When you imagine what cleaning products do to the environment, your first instinct is probably to think about the air—that chemical smell you breathe while scrubbing the tub. But an even bigger environmental story is what goes down the drain.

Spring Clean Your Water: A Cleaning Swap That Protects Every River Downstream illustration

Every squirt of conventional dish soap, every spray of scented all-purpose cleaner, every rinse of the sponge sends a mix of surfactants, synthetic fragrances, preservatives, and other synthetic chemicals into your household wastewater. That water flows to a municipal treatment plant or a septic system—and neither one can remove every pollutant.

Surfactants, the chemicals that give cleaners their grease-cutting power, are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms and can reduce treatment plants' ability to do their job. Endocrine-disrupting compounds like phthalates and synthetic musks pass through treatment largely intact, entering rivers and lakes at concentrations low enough to sound harmless but high enough to feminize male fish and disrupt reproduction across aquatic species. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), these chemicals are now detected in freshwater, wastewater, and drinking water systems around the world, triggering adverse effects at very low concentrations—especially in mixtures with other compounds.

This is a water quality problem, and it starts at your kitchen sink. This week’s one step on the Water pathway: swap your conventional all-purpose cleaner for one that’s safer for the water it will inevitably reach.

Following the Flow

The Water pathway in the Sustainable Practice framework covers the efficient use and protection of water resources. Most of us think about water and the environment in terms of gallons conserved: shorter showers, efficient appliances, drought-tolerant landscaping. But keeping water clean matters just as much as using less of it, because contaminated water is harmful to ecosystems and enormously expensive to remediate.

Roughly 80% of American households are connected to municipal wastewater systems. The other 20% use septic systems, where household chemicals percolate more directly into groundwater and nearby surface water. Either way, what you pour down the drain doesn’t disappear. It disperses.

A 2018 study published in Science by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researcher Brian McDonald and colleagues found that consumer products—including cleaning agents—now contribute roughly half of all fossil-fuel-derived volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions in industrialized cities. Many of those same chemicals also ride the water route: washed off surfaces, rinsed out of mops and sponges, flushed into the sewage system. The air pollution angle is real and worth knowing about—conventional cleaners release VOCs that make indoor air two to five times more contaminated than outdoor air, according to the EPA.

But the water pathway may carry an even larger and more lasting environmental burden. What enters a waterway stays in the ecosystem, accumulating in sediments, bioconcentrating in organisms, and traveling downstream to estuaries and oceans.

In the language of planetary science, the cleaning products we choose involve at least two of the nine planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for humanity. The “novel entities” boundary—covering synthetic chemicals released into the environment—was declared to have been transgressed in 2022. Surfactants, synthetic fragrances, and endocrine disruptors from household cleaning are part of that picture. And the “freshwater change” boundary is under pressure every time treatment-resistant chemicals enter rivers and aquifers. Choosing what goes down your drain is one of the most direct ways an individual household can push back on both.

Your One Step: Switch Your All-Purpose Cleaner

An all-purpose cleaner is the product most of us reach for most often, which makes it the highest-impact place to start. You have two good options.

Option A: Buy a certified safer product. Look for the EPA’s Safer Choice label—a green-and-white logo with a checkmark. Nearly 2,000 products currently carry this certification, meaning every intentionally added ingredient has been reviewed by EPA scientists for both human health and environmental safety, including toxicity to aquatic life. The program also restricts VOC content, so you get the indoor air benefit too. Browse the full list at epa.gov/saferchoice/products.

If you can’t find the Safer Choice label at your store, look for products labeled both “green” and “fragrance-free.” A 2023 peer-reviewed study in Chemosphere tested 30 common cleaning products and found that fragrance-free green products contained an average of just four hazardous chemicals, compared to an average of 22 hazards in conventional products. Fragrance is often the single biggest source of hidden synthetic chemicals—both the kind you breathe and the kind that wash into waterways.

Option B: Make your own. Equal parts white distilled vinegar and water in a spray bottle handles everyday kitchen and bathroom grime. The acetic acid in vinegar cuts grease, dissolves mineral deposits, and has demonstrated antimicrobial activity against common foodborne bacteria like Salmonella. For tougher jobs, sprinkle baking soda on the surface first—its mild abrasiveness does the scrubbing.

A few honest caveats: vinegar is a good everyday cleaner, but not a hospital-grade disinfectant. Research shows it’s less effective against some pathogens, such as Staphylococcus aureus. For most routine cleaning—counters, stovetops, sinks, glass—it works well. If someone in your household is ill and you need true disinfection, use a targeted disinfectant in a well-ventilated area rather than relying on vinegar alone. And skip vinegar on natural stone like marble or granite; the acid can etch the surface.

Either way, you’re sending dramatically fewer synthetic chemicals into the water supply. That’s the point.

Making the Switch Stick

This weekend, when you finish your current bottle of all-purpose cleaner, don’t replace it with the same product. Try one of the options above and give it two weeks. Many people find that once they’ve cleaned without synthetic fragrance for a while, the absence of that chemical smell starts to feel like the real kind of clean.

A few tips: keep a premade vinegar solution in a spray bottle under the sink so it’s just as convenient as a store-bought cleaner. If you go the Safer Choice route, stick with fragrance-free. Open a window while you clean, regardless of what product you use—ventilation helps with indoor air quality, which is the secondary benefit of this swap. And if you’re on a septic system, this switch matters even more, because your household wastewater receives less treatment before it enters the ground.

You don’t have to overhaul everything under the sink at once. Start with the all-purpose cleaner. Once that feels routine, look at your dish soap, your laundry detergent, your bathroom cleaner. Each swap reduces the chemical load flowing from your home into the shared water that connects every household to every river, lake, and aquifer downstream.

Why This Matters

It’s easy to dismiss a single bottle of cleaner as insignificant. But there are roughly 130 million households in the United States, each sending cleaning chemicals down the drain multiple times a day. Researchers have detected more than 240 synthetic chemicals in European drinking water, many of them originating from household products. Conventional treatment can remove as little as 40% of some synthetic compounds.

Your spring cleaning this year can do more than shine up your kitchen. It can protect the water that flows from your sink to your local river to someone else’s drinking supply. That’s a connection worth thinking about—and worth honoring with one swap.

For more steps you can take along the Water pathway—from rain gardens to greywater diversion to protecting well water—explore the Sustainable Practices Handbook at www.suspra.com. And for a framework for thinking about all the systems in your home, revisit our recent article, "Your Home Deserves a Manual."

References and Resources

Peer-Reviewed Research

  • Salonen, H., et al. (2024). “Cleaning products: Their chemistry, effects on indoor air quality, and implications for human health.” Environment International, 190, 108836. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2024.108836

  • McDonald, B.C., et al. (2018). “Volatile chemical products emerging as largest petrochemical source of urban organic emissions.” Science, 359(6377), 760–764. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaq0524

Government and Nonprofit Resources

Further Reading from One Step This Week

This article explores a step on the Water pathway—one of seven pathways to sustainability in the Sustainable Practice framework. For comprehensive guidance on protecting water quality and other sustainable water practices, visit www.suspra.com.