Spring cleaning is a happy tradition of opening every window and scrubbing the home down before bugs have opened their compound eyes.
You have a choice in the compounds you use for spring cleaning. Expensive commercial cleaning products allow you to fill your home with ammonia, alkyl ammonium chlorides, cationic and anionic solutions, chlorine, cresol, hydrochloric acid, isopropanol, lye, naphtha, nitrobenzene, oxalic acid, perchloroethylene, petroleum distillates, phenol, sodium bisulfate, sodium hypochlorite, and sulfuric acid.
For a lot less money, you can do the jobs with vinegar, baking soda, salt, and lemon juice, ISTC staffers Joy Scrogum and Laura Barnes remind us in a Tuesday story in The Daily Illini.
There we find that the University of Massachusetts Lowell Toxics Use Reduction Institute is a nice source of information about greening your spring cleaning.
The Cleveland Clinic has a checklist of hazardous ingredients you might find on your shelves.
The latest ISTC Report offers a cautionary tale of how one common cleaning chemical additive operates on the environment downstream of your drain.