, glass, floor). This is five plastic bottles and almost 5L of water that need to be transported. 5 chemicals that might clean your house, dirtying the water, the earth and possibly damaging your health (more if you suffer from allergies) in addition to protecting the most vulnerable (children and pets) from possible harmful effects. Easy access to these products
But what’s behind it?
We have been indoctrinated that we need specific cleaning products for each place and furniture and that every things also disinfected, as it was necessary to disinfect daily. The truth is that disinfectants are biocides that eliminate all kinds of life, and this causes problems due to excessive cleaning and other negative effects.
Every day more companies like WeTKare are committed to improving consumption habits and today we are going to see with perspective the importance of minimizing waste, eliminating chemicals and reducing water waste and CO2 emissions, and being a little more sustainable
Being sustainable, that buzzword, is fundamental since ecology alone is insufficient and here WeTKare is one of those companies that looks beyond and together with it we will show the importance of taking into account the cost behind each product, and that this is not only economic; water, transport, production of packaging, production of the product and a long etc are present.
1. Excessive cleaning
In 1980, British epidemiologist David Strachanobserved that, in the dirtiest, most polluted and least wealthy cities of East Germany, children had much lower rates of hay fever and asthma than in the cleaner and wealthier cities of West Germany with their less social lifestyle with other children.
Other doctors have since found that, in general, people in wealthy, more sanitized nations have much higher rates of asthma and allergies than those in the developing world. And while there might be other variants here, it was observed that people who move from a developing country to a richer one are more likely to develop these diseases than people who remain in their home country.
This is why more and more doctors have hypothesized that we live in a modern, ultra-sanitized world in which too much cleanliness may be causing us to develop allergies, asthma, inflammatory bowel diseases, and other autoimmune disorders.
Lack of exposure to bacteria, viruses, and allergens impedes the normal development of the immune system, which ultimately increases the possibility of disorders within this system in the future. This is called the hygiene hypothesis.
Our immune system needs education, just like any other organ. Erika von Mutius, a pediatric allergist at the University of Munich suggests that early exposure to microbes helps in educating a baby’s developing immune system. Without this education, your immune system may be more likely to attack the wrong target, in the case of autoimmune diseases.
Here it is very important to differentiate. Excessive cleaning is not related to not getting vaccinated and of course basic cleaning practices (Infrastructure, water and garbage treatment, washing hands …) are necessary and avoid a large number of diseases
True, it is still not fully understood how the immune system develops as we grow, but the idea is that exposure is really necessary for it to develop properly.
At the moment, the hygiene hypothesis remains a hypothesis: and no scientist believes it can explain all cases of allergies and asthma, but the interactions between a person’s environment and genes contribute to rates of autoimmune diseases.
None of this means you should stop cleaning your house or washing, or start drinking potentially contaminated water. And if you learn to clean dirt and sanitize without removing everything with mostly chemical biocides , which can be harmful to health.
2. The cost of cleaning products
We are going to include cleaning products in 5 broad categories and make a quick analysis of each one:
- Non-ecological cleaning products.
Mostly or all, made of very aggressive and toxic chemicals. They clean, although they usually involve a high price, due to the environmental and health impact they can cause due to chemical spills, poisonings and allergic recessions.
They are bottled in single-use plastics (producing each of these bottles involves an average of 3 – 4L of water) and have a formula composed of 10% chemicals and 90% water.
Its use is quite limited and after pouring the toxic content we throw away the plastic bottle to buy a new one.
Summary: We clean with a cleaner that contaminates and may affect our health and the environment. We waste water to produce each bottle and once finished we dry rivers and springs to fill it with water and transport it. We emit tons of CO2 in producing bottles and packaging and transporting water, when water is transported on its own…
Do you consider it efficient?
- Standard organic products
These products differ from the previous ones in that their components are less polluting.
However, they are still bottled in single-use plastic bottles and emit large amounts of CO2 in addition to being a strong waste of water as we saw earlier. And they have the same proportion 10% cleaning product and 90% water
- Organic products in bulk
Here we begin to see some change. The vast majority are organic products and there may be times when they are not.
They are transported in large quantities, (from about 5L) still with the same proportion (10-90%), to a point of sale, to which each customer must go with their bottle to fill with the product you need.
This can mean enormous savings in plastic bottles and other materials however there is still a large amount of CO2 emissions to transport those drums in addition to the aforementioned waste of water.
- Single-dose organic products
This model is gaining more followers every day. In this case, 90% of water is eliminated and the customer acquires only 10% of cleaning product in pill or liquid.
Many of these products are eco-friendly, although there may be exceptions. Here the great savings they represent in the production of single-use plastic bottles, reduction of CO2 emissions and water waste stand out.
However, what is not taken into account is the cost of producing each of the wrappers of each dose and the cost of producing each, which are quite high. And here we talk about the economic cost, energy cost and production cost (example: necessary machinery)
- Homemade cleaning products
These products are usually the most environmentally friendly as they are made mainly from 100% natural products; Vinegar, baking soda, lemon, soda, natural oils, plants…
But what is the cost in producing each of these components? What is the cost of producing the packaging of each? Do we take advantage of 100%?
3. Economic cost
As we saw above the costs behind each cleaning product, now we will see that economic expense that the client perceives.
How do you go to work each day? If you go by public transport, do you pay for your individual ticket every day? Or do you prefer to pay a monthly pass, trimestral.. ?
Most of us who use public transport use a pass, for the simple fact that paying individual tickets in the medium and long term is a much greater expense. The same happens with the car versus moving daily by taxi.
Supermarkets and most stores offer cleaning products for an average (according to brands and characteristics) of € 1 up to € 4 and € 5. We also have the products that are purchased online mostly taking advantage of the single-dose model with an average of € 1.50 doses.
We will take a global average price of € 2.5 per cleaning product. If at home you use, as we indicated at the beginning, about five products (Kitchen, bathroom, furniture, glass and floor) we will have an average expense of € 12.5. Not to mention specific products for types of wood, furniture, floors, bleach, etc.
How much do you think you spend on cleaning products?
Conclusion
n 2019 in Spain, only in domestic cleaning products, the expenditure was 225 million euros and since 2020 its consumption increased more than 20% making each citizen spend more than € 90 on cleaning products in a single year.
We like to enjoy a clean home and be able to visit places where we are comfortable. As we have seen and know the cleanliness, it is fundamental, without a doubt and at the same time we have to take into account that this cleaning respects our health and the environment.
Each cleaning product has some pros and cons but we have in our hand the possibility of choosing those more respectful and that best suit us.
WeTKare are cleaning products with such a concentrated formula, that the five cleaning products mentioned (kitchen, bathroom, furniture, glass and floors) and some more 😉 they have managed to agglutinate them in only two bottles, with an easy duration of one year. WeTKare Multi-surfaces offers between 50 and 100 cleaning sprayers, just dilute the right dose in each of its aluminum sprayers, add water and clean normally. Its floor cleaner with 250ml provides up to 250 buckets of water. It’s like having bulk cleaning at home in the minimum space.
A simple gesture that benefits us all such as avoiding food waste.
