The dirt on soap

Peter Malaise gets down to fundamentals on the cleaning front.

If we’re serious about preserving this heavily battered planet for future generations, we should really be thinking about doing some ‘reverse engineering’. That would mean working out what the poor thing can stand, then what would take the pressure off, and only then drafting action plans for different areas. One for the cleaning sector, for example – what you might call the Ideal Soap Show.

At the moment, we seem pretty preoccupied with keeping the everyday show on the road. We all want clean homes, clean schools, clean offices – whatever it is that we mean by ‘clean’.

And if there’s cleaning involved, there’ll be environmental impacts – even with the most environmentally sound products. Just as you can’t design a knife so safe that it will cut vegetables but not fingers, the question we need to ask of cleaning products is not whether they’re eco-friendly enough to eat, but whether they’ve been engineered to strike a sound balance between good technical performance on dirt, and good environmental behaviour.

Now consider this as a definition:

Dirt (n): a substance in the wrong place.

And this:

Cleaning (v): moving dirt to a different place.

Sounds a bit weird at first? Maybe, but ultimately that’s the nitty gritty of it. The marmalade on your toast is food – but when it hits the floor, it becomes dirt. Clean it off the floor, rinse it down the sink, and hey presto, it’s gone. Actually it hasn’t disappeared, it has just been displaced – into the drains, the ditch or the waste water plant. But we’re not concerned about what has happened to it – we just forget all about it.

Which brings us to our next definition:

Clean (adj): when a substance in the wrong place has been moved to a different place.

Admittedly, this isn’t a definition that will do anything to cut down on those domestic disputes, when your partner’s idea of ‘clean’ is not quite the same as yours… Then again, you could go for a legal, protectionist way of defining ‘clean’ – and end up, tonnes of chemicals later, with MRSA and those other superbugs. Not that we can go back to mediaeval notions of ‘clean’, which would probably leave us pretty unhealthy, but neither can we accept these current notions, because they’ll probably lead us into an even more unhealthy future.

So what kind of ‘clean’ do we want in our Ideal Home? And what kind can we afford, from an ecological perspective?

We’re talking about ideal places for living, which you’d probably want to build and decorate with living, renewable materials wherever possible – unlike in our current petrol-driven culture. The same goes for energy sourcing. You’d probably go for a lot of organic food too, and natural cosmetics, and clothes made of natural fibres. In other words, your global sourcing would definitely be of a sustainable kind, as would your Ideal Home.

“Trying to kill every last bug at gunpoint is a very bad idea”

So sustainable hygiene would fit like a glove. And sustainable hygiene has two main aspects to it. Firstly, it aims for a balanced situation, without going to extremes; trying to kill every last bug at gunpoint is a very bad idea. Secondly, it aims for a moderate level of use of mild, sustainable cleaning agents, which don’t end up creating chemical pollution that’s worse than the original ‘dirt’.

In the end, I would happily settle for that – even if we never get round to performing the Ideal Soap Show I was talking about to begin with. Just so long as you don’t go to the opposite extreme – and end up in some ghastly soap opera.

– Peter Malaise is concept manager at Ecover.