Clean your home with caution

Your top priority should be to banish toxic cleansers and adopt eco-friendly practices.

We're addicted to the routine use of hazardous chemicals to clean our homes. Of these, none is more dangerous to the environment than the phenyl we use to clean our sinks and toilet bowls. Despite being declared "hazardous" under India's environmental regulations, millions buy phenyl and use it to get rid of bathroom odours and messy floors. All that muck then goes into the environment where it kills almost everything that comes into contact with it, especially the fish.

The natural way
Biological waste gets attacked by microbes which are nature's scavengers. These microbes help break down human wastes, but the process releases bad odours. Cleansing chemicals kill off the microbes and substitute bad odours with their own strong smell. We all feel something has been cleaned only if it gives off the smell we have learnt to associate with anything that is chemically sanitised. Killing off microbes, however, is pointless because their populations are several trillion times the population of human beings. More importantly, microbes are designed by nature to break down wastes naturally. At one time we had no alternative.

Replicate at home
In recent years, a new class of cleaning agents have appeared which recruit the services of beneficial microbes for dealing with human wastes. They are called "Effective Microorganisms" or EM. EM has been around in the market now for more than a decade. I have been a regular user since it was first introduced. EM comes in bottles, from 200 ml to 1 litre. One cannot use it like one does other "off-the-shelf" products like acid or phenyl. The liquid has to be "activated" first. This means mixing the liquid in fixed proportions with a nutrient such as rice water, jaggery or sugar. These nutrients, when added, lead to an explosion in the population of beneficial microbes available to the user. The activated EM must then be diluted before use, so one bottle of EM concentrate goes a really long way. In Goa, the EM dealer actually sells "activated" EM, saving consumers the bother.

Safer, therefore Better Almost all brands of EM are safe to use. This is because they comprise consortia of nearly 80 different species of microbes including those used to make yeast and curd (lactobacillus). With persistent infusions of EM, these beneficial microbes establish themselves in the local waste system, overpower the pathogenic ones, and the smells fade away. In contrast with chemicals, nature benefits every time you use EM because you stop dumping chemicals and replace them with microorganisms. EM has been used to improve the functioning of sewage treatment plants and clean up polluted river beds. Unlike chemicals, where more is better, with EM the homoeopathic principle of 'less is more effective' applies. With EM, the gains are slower but long lasting. You are dealing after all with life, not with chemicals, and living processes always work at their own sweet pace.

EM in your city
There are two major suppliers of such "nature-safe" cleansing agents in India-Maple (contact: 09051498600/09051614886) in Kolkata and Clover (contact: 135-2657119) in Dehra Dun. They can indicate where they are distributing in your city.