February 04, 2020 Leave a Comment
We live in a time when we're hearing more about how unsafe most cleaning products are for our health, and in particular for the health of our children, who are more susceptible to the dangers of the toxic chemicals found in the cleaning products used in our homes, schools, doctor's offices, and other public access areas. We're also living in a time when we need to be more concerned about our eco-system and how the products we use to clean, sanitize, and disinfect are affecting it. In short, we need to start using safe cleaning products if we want to keep people and the planet safe.
Dangers of Unsafe Cleaning Products
The Centers for Disease (CDC), the World Health Organization, and the American Lung Association have all made it clear that the vast majority of cleaners and disinfectants we use are causing us harm, in some cases, these products are killing us. Some of the results of using harmful cleaning, sanitizing, and disinfecting products include birth defects, ADHD, autism, asthma and allergies, respiratory disease, and even cancer. Norway's University of Bergen studied 6,235 people over 20 years and concluded that the regular use of cleaning sprays is as harmful to lungs as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for 10 to 20 years. This is especially true for women. Men, on the other hand, need to be aware that endocrine disruptors found in cleaning products have been linked to the startling reduction in sperm count over the last generation and a half. A 52 percent reduction, in fact, as indicated from an analysis of 185 studies of nearly 43,000 men. With statistics like this, it's even more important we start using safe cleaners, but how do you know which cleaners are safe and which ones are making false claims?What Are Safe Cleaners?
This is a good question. Safe cleaning products, ideally, would pose absolutely no threat to the environment or to the people using or coming into contact with products that claim to be safe, but there is no way to be certain the companies that make these claims are following any sort of guidelines. In fact, it's very hard to find safe cleaners because manufacturers currently aren't required to list all of the ingredients in their products. The manufacturer of a cleaning product is not obligated at this time to list the ingredients in fragrances, which can be quite dangerous, they don't have to list ingredients that can be considered "trade secrets," and they are able to use ambiguous words and phrases like "quaternary ammonium compound," "cleaning agent," or "cleaning compound." These phrases sound powerful but really don't mean much, and they certainly don't tell us what ingredients we're actually dealing with when we use the product. Quaternary ammonium compound is an umbrella term that encompasses all kinds of ingredients a company doesn't want to list on their product individually. These compounds can cause severe burns, damage to eyes, and are often toxic to wildlife.
GenEon Believes in Being Transparent
At GenEon, we understand the frustration consumers face when it comes to finding safe cleaning, sanitizing, and disinfecting products. We understand how the lack of concern by the cleaning industry in general can be frustrating to consumers. That's why the cleaning, sanitizing, and disinfecting solutions from GenEon are made using nothing more than water, natural minerals, and electricity. That's all there is to it. Our products are made with a process known as electrochemical activation (ECA). The process is simple. One of the natural minerals GenEon uses as a catalyst is salt, which is a compound comprised of sodium and chloride. During our process, Sodium ions are positively charged and chloride ions are negatively charged. Our onsite generators expose these ions to a low electrical charge. The positive side of the charge electrochemically converts the chloride ion (Cl) to hypochlorous acid (HOCl), which is a powerful sanitizer, and the negative side of the charge electrochemically converts the sodium ion (Na) into sodium hydroxide (NaOH), which is a cleaning compound commonly found in soaps and detergents. Our system is a Blended Stream System that uses both versions in the same solution where the hypochlorous solution is represented as Free Available Chlorine (FAC) with 80-200 times the sanitizing power of chlorine bleach. It's produced at a near neutral pH, so it won't even bleach out furniture or clothes.
