The Dangers of Cleaning Products We Don’t Discuss

In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic is not over yet.

While the world may seem to have moved on when it comes to our quotidian practices, we never fail to be struck by the continuing prevalence of sanitizers, masks, tests, and cleaning agents present in places of work, homes, and stores.

When it comes to the use of cleaning products and sanitizers, in particular, the numbers seem to bear this out. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the share of American respondents who stated that they were using hand sanitizer more often has stayed at a constant 72 percent since September 2020. This figure stood at 59 percent in March 2020.

An increased culture of self-sanitization and assiduous cleaning that was ushered in somewhat abruptly in the first few months of 2020 has set a new norm that is here to stay. And given the intensity and impact of the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic over the last few years, understandably so.

While it is pleasing to see the culture of self-care taken so seriously, most people don’t consider another angle to this phenomenon, and it is one that you might not expect. The vast majority of people have never heard of quaternary ammonium compounds. The term doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and so they are often referred to, quite simply, as QACs.

QACs are one of the most common active ingredients in sanitizing and disinfecting products, especially among those recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Canadian government to prevent the spread of COVID-19. They’re super common because they work. To make it simple, QACs can effectively disinfect by disrupting the cell membranes of bacteria and lipid coats of viruses, and then breaking them down, thus rendering them inert.

So far, so good.

But what we often forget about QACs—and similar active compounds in cleaning detergents—is that much of them end up in the environment. An estimated 25 percent of consumed QAC volume is annually discharged into the environment. Water treatment facilities can remove about 90 percent of those compounds but that still leaves 10 percent that is pumped out into rivers and lakes that are downstream from these facilities and that receive their effluent.

And there are still so many things we just don’t know about what happens when QACs hit water supplies. Given that QACs disrupt the membranes of living beings, how does that affect, say, an intricate and delicate food web in a lake when algae and invertebrates at the bottom of the food web could potentially be impacted by the presence of this foreign substance?

And could these microorganisms in, say, a lake become resistant to the effects of QACs? If so, what does that teach us about the ongoing effectiveness of QACs being used on kitchen surfaces? Also, we know that when QACs are present in combination with contaminants like oil, their toxicity can be intensified. So, what does this mean for water bodies that have suffered an oil spill?

On the other hand, in freshwater bodies with more sediment, QACs may be sequestered and rendered unavailable, thus reducing their risk, so does the make-up of a lake make a difference? Lots of pending questions. The answer, however, is relatively simple: We need to learn more.

We need more research—ideally using experimental approaches (such as whole-ecosystem experimentation) that consider not just QACs’ toxicity to individual organisms, but the impact on the whole food web and ecosystem.

And all this matters because the findings should affect how we regulate, and dispose of the cleaning products that we use on an ever-increasing basis every year, to allow us to protect human life while also protecting the resources on which we depend.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Gil is a research scientist at IISD Experimental Lakes Area.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.