Glass Cleaner Warning

Posted on July 29, 2009 in Consumer Goods, Health & Medicine, Recalls

When thinking of all the household cleaners you have collected under the sink, a certain amount of respect and caution is paid to some while others are regarded as harmless. For instance, everyone knows to give bleach and drain cleaner a wide berth and to wash traces of the cleaners off of their hands thoroughly. However, the same care is not often used with glass cleaners.

Glass cleaners are usually made up of 90% water and as a whole are far less caustic than kitchen cleaner or bathroom disinfectant. This is the reason they are not required to have an obvious warning label on the bottle. And yet glass cleaner is the culprit behind more than 9,100 calls to poison control centers each year.

The chemical largely present in glass cleaner is ammonia; although isopropanol is also used, as well as other chemicals. When inhaled or ingested in a large enough quantity, these chemicals cause nausea, vomiting, and irritation of the eyes and skin. When an ammonia based cleaner is used in conjunction with a chlorine bleach, a toxic gas is created as a byproduct. Children are usually the victims of these chemicals as the bright blue color popular with glass cleaners attracts them to the bottle.

As a result of these findings, many glass cleaners do have warning labels, but they are printed on the inside of the main label. To read the back side you must peer through the bottle, liquid and around any back label or identification label there may be to see the warning. While they are not toxic enough to be warned against in an easy-to-see manner, they are far from innocuous, especially in families with small children.