Since the virus primarily spreads via person-to-person transmission, covering the surfaces in your home with chemicals won’t necessarily help prevent the spread of COVID; however, it could lead to significant health risks for your family. By learning how to choose safer products and understanding when disinfecting is appropriate, you can guard against viruses and other germs while also protecting your home’s indoor air quality and the health and safety of your family.
Cleaning Your House is Usually Enough
The science has long been clear that coronaviruses, including the COVID-19 virus, are relatively easy to kill on surfaces because they are surrounded by a protective lipid envelope that easily breaks apart with plain soap and water.
Now, we also know that the risk of surface-to-person transmission of COVID is extremely low. In fact, research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found there is less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of being infected with COVID-19 from touching a contaminated surface.
When to Disinfect Your Home
While regular cleaning is typically effective at removing most virus particles on surfaces, targeted disinfection is sometimes appropriate — such as when someone confirmed or suspected to be infected with COVID has been in your house within the past 24 hours. Otherwise, cleaning regularly is sufficient, so you don’t have to worry about cleaning every time you touch a surface in your home.
Importantly, even when disinfecting is appropriate, you should always clean first. Cleaning removes dirt and grime that viruses can hide under.
Choosing Safer Cleaning Products and Disinfectants
Only a few hundred of the 80,000-plus chemicals registered for use in the U.S. have been evaluated for health and environmental effects — so the chemicals inside your cleaning products matter more than you might initially think.
Much like cleaning products, some disinfectants are safer for human and environmental health than others. Unfortunately, disinfectants often contain hazardous ingredients such as quaternary ammonium compounds, or quats, which are linked to asthma, cancer, and endocrine disruption. Repeated exposure to these harmful ingredients can increase the risk of serious respiratory disease, especially for vulnerable populations including children and those with asthma.
US EPA’s List N: Disinfectants for Coronavirus provides a list of products effective against the COVID-19 virus. However, this list does not identify which products use safer disinfecting ingredients. Green Seal recommends choosing approved disinfectants with the following, safer active ingredients:
- hydrogen peroxide*
- citric acid
- lactic acid
- ethyl alcohol (also called ethanol or just alcohol)
- isopropyl alcohol
- peroxyacetic acid*
- hypochlorous acid
*Avoid products containing both hydrogen peroxide and peroxyacetic acid (also called peracetic acid) as that combination is an asthmagen.
While EPA does not allow third-party certifications for disinfecting solutions, Green Seal has curated EPA’s List N to help you identify safer ones.
How to Avoid Over-Disinfecting Your Home
The science surrounding the COVID-19 virus indicates that we ought to avoid a dangerous reliance on disinfectants. Fortunately, there are ways to minimize exposure to cleaning chemicals, regardless of the types of products at hand.
Follow the instructions on product labels
Product-specific information on the disinfectant’s label — such as the duration a surface needs to remain wet with disinfectant to kill specific pathogens — helps ensure safe and correct use. For instance, when it comes to contact times, it’s not always a quick spray and wipe; contact times can range from 30 seconds to 10 minutes.
Avoid accidental exposure
To minimize the quantity of chemicals that become airborne, choose a disinfectant wipe, or spray the product into a microfiber towel before wiping household surfaces. It’s also best to keep kids and pets in a different room while cleaning to further reduce exposure.
Improve ventilation
Open windows or run fans, when possible, to reduce the buildup of pollutants released during cleaning and disinfecting. Without proper ventilation, this chemical buildup can lead to poor indoor air quality.
Because of the nature of the COVID-19 virus, masking, vaccines and regular handwashing are the most effective precautions against its spread. However, cleaning and disinfecting are among several precautions that can help protect you. By choosing safer disinfectants for your home, following science-based guidance on disinfecting frequency, and taking precautions when cleaning, you can help protect yourself and your loved ones from both COVID-19 and negative health effects from exposure to harmful chemicals.
]]>The bill was signed into law on June 22, 2016 by President Obama, and was widely proclaimed a success. Soon after the signing, the usual political chatter began: cheers (a rare show of bipartisanship!), grumbles (the law was decades overdue), jitters (could the EPA handle the ambitious time lines?), shrugs and yawns (too many compromises). We, in Green Seal’s Washington, DC’s headquarters, sometimes enjoy the political opera, especially since we remain happily seated in the mezzanine. I, and my friends in the DC environmental community, were heartened by the news: the EPA now had greater authority, strict time lines for progress, and dependable funding sources for implementing effective chemical regulation.
Chemical Safety, The Previous Version
The law is an update and expansion of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) (“Ta-Ska”), which defined the federal regulation of chemicals. Unlike the other major environmental legislation of the 1960s and 70s (The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, CERCLA, RCRA, etc.) which responded to pollution and hazardous chemical releases after the fact, TSCA was intended to prevent hazardous chemicals from entering the market. The EPA was authorized and required to track chemicals that were being manufactured or processed, to evaluate new chemicals for health and environmental impacts, and to regulate (restrict, ban or in some way control) those chemicals that were identified as hazardous. TSCA implementation was slow and often ineffective because of legal loopholes, an overworked and underfunded agency, and general disinterest among members of Congress. Pushed to fill what they saw as a public health protections gap, state health departments and legislative bodies established state-wide chemical regulation programs, which sometimes caused confusion and frustration for product companies and chemical suppliers. With a goal of simplifying and re-nationalizing US chemical regulation, TSCA reform became a priority for businesses and chemical manufacturers. From 2009 to 2016, members of Congress, environmental advocates, and industry groups worked on the reform bill, and ultimately passed the Lautenberg Act in the House of Representatives with a vote of 403 to 12, and passed the Act in the Senate with a voice vote.
About the Lautenberg Act (TSCA Amendment)
- The EPA no longer needs to identify a regulatory action that is “least burdensome” to industry when carrying out a chemical ban, restriction, or exposure reduction measure.
- The EPA is no longer required to conduct a cost-benefit analysis along with its chemical assessments, and is, in fact, prohibited from factoring in the financial impacts of a regulatory action.
- The Act requires the EPA to protect vulnerable populations: “”the health of children, pregnant women, the elderly, workers, consumers, the general public, and the environmental from the risk of harmful exposures to chemical substances and mixtures.” One year in, the EPA has made real progress.
- June 22, 2017: The EPA issued Final TSCA Framework Rules (National Law Review)
- Announced the scopes of the risk evaluations for the first ten chemicals (EPA)
- Dozens of new chemical determinations were completed in June 2017 and nearly 1,000 new chemical determinations were completed from June 2016 to June 2017 (EPA – Actively updating the number of completed determinations).
Green Seal’s Chemical Considerations
The ongoing implementation of the Lautenberg Act has had no direct effect on Green Seal, our standard development, or our product evaluation processes. In their chemical assessment process, the EPA is identifying and regulating the most harmful chemicals; Green Seal is defining and validating the qualities of environmental leadership products – that they are formulated with safer chemicals, perform effectively, and have an overall lower environmental and health impact. However, TSCA Reform may eventually lead to a change in Green Seal’s standards. If the floor for chemical safety rises in the US market, we may see a significant shift in the formulations of all products, and further improvements to leadership products. If this shift takes place, Green Seal will update our standards in order to accurately reflect the new levels of leadership.
A Different Level of Scrutiny: While the EPA conducts risk analyses, Green Seal emphasizes chemical hazards. One of our major goals of product certification is to encourage the elimination of hazardous chemicals on the US market.
Identifying New Chemicals of Concern: In our product reviews, Green Seal ensures that products are not formulated with persistent / bioaccumulative / toxic substances (“PBTs”) and one way that we accomplish this is by noting the chemicals of concern that are listed in the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory. As the EPA gathers and reports the results of toxicological evaluations, new PBTs may be identified, which would better inform our evaluation.
A Clearer Evaluation Process for Companies: Companies with Green Seal-certified products will benefit from a clear and consistent framework for the evaluation of chemical substance and the associated risks, and from the new data that will result from the evaluation process. (Looking through rose-colored beakers…) Perhaps TSCA Reform will also spur green chemistry innovations, increasing the numbers of safer substitutes, and simplifying the process of developing safer formulations.
To learn more about TSCA Reform, the Lautenberg Act, and EPA’s progress since June 2016, check out the following links:
]]>Green Seal recently collaborated with the Bren School of Environmental Sciences and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on a year-long study to quantify the environmental benefits (in terms of greenhouse gas [GHG] reductions) for hotels in the City of Los Angeles that are certified under Green Seal’s hotel standard (GS-33).
Let’s go back a few years to get the full picture…. in 2008, the City of Los Angeles recognized the role hotels can play in reducing the city’s overall GHG emissions, and created the Los Angeles Green Lodging Program (LAGLP) to meet its Climate Action Plan goals. Green Seal was selected as the official certifier for the LAGLP, which now has 7 certified participating hotels including: JW Marriott Los Angeles LIVE, Hilton Universal City, Hilton Los Angeles Airport, Sheraton Gateway, Crowne Plaza, Westin Bonaventure, and Westin Los Angeles Airport. Los Angeles now has more Green Seal-certified hotels than any city in the nation (over 6 million square feet certified), with a number of additional hotels in the process of getting certified. Until the recent Bren Study, however, neither the City nor Green Seal had a quantitative metric of the environmental benefits of the LAGLP.
The Bren team used electricity consumption data from 6 certified hotels in Los Angeles, and found that on average:
- entering at Bronze level saw 2.8% reduction in GHG emissions,
- those progressing to Silver saw an added reduction of 8.8% (hotels entering directly at Silver would see a 2.8% + 8.8% = 11.6% reduction)
- those progressing to Gold saw a further reduction of 18.2% (hotels entering directly at Gold would see a 11.6% + 18.2% = 29.8% reduction)
The Bren team took this study one step further to see how Green Seal certification benefits a hotel itself. They conducted surveys of over 1000 participants and found that consumers were willing to pay $6.50 more per night for hotels with demonstrated sustainability measures.
A case study by the Bren team showed that meeting the most basic requirement in the GS-33 standard of upgrading lighting (mandated by the Bronze level), can reduce a hotel’s emissions by a total of 1,066 MT CO2 annually, which is equivalent to emissions from 225 passenger vehicles driven for a year. Furthermore, these replacements reaped financial benefits as well: over a 20-year project cash flow period, the hotel would see $1,562,157 in cumulative savings from avoided utility costs. Hotels can target lighting upgrades as “low-hanging fruit” thatyield higher benefits than costs.
Finally, the Bren team also created a user-friendly Excel-based tool that can be used by an individual hotel to calculate its GHG reductions and financial savings from different energy and electricity reduction projects undertaken because of Green Seal certification. This tool can be used by hotel managers and engineers to calculate their GHG and long-term financial savings.
As hotels across the globe increasingly embrace green practices, it is important for the lodging industry to pursue practices with real environmental benefits. Hotels can be one of the most energy and GHG intensive buildings, as they tend to keep lights on throughout hallways at night or run thermostats even when there are no occupants in the room. Green Seal’s GS-33 Hotels and Lodging Properties standard requires hotels to upgrade their energy intensive equipment and to integrate sustainability practices in their daily operations.
The Bren study strengthens the findings of an independent study by Washington State University, which stated that: “The single most important thing is to become certified by an independent and credible agency such as Green Seal and Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED), the major certification programs in the lodging industry.”
