Pull the all-purpose spray out from under your sink and turn it around. You will probably find a hazard warning, directions for use, a phone number, and no ingredient list at all.
That is not an oversight. Food has to carry a full ingredient panel. Cleaning products do not. EPA’s Safer Choice program says so directly: “manufacturers of chemical products are not required to list ingredients on their containers.”
So most of what you think you know about a cleaner comes from the front of the bottle, which is advertising, and the back, which is a legal warning written to a standard most shoppers have never heard of.
The gap matters most in one specific place. Between January and March of 2020, US poison centers took 45,550 exposure calls about cleaners and disinfectants, about a fifth more than the same three months of 2019, according to a CDC report in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The products involved were ordinary. They were already under the sink.
What is in the bottle
A general-purpose cleaner is usually six kinds of ingredient doing six jobs, suspended in water.
Surfactants do the actual cleaning. Each molecule has a water-loving end and a grease-loving end, so it can grab oily soil and hold it in water long enough for you to wipe it away. EPA describes this class as the ingredients that reduce surface tension. Detergent chemistry gets a fuller treatment in our article on detergents. Here, just know that surfactants are the engine.
Solvents handle what water cannot dissolve on its own: ink, grease films, adhesive residue. Alcohols and glycol ethers are common ones.
Builders and chelating agents deal with hard water. Calcium and magnesium dissolved in tap water will tie up a surfactant and waste it. A builder locks those minerals away so the surfactant can get on with the job. It is the reason the same spray behaves differently in a hard-water town than in a soft-water one.
Acids and bases either fine-tune the product’s pH or do the heavy lifting themselves. Acidic products attack mineral scale, rust and soap film. Alkaline products attack grease and baked-on carbon. The strongest members of both families are the ones that injure people, and they get their own section below.
Preservatives stop a water-based product from growing mold and bacteria on the shelf. The widely used isothiazolinone family has a real downside. Dermatologists writing in the journal Cutis in 2019 described methylisothiazolinone as the driver of an epidemic of allergic contact dermatitis, and noted that related isothiazolinones show up in cleaning products as well as in personal care. If a cleaner gives you an itchy rash that is not simple dryness, preservative allergy is one of the likelier explanations, and a dermatologist can patch test for it.
Fragrance is one word that can stand for many separate chemicals. Our article on fragrance explains why that single word is a regulatory subject all by itself.
Why the label tells you less than a cereal box
Household product labeling runs on different logic than food labeling. A food label answers “what is in this.” A cleaning product label answers a narrower question: “what could this do to you.”
Under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act, a product that meets the legal definition of a hazardous substance has to carry a specific set of items, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission enforces them. There is a signal word, chosen from four: CAUTION, WARNING, DANGER and POISON. There is a statement of the main hazard. There is the common or chemical name of the substance causing that hazard. There are precautionary measures, first aid where appropriate, and handling and storage instructions where the package needs them. There is a line telling you to keep it away from children. And there is the name and address of the company behind it.
Read that list again and notice what is missing. Only the ingredient responsible for the hazard has to be named. The rest of the formula can stay off the label entirely, and a product that does not meet the hazardous substance definition may carry almost nothing.
California changed part of this picture. Its Cleaning Product Right to Know Act set ingredient disclosure rules for cleaning products sold in the state. Because printing one label for the whole country is simpler than printing fifty, the effect reached past California’s border. The American Cleaning Institute, the industry’s trade association, describes that act as the framework its member companies follow, and says there is no uniform national standard for how cleaning product ingredient information gets communicated. What you get in practice is a short summary on the bottle and a longer list on the manufacturer’s website.
One more wrinkle is worth knowing. EPA requires every product carrying the Safer Choice label to list all of its ingredients, fragrances included, either on the package or on an easy-access website. A voluntary certification demands the disclosure that federal law does not.
Sorting the claims on the front of the bottle
Every word on the front of a cleaning bottle sits in one of four buckets. Knowing which bucket you are looking at is most of the skill.
Bucket one: written into regulation
The hazard labeling above is law, enforced by a federal agency. So is truth in advertising: the Federal Trade Commission can act against a deceptive environmental claim under the FTC Act, which is why the claims below are not a complete free-for-all.
Bucket two: a government certification program
EPA’s Safer Choice label is the main one in this aisle. It is not a regulation, and it is not a private seal. It is a federal program a manufacturer volunteers to enter. EPA reviews every chemical ingredient regardless of how small a share of the formula it is, along with packaging, pH and volatile organic compound content, and the product has to perform comparably to conventional products to qualify.
Behind the label sits the Safer Chemical Ingredients List, where EPA sorts individual chemicals with a color code. A green circle means verified to be of low concern. A green half-circle means expected to be of low concern, with less data behind the call. A yellow triangle means the chemical clears the bar for its particular job but still carries hazard concerns, and EPA treats that job as an area where better chemistry is needed. A grey square means the chemical may not be acceptable, and products containing it face reformulation.
That is specific and checkable, which makes it unusual on a cleaning shelf. It is also narrower than people assume. “Safer” here means screened against published criteria, not harmless.
Bucket three: a private certification
Third-party ecolabels belong here. Some are rigorous. Some are a logo a company awarded itself. The FTC’s Green Guides are the useful test: a marketer should not use an environmental seal that fails to convey the basis for the certification. A seal that names what it tested is worth something. A green leaf with no explanation is worth nothing.
Bucket four: undefined
“Non-toxic” lives here. No federal rule sets out what a cleaner must contain or avoid to earn the phrase. The Green Guides treat it as a claim that likely tells shoppers the product is safe for people and for the environment both, which means a marketer needs evidence for both or has to qualify the claim. Nothing about seeing the phrase on a bottle tells you that evidence exists.
“Natural” sits in the same bucket. EPA’s Safer Choice staff answer that one by pointing out that a chemical made from a plant is chemically identical to the same chemical made from petroleum.
“Biodegradable” is the special case, because the FTC has written rules for it. Under the Green Guides at 16 CFR Part 260, an unqualified degradable claim for something that goes into regular trash is deceptive unless the entire item completely decomposes within one year after customary disposal. The Guides add that landfills, incinerators and recycling facilities do not provide the conditions for that to happen. Strictly, the Green Guides are guidance rather than binding law, and they say so. The FTC can still bring a case under the FTC Act, so treat them as rules with teeth.
Disinfectants are a fifth thing again, with their own federal registration system. Our article on disinfectants covers it.
The two mixtures that send people to emergency rooms
This is the part worth memorizing, because almost nobody mixes cleaners on purpose. One product goes into a toilet bowl on top of another. A bucket gets reused without rinsing. Two sprays get used five minutes apart in a bathroom with the door shut.
Bleach plus ammonia produces chloramine gas. The National Library of Medicine’s MedlinePlus lists chloramine gas, formed by mixing bleach with ammonia and with certain powdered cleansers, as a household source of chlorine poisoning. This is not theoretical. Military physicians reported in Military Medicine in 1998 on two barracks cleaning details ten days apart, in which soldiers mixed liquid bleach and ammonia. Seventy-two people came through one emergency department.
Bleach plus an acid produces chlorine gas. CDC states it in a single sentence: “Household chlorine bleach can release chlorine gas if it is mixed with certain other cleaning products.” The same page follows it with a blunt instruction not to mix household cleaners at all.
Here is where each one hides:
- Chlorine bleach is sodium hypochlorite. MedlinePlus lists it in household bleach, pool chlorine products, disinfectants, some bleaching solutions and water purifiers.
- Ammonia appears in a range of household cleaners. If ammonia is what makes a product hazardous under federal law, the label has to name it, so the word is usually there if you look.
- Acids are in toilet bowl and porcelain cleaners, which MedlinePlus names as a household source of hydrochloric acid, and in plain white vinegar. Vinegar deserves its own warning, because people file it mentally under food rather than chemistry. The CDC report mentioned earlier describes a woman who soaked groceries in a mixture of bleach solution, vinegar and hot water, noticed a chlorine smell, could not breathe properly and called 911.
Small amounts matter more than people expect. NIOSH sets its recommended exposure limit for chlorine at a ceiling of 0.5 parts per million and considers 10 parts per million immediately dangerous to life or health. Those are workplace numbers for a gas most people can smell well below them. A closed bathroom does not need much.
What to do. Get everyone, including pets, out of the room and into fresh air. Open a window on your way out, not as a reason to stay. Do not go back in to see how bad it is.
Then call Poison help at 1-800-222-1222. It is free, confidential and staffed 24 hours a day. If anyone is struggling to breathe, has chest tightness, is coughing up white or pink fluid, or has burning in the nose, throat or eyes, call 911 instead, and make the call from outside. CDC’s sequence after a chlorine exposure is to leave the area, get clean and get medical help: remove contaminated clothing, shower with lukewarm water and mild soap without scrubbing, and rinse burning eyes with lukewarm water for 10 to 15 minutes.
Timing matters too. After a lower exposure, symptoms can appear later rather than immediately, so call even if the person insists they feel fine.
The two products with the worst burn potential
Drain cleaner and oven cleaner sit in a different category from everything else under your sink.
Drain cleaners commonly contain sodium hydroxide, also called lye. Oven cleaners contain corrosive alkalis. MedlinePlus describes what these do in language that is hard to read and worth reading anyway: burns to the mouth, throat and stomach, holes in the esophagus or stomach, vision loss from eye contact, and damage that keeps progressing for weeks after a swallow. Death can follow months later from complications. Sodium hydroxide also turns up in some hair straighteners, metal polishes and aquarium products.
Three specific things to know, because they run against instinct:
- Do not make the person vomit unless poison control or a clinician tells you to. Bringing a corrosive back up burns the same tissue a second time.
- Do not give vinegar or lemon juice to neutralize a swallowed alkali. MedlinePlus warns that this can worsen the burning.
- Take the container to the hospital. The label tells the clinician which chemical it is and at what strength, and that changes the treatment.
For skin or eye contact, flush with a large amount of water for at least 15 minutes before anything else, and call 1-800-222-1222 while you are doing it.
Open a window before you start
Cleaning puts chemicals into the air you are standing in. EPA reports that many volatile organic compounds run consistently higher indoors than outdoors, up to ten times higher, and that levels can spike far above background during and right after certain activities. EPA’s advice is unambiguous: increase ventilation when you use products that give off VOCs.
There is a second reason that is less obvious. Chemists at the University of Toronto reported in Environmental Science & Technology in 2019 that using chlorine bleach indoors releases hypochlorous acid and chlorine gas at levels that can reach hundreds of parts per billion during cleaning. In their chamber work, those gases reacted with limonene, a scent chemical common in cleaning products, and ordinary indoor light then drove the formation of new fine particles at a mass yield of roughly 40 percent of the limonene consumed. The short version: the air you create by cleaning contains more than what you sprayed.
Does any of this matter across a lifetime? A study in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine in 2018 followed 6,235 European adults over 20 years and found that women who did the cleaning at home lost lung function faster than women who did not: an annual decline in forced expiratory volume of 22.1 millilitres against 18.5 millilitres. The yearly gap is small, and an observational study cannot prove cause. It is still a cheap reason to crack a window rather than clean a bathroom with the door closed.
One line on a stubborn belief: the smell of cleanliness is fragrance, not cleanliness. A lemon-scented counter is a counter with scent chemicals sitting on it, and our article on fragrance explains why that is not nothing.
Ventilation as a whole-house strategy belongs in our article on ventilation. For cleaning, the instruction fits in a sentence: open a window or run the exhaust fan, and leave it going a while after you finish.
Five minutes with the cupboard under your sink
Do this once and you will not need to do it again for a year.
- Pull everything out and read the signal words. Sort into two piles: anything that says DANGER or POISON, and everything else. That first pile is what children and confused adults must never be able to reach.
- Find your bleach and your ammonia. Put them at opposite ends of the shelf. Accidental mixing usually begins with two bottles standing next to each other.
- Check for anything decanted into an unlabeled container. A cleaner in a drink bottle is a poisoning waiting to happen. Relabel it properly or pour it out.
- Look for anything you have not used in two years. If you cannot remember buying it, you do not need it. Your city or county almost certainly runs a household hazardous waste collection.
- Write 1-800-222-1222 where everyone can find it. The inside of the cupboard door works. Program it into every phone in the house while you are there.
- Count your single-purpose products. Most households need a general-purpose cleaner, something for glass, something for the toilet and something for the oven. The rest is usually duplication.
Bleach, and everything else
The habit to carry out of here is simple: keep bleach away from everything else. Bleach is cheap, it works and it sits in a great many cupboards, and it is also the ingredient at the center of most household chemical accidents that involve breathing. Used alone, with a window open and a rinsed bucket, it is a reasonable tool. Combined with ammonia or with an acid, in a small room, it is a gas release.
The rest is less urgent. Labels will keep telling you less than you want to know, and “non-toxic” will keep meaning nothing in particular. The Safer Choice logo will keep being the one mark on a cleaning bottle that corresponds to a defined federal review of what is inside it. Sorting which is which takes about ten seconds, and only once per product.
Sources
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Frequently Asked Questions about Safer Choice.” epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Safer Choice and Design for the Environment (DfE) Standard.” epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Learn About the Safer Choice Label.” epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Safer Chemical Ingredients List.” epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Safer Choice Master Criteria for Safer Chemical Ingredients.” epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Volatile Organic Compounds' Impact on Indoor Air Quality.” epa.gov
- U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. “Federal Hazardous Substances Act (FHSA) Requirements.” cpsc.gov
- U.S. Federal Trade Commission (via eCFR). “16 CFR Part 260: Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims.” ecfr.gov
- U.S. Federal Trade Commission. “Green Guides.” ftc.gov
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Chemical Fact Sheet: Chlorine.” cdc.gov
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Chemical Fact Sheet: Ammonia.” cdc.gov
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Cleaning and Disinfecting with Bleach.” cdc.gov
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (MMWR). “Chang A, et al. Cleaning and Disinfectant Chemical Exposures and Temporal Associations with COVID-19, National Poison Data System, United States, January 1 to March 31, 2020. MMWR, April 24, 2020.” cdc.gov
- National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. “NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards: Chlorine.” cdc.gov
- National Library of Medicine, MedlinePlus. “Chlorine poisoning.” medlineplus.gov
- National Library of Medicine, MedlinePlus. “Sodium hypochlorite poisoning.” medlineplus.gov
- National Library of Medicine, MedlinePlus. “Sodium hydroxide poisoning.” medlineplus.gov
- National Library of Medicine, MedlinePlus. “Drain cleaner poisoning.” medlineplus.gov
- National Library of Medicine, MedlinePlus. “Oven cleaner poisoning.” medlineplus.gov
- National Library of Medicine, MedlinePlus. “Hydrochloric acid poisoning.” medlineplus.gov
- National Library of Medicine, MedlinePlus. “Household Products and Chemical Safety.” medlineplus.gov
- American Cleaning Institute. “Ingredient Communication.” cleaninginstitute.org
- American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (PubMed). “Svanes O, et al. "Cleaning at Home and at Work in Relation to Lung Function Decline and Airway Obstruction." 2018. PubMed. DOI: 10.1164/rccm.201706-1311OC.” doi.org
- Environmental Science & Technology (PubMed). “Wang C, Collins DB, Abbatt JPD. "Indoor Illumination of Terpenes and Bleach Emissions Leads to Particle Formation and Growth." 2019. PubMed. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.9b04261.” doi.org
- Clinical Toxicology (PubMed). “Slaughter RJ, et al. "The clinical toxicology of sodium hypochlorite." 2019. PubMed. DOI: 10.1080/15563650.2018.1543889.” doi.org
- Military Medicine (PubMed). “Pascuzzi TA, Storrow AB. "Mass casualties from acute inhalation of chloramine gas." 1998. PubMed PMID: 9503902 (no DOI assigned).” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Cutis (PubMed). “Reeder M, Atwater AR. "Methylisothiazolinone and isothiazolinone allergy." 2019. PubMed PMID: 31603959 (no DOI assigned).” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov