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.

Since 1847, when chlorine was first used as a disinfectant, there have been few alternatives to the effective but often dangerous substances known as chemical disinfectants. Today, there is a technology that combines salt, water, vinegar, and electricity to create an EPA-registered, general purpose, hospital-grade cleaner and disinfectant proven more effective than chlorine bleach.

Dubbed by The Los Angeles Times as “miracle liquid,” those of us in the world of advanced science call it electrolyzed water. It is effective, harmless to skin at both the dermal and subdermal levels, and easy and inexpensive to produce. Nobody is suggesting prolonged exposure, but if it gets in your eyes, no harm will come to them. In fact, products based on this same electrolyzed water are the basis of commercially available eyelid cleaning products. If ingested at small amounts, the most harmful effect is an imbalance of good and bad microbes in the intestine, which can cause discomfort for two or three days. The solution also can be generated on-site, eliminating delivery, storage, and disposal issues.

The Science Behind Electrolyzed Water

The process of making electrolyzed water is elegant in its simplicity. Tap water is placed into a flask containing an electrolytic cell composed of an anode that delivers a positive electrical charge and a cathode that delivers a negative electrical charge. Then, a carefully formulated solution of saline and vinegar is added to the water. When the device is operating, a measured amount of electricity passes through the anode and cathode. Negatively charged chloride ions are attracted to the anode and electrochemically convert into hypochlorous acid — a powerful and reliable disinfectant. The positively charged sodium ions are attracted to the cathode and convert into sodium hydroxide, a powerful grease cutter and cleaning compound.

This approach, based on simple but advanced electrochemical technology, is catching on in homes, schools, day cares, and professional cleaning companies throughout the U.S. and beyond. Commercial users of electrolyzed water note significant cost savings and fewer absences due to illness and injury from toxic chemicals exposure.

The Toxins Use Reduction Institute at the University of Massachusetts has standard, industry accepted protocols to measure the cleaning capability of a variety of chemicals used in homes and by professional cleaning organizations. It found that this technology can clean and disinfect on par with mainstream chemicals that are both toxic and more expensive than electrolyzed water.

While there has not been a major paradigm shift in cleaning and disinfecting chemistry since 1847, to quote a famous folk singer, “The times they are a changing.”

When is disinfecting appropriate? The CDC now says to disinfect when someone confirmed to be infected with COVID-19 has been in the building within the past 24 hours.  

This is the same guidance Green Seal provided last Summer in our Safer Guidelines for COVID-19 Disinfecting for Schools and Workplaces, a free public resource that is now being implemented in more than 1 billion square feet of building space, including by Green Seal-certified cleaning services. 

Why Disinfecting Can Harm Instead of Help

It has been clear for some time that dousing a space in hazardous disinfecting chemicals won’t do much to prevent the spread of COVID-19. There are two main reasons for this: COVID-19 is much more likely to spread through person-to-person and airborne transmission than it is through surface-to-person transmission, and coronaviruses are relatively easy to kill on surfaces with plain old soap and water (or regular cleaning solutions).

There is a natural instinct to turn to the harshest chemicals available to attack a nasty virus, but the CDC’s new guidance should reassure us all that we can follow the science to avoid a dangerous reliance on disinfection. Doing so will avoid health risks ranging from cancer to serious respiratory disease – an especially grave risk for vulnerable populations such as children and the 1 in 13 Americans with asthma.

Not All Disinfectants are Created Equal

For the times when disinfecting is appropriate, some disinfecting products are safer than others. Green Seal has curated U.S. EPA’s List N: Disinfectants for Coronavirus to help you identify safer ones.

Unlike other active ingredients commonly found in disinfectants, the active ingredients we recommend are not linked to asthma, cancer, endocrine disruption, DNA damage or skin irritation. Find our list of recommended ingredients and products here. 

With our new certification program, Green Seal is providing consumers, purchasers and facility managers a simple way to identify hand sanitizers that meet the highest standard for health, safety and performance.

The Highest Standard of Clean

Formulating with healthier ingredients is vital for a product that people apply to their skin dozens of times a day. Our new certification standard, created with input from public health and industry experts, screens 100% of alcohol-based hand sanitizer product formulas for:

• carcinogens
• reproductive toxins
• skin irritants
• phthalates
• parabens, and
• contaminants

And as always, consumers can be confident that Green Seal-certified products meet uncompromising performance standards, do not pollute waterways, and use environmentally preferable packaging materials.

Verification By a Trusted Authority 

Our new hand sanitizer certification program is part of our commitment to leverage our expertise in healthy and sustainable cleaning and facility care to help protect people from both COVID-19 and negative health impacts from toxic chemicals. 

• Green Seal’s Guidelines for Safer Cleaning and Disinfection for schools and workplaces have been adopted by commercial cleaning companies servicing more than 1 billion square feet of space.
• We’ve partnered with SEIU 32BJ, the largest union of property service workers in the U.S., on COVID-19 training for its members.
• More than 30,000 Green Seal certified products are used in offices, schools and homes each day, including cleaning products and hand soaps critical to de-contaminating buildings and protecting people.

Learn more about Green Seal certification for hand sanitizers here.