The Cleaning Ingredients We Avoid, and Why

Most cleaning businesses will tell you they use eco-friendly products. Very few say what that phrase excludes, because it has no legal definition and no minimum standard behind it. Here is my list, ingredient by ingredient, with the honest reason each one stays off the truck.

Why I publish an exclusion list instead of a product list

Naming the bottles I carry would be the easy version of this article, and it would be worth very little. Manufacturers reformulate. Ranges get bought by larger companies. A product that was clean in March quietly picks up a new preservative in September, and nobody sends a letter.

A standard survives all of that. If I tell you what is never in the bucket, you can check any bottle I use against it, and so can I. It also helps with the wider problem for shoppers: the marketing sits on the front of the bottle and the real information sits in 6 point type on the back. I have written separately about eco-friendly cleaning products in Australia, and about how to read a cleaning product label without needing a chemistry degree.

Synthetic fragrance and parfum

A single word on an ingredient list can stand for a mixture of dozens of individual compounds. "Fragrance" and "parfum" are treated as trade secrets in most jurisdictions, so the disclosure stops at the word itself. You are not told what is in it, and neither am I.

Fragrance also does no cleaning at all. It is there so the room smells like the job got done. Remove it and the clean is identical, because the work was always done by the surfactant, the abrasion and the technique.

It is also the part of a cleaning visit a household cannot opt out of. I leave at 3pm and the scent is still there at 9pm, in a bedroom, in the air someone sleeps in. Fragrance is the household trigger people raise with me most often, and removing it costs nothing.

Hormone-disrupting chemicals

This one needs care, because it is where low-tox writing usually goes off the rails. Endocrine-disrupting compounds are a broad class: certain preservatives, certain surfactant residues, certain fragrance carriers. The research is genuinely still developing, much of it is laboratory or animal work, and the doses used sit well above anything in a mopping bucket. Anyone telling you the science is settled in either direction is overselling it.

I do not have to settle it to make a decision. The question I face is narrower: is there any cleaning outcome I would lose by excluding this class? There is not, so I exclude it and lose nothing.

SLS, parabens and phthalates

These are 3 different ingredients doing 3 different jobs, usually grouped together because they turn up in the same products.

• Sodium lauryl sulphate (SLS) is a surfactant and a foaming agent. Suds do not track with cleaning power, and plenty of effective products barely bubble. SLS is also well documented as a skin irritant, to the point that dermatology uses it as a reference irritant in patch testing. That is a strange thing to leave sitting on a benchtop where hands go all day.
• Parabens are preservatives. They stop water-based formulas growing something of their own on the shelf, which is a legitimate job. They are also among the most commonly cited groups in the endocrine discussion above. Simply formulated, fragrance-free products can be preserved other ways, or bought in smaller quantities and used faster, so I solve it that way.
• Phthalates are plasticisers, and in cleaning products they usually appear as fragrance fixatives, making a scent last longer on a surface. They are rarely listed by name, because they sit inside the word "parfum". Excluding fragrance quietly excludes most of this category as a side effect.

Antibacterial agents, including triclosan

This is where I part company with the industry most sharply. Routine use of antibacterial agents on ordinary domestic surfaces is a habit the industry sold to households.

The microbiome argument is the one I care about. Skin, gut and respiratory microbiomes are populated by the environment we live in. Coating a home's surfaces in residual antibacterial compounds, week after week, is a small daily intervention in that environment with no matching benefit in a normal, healthy household. There is also the resistance question, which sits outside my expertise, and it has been raised seriously enough by people whose expertise it is that I treat it as a reason for caution.

Triclosan is the clearest case. It sat in soaps, washes and impregnated plastics for years, until overseas regulators removed it from consumer antiseptic washes after manufacturers could not demonstrate it outperformed plain soap and water.

Where genuine disinfection is warranted, I say so plainly rather than pretend a gentle product covers it. Raw chicken juice on a board, or a household in the middle of gastro, wants a product actually rated for the job. Routine Tuesday cleaning sits well outside that, and treating every surface as though it might be is how the habit got normalised.

Bleach

Sodium hypochlorite is very good at removing colour. On porous surfaces that becomes a problem. Bleach a mouldy grout line or a painted plasterboard wall and the pigment lifts while the growth held below the surface carries on, with nothing visible left to tell you it is still there.

The second problem is the carrier. Household bleach is mostly water, so you have just applied moisture to the exact spot that had a moisture problem to begin with. In a small Brisbane bathroom with one window and no exhaust fan, that matters. Physical removal is what works: the right brush, an appropriate cleaning agent, and enough time booked to actually do it.

Dyes and added colours

Blue for bathroom, green for pine, amber for something that wants to seem old-fashioned and reliable. Added colour has no cleaning function of any kind. It exists so the liquid in the bottle matches the promise on the label.

It is the easiest exclusion on this list. There is a small practical benefit too: strong dyes can mark grout, unsealed stone and light-coloured porous surfaces if a product is left sitting, and clear products never create that problem.

Essential oils, which is the one people argue with

I get pushback on this more than everything else combined, and I understand why. Essential oils feel like the natural answer, and plenty of people use them at home with no trouble at all. If that is you, I am not telling you to stop.

There are 2 reasons they are wrong for my work specifically. An essential oil is a concentrated mixture of volatile aromatic compounds, and several of the common ones oxidise on contact with air into more reactive forms over time. It is also still a fragrance. A household that reports trouble with synthetic scent very often reports exactly the same trouble with citrus, eucalyptus, tea tree and lavender.

I walk into a lot of different homes, and I cannot run a trial in each one to find out who is fine. So the rule is no added scent of any origin. There is more detail on that reasoning in my piece on essential oils in cleaning.

What replaces all of it

Take that much chemistry away and something has to do the work. In my case it is professional HEPA vacuums, natural products matched to the surface, the correct brush or scouring tool for each job, a mild acid where there is mineral build-up, and a fair amount of physical effort.

Which brings me to the real reason harsh products dominate this industry. It is time. A commodity clean is priced on speed, and a lower price usually means fewer hours in your home, so aggressive formulas have to make up the difference. Dissolve it, wipe it, move on. I price the time instead, at $85 per hour, which is what makes the gentler method work. That is the whole model behind our natural house cleaning service.

Harsh chemistry is mostly a way to save time. Book enough hours and you do not need it.

What must never be combined, whatever you clean with

Since this article is about what sits inside the bottle, the safety note belongs here rather than in a footnote.

• Never mix bleach with ammonia or any ammonia-containing cleaner, including many glass and multi-surface sprays. The reaction produces chloramine gases.
• Never mix bleach with vinegar, citric acid or any acidic product, including many toilet and rust removers. That combination releases chlorine gas.
• Never layer products on the same surface hoping for a stronger result. Rinse the surface before switching to a different product.
• Store bleach where a spill cannot bring it into contact with acidic cleaners.
• Do not assume a homemade mix disinfects. Most gentle DIY recipes clean well and disinfect poorly, which is fine as long as you know which of the 2 you are getting.

The part that matters most: there is no green tier

Plenty of cleaning companies will now offer you a green option. It sits on the price list beside the standard clean, costs more, and quietly tells you what they think of the default.

There is no such tier here. Every product that comes into your home meets this standard, on the first visit and the 40th, whether you asked about ingredients or never gave them a thought. No fragrance-free surcharge, no premium natural package, no upsell at the door. It is $85 per hour, and that is the only price.

The time is what flexes. A reset deep clean on a 3 bedroom home runs 20 hours, usually 2 cleaners across a day or 2. That might sound like a lot of hours, and it is how long the job takes to do it well on a home that has not had it done yet. A reset is the ideal starting point and makes everything afterwards easier, though plenty of homes are kept properly clean on regular maintenance visits alone, and those visits are much shorter. Either way the higher detail work (ceiling fans, light fittings, cornices, air-conditioning vents and filters, blinds, interior windows) rotates across visits so nothing accumulates unseen and nobody pays fortnightly for work that is not due. Once a home is genuinely well maintained we still stay for the time booked. The remaining time goes on the things that never quite get their turn: under the kitchen sink, the back shelf of a cupboard, inside the fridge.

If something we agreed on has been missed or not done properly, tell us within 7 days and we come back and put it right at no charge. If particular areas matter most to you, tell us before we start and those get prioritised within the time booked. To work out what your home actually needs, get in touch and we will talk it through honestly, including telling you if you do not need us as often as you think.