Do we know enough about the safety of quat disinfectants? (2020)
cen.acs.org
cen.acs.org
For those who, as the article describes, think they’re maybe harmless unless inhaled, you can buy hair detangling sprays. Maybe you’re supposed to only use them outdoors while hearing a very well-fitting mask?
From a cost perspective, the Clorox Company no doubt prefers to add a few grams of a quat to multiple gallons of scented water, which means they're basically selling a spray bottle of a nearly-free solution that is 99.5% water for $5. Shipping 70% alcohol also brings with it a Flammability-3 (high) hazard label.
I remember some medicines were dispensed like that in the 80s, and the patient had to reconstitute them before using.
I think consumers would just rather have ready-to-use spray bottles in most cases. There's probably a surprising number of people that couldn't do the basic math of diluting based on a formula.
So applications that are regulated cannot use alcohol unless they can use a listed product, which is rare and expensive
Super cheap and effective cleaner, easy to make at home.
Only downside is it isn’t shelf stable, so you have to make a new batch every ~2 weeks.
Force of nature has a pretty neat kit that automates the chemistry.
I’m afraid you have the reaction products wrong. This is the chloralkali process, and you get hydroxide, hydrogen, and chlorine gas. The latter is extremely nasty. If you do it right (which I can almost guarantee you are not doing), it will react with water to form hypochlorite (that’s your fairly safe disinfectant) and chloride (harmless).
But this reaction goes the other way in acidic conditions: hypochlorite will turn into chlorine gas.
DO NOT run the chloralkali process indoors. DO NOT run it near your face. DO NOT think you’re clever and run it in a closed container — not only is the chlorine toxic, but it can explode when mixed with hydrogen. DO NOT mix bleach-containing products with acids. Just buy plain bleach (the “sanitizing” kind), dilute it carefully with water, and use it in an appropriate concentration.
(You can safely do the chloralkali process in a cell with a high flow of salty swimming pool water, with safety measures to turn it off if the flow stops.)
I have a bottle of it sitting around, but it’s quite old and I’m not sure if the date on it is when it was made or when it should be discarded.
You can find actual research from the swimming pool chemical industry. At higher concentrations (bleach sold for swimming pools is more concentrated), it’s less stable and apparently should ideally be used within 30 days in hot weather. The household stuff ought (good luck!) to be more stable, and you’re probably not storing it in a hot pool equipment room.
If it's diluted for use, it will expire in a few months.
My lay understanding is that the process you’re describing happens at a different pH, same ingredients. Yes you can get bleach and toxic gases, but, like, don’t do that?
My understanding is that most large schools and hospitals have on-site synthesis of exactly this for disinfecting.
There are off-the-shelf products that do the same thing for the consumer market. This is the favorite I’ve found: https://www.forceofnatureclean.com/
My understanding is you get lye on the anode and hydrogen chloride on the cathode (might have those backwards?).
I think it’s one hydrogen one chlorine atom? Hydrogen chloride sounds right (but I’m not a chemist) I think it’s also called hypochlorite? My understanding is the vinegar controls the pH to get the water molecule and salt molecule to do its thing.
But I’m also under the impression that this is perfectly safe. I produce and use the cleaner daily, have been for a while!
That "Force of Nature" site looks a bit sketchy. At least they claim to be using a controlled chemistry (although they can't actually control the tap water pH), and they are EPA registered. Their EPA registration claims that they produce 220 ppm "available chlorine" solution.
Hydrogen chloride is not hypochlorous acid. Hydrogen chloride dissolved in water is hydrochloric acid, aka muriatic acid or stomach acid (nasty stuff unless it's very dilute), and it will also kill bacteria if you concentrate it enough because it's very acidic. You can find it in a lot of toilet cleaners.
Here's an IMO mildly less sketchy product:
https://store.hocl.com/ecoone/
At least it ships with test strips.
If you DIY this and stick big electrodes in salt water (especially with added vinegar, especially if you get the pH below about or if you fail to capture the bubbles so they can dissolve fully) and connect a beefy power supply, you will regret it.
I never use fabric softeners either.
Yes? I'd expect to mostly see them use soap.
Some companies have started to remove them recently.
Eventually switched to daily contacts for a couple of years before going back to wearing glasses.
Then eventually settling on LASIK :)
Here's how it would work:
* Companies that make products would randomly increase by 5% or decrease by 5% the dosage of each ingredient in a product headed to a specific town.
* The government would publish A/B groupings for every town in the US and every chemical they track.
* Average health data would be collected, and whenever a specific chemicals A/B group difference exceeds some threshold, investigation is done.
The main downside is production costs of products goes up, since every product will now have a final step of adding all the A/B adjustment doses to the bottle before sealing. But I believe this is worth it for rooting out chemicals that have low level yet very widespread negative effects.
Also how would we control for environmental health effects, or even interactions between multiple product variances. This kind of testing would be wildly expensive, pose potential public health risks, and the data collected would be coarse and noisy at best
The only difference is it very slightly adjusts the quantity - and does so in a way that is within existing allowed tolerances, so effectively this might already be happening, just we aren't collecting the results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_sign
By tightening the required tolerances, londons_explore's proposal could be implemented without exposing anybody to different levels of product than are already permitted.
However, you have to get people to tell you how much product they use, which brands, how often, and not lie about it. That's basically impossible without antisocial levels of monitoring (which supermarkets probably already do, but which they don't want to tell their customers they do).
It's like the early days of mass customer data tracking where they'd tell customers they were probably pregnant, or probably gay, or whatever. People didn't receive the information in a way that suggested they were happy about the data being gathered.
It's probably too unethical to even use that data. Unless you're only trying to sell more crap, then it's A-OK! /s