Some cleaning products that claim to be green are not really very green at all. We take a look at some pseudo-green products.  When you examine the big picture, a product that appears green on the surface may not be so green after all.

Ready to Use Products (RTU) contain mostly water.

At the consumer level, you may note that there are many products sold in a ready to use format claiming to be green.  On the commercial side as well, a number of green branded RTU products are available.  Although we have no doubt that the components are green, looking at the big pictures suggests these products are NOT green. Typically, a product sold in a ready to use format contains 95-99.9% water.  Not only are you buying a lot of water, but excessive packaging!  RTU products are typically a use once and done product.  Nice for the convenience, but lousy for the environment.  Now, think about shipping all that water, which means higher costs and more fossil fuels needed to transport and distribute such products.

Concentrates are great, but only if you can insure they are diluted correctly.

The Glug-Glug mentality:  It is human nature to think that using more of a cleaning product is going to make it clean better. Although some cleaning products are designed to allow for stronger dilutions matched to the soil load, for regular cleaning, using extra is wasteful and tantamount to pouring money down the drain.

Green or not, waste reduction is a fundamental pillar of a true green cleaning program. For concentrated cleaning products, it is not uncommon to use 2-5X more that what is needed to get the job done.  Green product or not, needlessly wasting products is NOT green.

Excessive packaging clogs waste and recycling containers.

Containers that are recyclable are great, but what about reducing the amount of packaging altogether? Remember the mantra, Reduce-Reuse-Recycle, the recycling part is what we do after we have considered reducing and reusing.

Examples.  A package with a built in portable dispenser sounds great, but it is a lot of plastic to dispose of after a single use. A plastic pail uses a lot of plastic in its construction.How about a portable dispenser that can be re-used, or a Bag-In-Box (BIB) package that uses 90+% less plastic.

Does the product work? If it doesn’t clean, it’s NOT green.

Cleaning devices that make claims that turn plain water into a cleaner sound about as green as you can get, but only if it actually works!  Too often the claims don’t live up to the actual result.

Visit Multi-Clean’s green resources webpage to access resources to help support efforts to go green.

Green Resources:  https://www.multi-clean.com/green.html

Multi-Clean offers the patented Multi-Task System, an innovative dilution control system that includes green certified products combined with a dispensing system that insures the product is diluted correctly every time.

More info:  https://www.multi-clean.com/concentrates.html

1 Minute Youtube Video:  http://youtu.be/W1GPGYlzfTU