Excessive Cleaning Might Cause an Unhealthy Environment

Did you know that excessively clean spaces can actually be bad for our health?

Preventing the existence of the natural bacteria with antibacterial detergents and medicines create a potential environment for mold. This occurs for example in buildings, which often are cleaned with detergents that are too strong.

Antibacterial detergents remove but harmful bacteria, also microbes that protects surfaces from mold. This opens the door for indoor air problems.

Strong detergents are harmful for indoor air

After drying, the detergents vaporize the contained chemicals into the indoor air, which causes the indoor air quality to suffer. Today most detergents don’t even have to be washed away with water, which further increases the percentage of chemicals in the detergent. In a location where the air circulates mechanically, the percentage of chemicals in a detergent can go from low to as far as a hundred percent, meaning the chemical percentage of the detergent might be something completely else that what i stated on the bottle.

A microbiology professor from the University of Helsinki encourages to use only water or mild natural detergents when cleaning instead of using strong chemicals.

Another possibility to achieve better indoor air can be not to clean so often. In the Netherlands the amount of indoor air problems within office spaces has been declined due to less cleaning and more often using water instead of detergents filled with chemicals when cleaning.

By using products that are too strong when cleaning we can harm the environment in two ways: the natural balance of microbes in our environment is changed and the indoor air suffers from the effect of the chemicals.

A sterilized and chemical-filled indoor air is far away from a natural environment.

Fresh air isn’t a result of a clinical processes, it's a result of a space filled with microbes.

No reason to be afraid of bacteria

Being afraid of the bacteria can become harmful for our health. For the development of our immune system it is essential to live in a world of microbes. Microbes shouldn’t be seen as a threat for our health, because they actually are a prerequisite for our well-being.

Unfounded fear of bacteria can be damaging both for the nature and for the human health. When cleaning, maybe less is more.