Environmental Impact of Household Hazards

Are those seemingly harmless and gaily packaged cleaners stored under your kitchen sink starting to sound scary? If they can be so harmful to you and your family, it should be fairly obvious that their impact upon vegetation and wildlife is equally negative. Therefore, please refrain from the temptation to flush or toss them away; you’ll be doing more harm than good in an attempt to “set things right.”

You may rationalize that the small amount you’ll be dumping has little effect on the “big picture.” This kind of faulty thinking has created pollution on a global scale; in an average city, nearly 168 tons of household cleaners are released into kitchen and bathroom cleaner drains every year. In fact, the EPA characterizes the typical American household as “the number one violator of chemical waste per capita.” Aside from the direct impact the chemicals have when introduced into the environment, there are other complications to consider when disposing of their containers.

The average person contributes 3.5 pounds of waste product per day to the whole garbage pie, a sobering increase of 90 percent from only 30 years ago, before the dawn of commercial manufacturing of household hazards products. Many products are packaged in nonrecyclable containers. If all those containers aren’t being collected with the recycling, where do they wind up? The answer, of course, is the landfill. During the last 20 years, more than 75 percent of our landfills have reached maximum capacity, and the EPA estimates that more than half of those remaining will be filled up over the next 20 years. Furthermore, a considerable portion of this waste is laden with residual chemicals that eventually seep into the soil, contaminating groundwater and surface runoff leading to lakes and streams.

The use and disposal of such products have very clear, far-reaching ramifications on both the earth and its inhabitants. We are slowly destroying our environment. We have also been manipulated into destroying ourselves in the process, just a little quicker.