When I first started working when I was 19, I remember what is was like when my fast-food job needed to do some deep cleaning. It was horrible, if I'm being honest. Flat-top grill cleaners, mop solution, even the chemical used in the dishpit all had choking fumes. In the dishpit, dried and cracked hands were the norm for anyone tasked with that area for the day. Definitely not a job for anyone with chemical allergies or asthma.

Now at my current job, using green cleaning chemicals is a stark difference from those early days. No harsh scents or fumes, no toxic residues, and they're not as rough on the skin if you have accidental contact while mixing or using them. Just a few products cover a vast majority of things we need cleaned, cutting back on inventory space being taken up by a half-dozen individual chemicals, and I don't have to worry about the environmental impact either.

For decades, the environmental impact of even househould chemicals has been a standing issue. For example, chlorine, while widely used for water sanitation, was industrialized during WWI, and was better known as mustard gas at the time, due to it's sickly, pale-yellow color. Now you can find it everywhere, from tap water to pools and toilet-cleaning tablets, and even in these circumstances chlorine still causes health issues. In pools it can react with someone's skin (such as myself), causing massive dryness and irritation, and the fumes can easily make someone sick. Using pools as the example, there's been several green solutions, ranging from mineral-based sanitizers that use copper and silver ions, to diamateceous earth filtration systems. Some people even go the route of recreating an entire pond ecosystem that cleans itself!

With being Green Cleaning certified, my knowledge and skill base will be much stronger, making me more capable of sourcing, mixing, and implementing a proper cleaning regiment on a more efficient scale. With the rising availability and range of green cleaning products, green cleaning is becoming more and more mainstream, and having the training needed to be viable is important.