Wash away the killer cleaners

Or How not to kill your clean­ing staff

This was orig­i­nally pub­lished in Com­mon Ground mag­a­zine www.CommonGround.ca

by Peter Sir­com Bromley

http://www.perubluesky.ca/

Ever won­der what it’s going to take to get rid of the toxic clean­ers in our homes, work­places and the envi­ron­ment? Kevin Daum won­ders about this every day because that’s his job. Kevin Daum is an entre­pre­neur and inven­tor who for­mu­lates man­u­fac­tures and sells green clean­ers. Over the last fif­teen years he has spear­headed the devel­op­ment of a com­pany called Save the Oceans Inc. The goal is to solve global oil pol­lu­tion and toxic cleaner prob­lems by chang­ing how we clean at home and at work. The com­pany has turned this ideal into Oil Lift and other Lift Brand clean­ing prod­ucts now avail­able in retail stores nationwide.

You might think such enter­prise would be easy con­sid­er­ing all the talk about going green. The truth is that Kevin’s peo­ple spend most of their time re-educating prospec­tive cus­tomers. And that’s a real chal­lenge despite count­less sto­ries in the media about switch­ing away from toxic cleaners.

In North Amer­ica, toxic clean­ing prod­ucts are a part of the domes­tic land­scape, but few peo­ple real­ize that spray­ing poi­son on a sur­face or adding it to their laun­dry makes it, in a sense, less clean. Mil­lions of oth­er­wise ratio­nal peo­ple have been trained to place a high pri­or­ity on white laun­dry and spot­less kitchens at the expense of their health. The cure is killing the patient.

So how is this spin accom­plished? Kevin says the answer is sim­ple: fear and embar­rass­ment. Adver­tis­ers ask if you care about your chil­dren, fam­ily, friends and pets. They sug­gest that if you don’t kill the bac­te­ria, you’re a bad par­ent. Fears of being a bad home­maker can be so pow­er­ful that they over­ride com­mon sense. For exam­ple, you’ve been trained to believe doing laun­dry a cer­tain way kills bac­te­ria when in fact laun­dry machines can be bac­te­ria incu­ba­tors. Kevin calls this skanky laun­dry syn­drome. To find out if you have skanky laun­dry syn­drome, he sug­gests you smell your tow­els after you use them a cou­ple of times. If they smell of mildew, you most likely need to detox­ify your laun­dry machine.

As an inno­va­tor, Kevin is used to think­ing out­side the deter­gent box. Con­sider this: if the aver­age per­son was given laun­dry deter­gent from Brazil they would think that their whites are not clean. Laun­dry deter­gent in South Amer­ica is designed to make your whites have a red­dish hue. In North Amer­ica we’re trained to think that white laun­dry has a bluish hue. It also has to have a chem­i­cal smell. Kevin recently had a friend do laun­dry tests for him; she had removed all the red wine stains and was very happy with the results. Her mother then sniffed the tow­els. “These aren’t clean”, she said. “They don’t smell like bleach”. Most other mam­mals would run from the scent of chlo­rine bleach.

So how can we over­come the brain­wash­ing and get rid of toxic clean­ers from our homes and work­places? Recently Kevin was doing a clean­ing prod­uct replace­ment audit for a hotel. Many of the clean­ing staff were using prod­ucts they thought were green because the sup­plier had a green sound­ing name. The head of house­keep­ing knew that this was mis­lead­ing yet she couldn’t get her staff to change (at home she uses bak­ing soda, vine­gar and lime juice). Even staff mem­bers who knew they were using toxic prod­ucts were reluc­tant to change because they believed the green clean­ers don’t work. One of the staff even showed Kevin the bleach she hides in her tow­els to use when her boss isn’t around. They both had a good laugh when Kevin pointed out that her boss could prob­a­bly smell it.

So Kevin found him­self with a bunch of bleach-smuggling pro­fes­sional clean­ers that he had to depro­gram. In response, he wrote a book­let called How to Kill your Clean­ing Staff and pro­vided it as a free down­load on his web­site. When they had read the book­let, he devised a clever strat­egy: he sold the hotel small bot­tles of two replace­ment clean­ers and asked the staff to go home and find out what clean­ing prob­lems the clean­ers don’t work on. They could not find any. The illu­sion that green clean­ers are inef­fec­tive disappeared.

Kevin’s story illus­trates the degree to which the pur­vey­ors of poi­son have brain­washed us to con­tinue buy­ing their watered down toxic goo.

So how do we break the cycle? Kevin says the first step is to get edu­cated. To that end, Kevin offers a book­let How to Kill Your Clean­ing Staff on his web­site www.oillift.net. Just click on the ban­ner that says fun stuff for free on the col­umn, fill in your name and e-mail. The book­let is auto­mat­i­cally sent to you.

The sec­ond step is to read and sign Kevin’s on-line peti­tion to stop water pol­lu­tion in your neigh­bour­hood by ban­ning toxic clean­ers. With the peti­tion there is a series of six ques­tions. Kevin asks that you answer them hon­estly as he is try­ing to deter­mine how much peo­ple know about envi­ron­men­tal clean­ing. You’ll be emailed the answers to the ques­tions. And you’ll also get a solu­tion for skanky laun­dry syndrome.

Whether you buy Kevin’s prod­ucts or other eco-certified clean­ers, the prob­lem of tox­i­c­ity in clean­ing prod­ucts needs to be solved. Through edu­ca­tion you become part of the solu­tion to get the tox­ins out of your home and workplace.

Note: Save the Oceans Inc and Oil lift is estab­lish­ing dis­trib­u­tors world wide and cur­rently is avail­able on line and at major retail­ers Cana­dian Tire, Lordco, Wind­sor Ply­wood, Tim-BR-Mart, True Value, Ben­jamin Moore, and most health food stores. Con­tact: Info@oillift.net with your clean­ing ques­tions. www.oillift.net Now you have a Choice!

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