Microfiber Cleaning Removes Pollutants That Air Purifiers Miss

Hi everyone. Today I'm going to share a cleaning protocol that is elegant in its simplicity, powerful enough to be effective in homes with mold issues, and safe enough for even the most environmentally sensitive people. This protocol involves cleaning with microfiber, but in a very particular manner that I'll describe. As the video goes, everything in this protocol has a specific purpose and is backed by extensive testing and can be explained by physics and chemistry. Adding microfiber to my own cleaning routine has been incredibly helpful in my recovery from mold illness. Before I started using microfiber, I just used air purifiers and a HEPA vacuum to keep my place clean, and they both helped me a lot and still do. But I still had some nasal allergies and eczema every day. Once I added microfiber mopping to the mix, my symptoms decreased even more and I felt more resilient, like less sensitive. I've been able to incorporate more foods into my diet that my body hasn't tolerated previously. But even for those who aren't as environmentally sensitive as I have been, microfiber cleaning is at least something to consider. Why is that when you well, given how common water damage and mold is and how harmful mycotoxins are to virtually every system of the body, as well as all the other toxic substances like PFAS, flame retardants and other SVOCs that researchers are finding in house dust these days. Not only that, but just how harmful particulate matter in general can be, according to large studies that I've discussed in other videos. You Wonder why almost 20 million people are diagnosed with cancer worldwide each year. I work as a scientist in cancer genomics and I see this firsthand every single day. Extensive evidence shows that it environmental exposures can play a role. Fortunately, there's a lot we can do about that. Welcome to the Healthy Home Guide. This is a place where I share practical tips for creating a safe and healthy home. Whether the word home refers to your house or your body, please go ahead and like this video and subscribe and share it with someone who might need it. Back to the video I first learned about a proper microfiber cleaning protocol from John Banta, an author and indoor environmental consultant with over 30 years of experience. Experience. He's a certified industrial hygienist who conducts research about mold and water damage issues in buildings. John has helped countless people with severe environmental sensitivities living in extremely toxic buildings. If you like my approach, you'll be pleased to know that John's is really similar to mine. Like me, he aims to find the simplest, most practical and most effective ways to get the job done without any extra work. But he's been doing it for a lot longer than me. He's one of the OG IEPs, if not the OG in my eyes at least. I reached out to him asking to interview him, and he accepted. So you'll see clips of the interview throughout this video. Let's address the title of this video. How does microfiber cleaning remove pollutants that air purifiers miss? I'll explain. Air purifiers are incredibly helpful for reducing the airborne concentration of particulate matter, which I'll mostly call dust in this video. When I'm running my air purifier, the average particle count in my home is 80 to 90% lower than when I don't run it. Air purifiers are key. However, they have their limitations. For one, they can't capture nearly all of the dust in a space. So where does that dust end up if not in the filters? Well, mostly on horizontal surfaces like floors and counters. John, can you talk about why the floor does such a great job of collecting dust?

I'm fond of saying that I think that a clean floor is a better air purifier than a room. Air purifier. The dust that's floating around in the air is attracted to the floor and it sticks because of electrostatic charges and because of molecular forces. So electrostatic, it's just like with magnets. Your positive charges attract your negative charges. And mold spores, being from nature, they're negatively charged. But most of our floors, because they're either synthetic floors or they have a synthetic coating on them, they're positively charged. The other thing that's real important is the molecular forces. When you have a large smooth surface, it's very attractive because of something called van der Waals forces. These are the forces that allow a gecko to climb up a smooth sheet of glass. Geckos actually have these little tiny microscopic fibers. It's the fibers that have a molecular force that attracts them to glass or a smooth surface, and they stick. Well, the same thing is true with regards to mold particles and other types of dust particles. When they come in contact with a smooth surface that's clean, they stick.

But what's so bad about a dusty floor, really? Here's a quote from Harvard researcher and professor Joseph G. Allen and John D. McCumber's Healthy Buildings. As we walk, sit on couches and fold laundry boundary, we resuspend particles that have settled out on surfaces all around us, creating a cloud of invisible particles that surrounds us. There are tons of research studies on these personal dust clouds. Here's one. Figure 2 from Qian et al. Shows that walking for five minutes significantly increases the concentration of particulate in the air. Here's the lowdown, and this is intuitive. Even the best air purifiers take time to capture those localized clouds of dust that we generate around us. Especially as the distance between the air purifier and the person generating the cloud increases. So the person would still be exposed to some dust for a duration before the air purifier captures it. Here's some evidence supporting that. Figure 1 from del Porto et al. Shows the particle concentration in a home office. To the left of the center line is a control test. With no air purifier running, the decay rate is slow, meaning those particles are hanging around. To the right of the line are tests with various air purifiers running and the decay rate is faster. However, it still takes time for the particle concentration to decrease. And this is the best case scenario because no one is moving around resuspending dust. In this test, the best air purifiers have a high clean air delivery rate and capture airborne dust faster, which shortens your duration of exposure and reduces the average particle count. But when you move around and resuspend dust, you're still exposed to it while the air purifier is working on capturing it. And not only that, but some dust escapes air purifiers entirely.

Our company Restcon Environmental did some research. We had a mock building in our warehouse. What we did was we put a bunch of pre weighed dust on the floor, on the floor in front of an air filtration device. And we pre weighed the filters and then let it run with this 400 gram sample of dust on the floor in front of it for 24 hours. And basically during that 24 hour period, it picked up one gram of dust.

Wow.

At that rate, it would only take 400 years to clean the surfaces. But let's take a bunch of air movers and let them basically blow the dust around inside this 400 square foot mock building and see how much more ends up being picked up and going into the air filtration device. And what we found was that it was only able to accumulate about three grams of dust instead of one. So three times better by blowing it around. But in that case it's only going to take what, 125 years to, to clean everything up. This, this idea that you can use an Air purification device to clean a building. It doesn't work once you get outside of that zone where it's capturing 100% of the particles. You know, they're just going all over the place and they're spreading about.

So how do we prevent these dust clouds in the first place? Proper surface cleaning is the key. Cleaning horizontal surfaces captures the dust before it becomes airborne. So there's virtually no amount of exposure from that route. You're basically removing the root of the exposure, also known as source control, if you want to get technical. True source control is removing what generates the dust, which includes like the outdoors, cooking mold, our own bodies, and etc. Obviously it's not possible to eliminate all these sources, but removing surface dust helps a lot. This next point I'm about to say, I think is paradigm shifting. So listen up. Cleaning is also important because a dirty floor has a reduced electrostatic charge, making it less effective at attracting dust particles, which then remain suspended in the air rather than settling. Cleaning your floors is quite honestly like changing your filters. Isn't that crazy? More on that later. So what material is best at removing surface dust? Microfiber, of course. Let's talk about why that is. Jon Banto will teach us.

So microfibers, by definition, they are micro fibers. The smaller the fiber, the more molecular forces that they have. And if they're synthetic fibers, then now you have electrostatic charges as well. The electrostatic charges and the molecular charges do a great job of helping to attract the really tiny particles. The clean room industry has done a huge amount of research. They have spent millions of dollars figuring out what makes a building clean. And we've been able to take that information and learn from that and apply that to what we do.

John, can you explain how water and detergent is actually a very comprehensive cleaning solution here?

So in my opinion, soap and water is the ultimate, to the best of my ability to determine. I've never found anything that is not either water soluble or fat soluble. A lot of our biotoxins, a lot of the mycotoxins and things like that are fat soluble. So if you have fat soluble biotoxins, the soap and water helps emulsify them and pick them up so they go right into the microfiber cloth. And if you have just water soluble mycotoxins, then the water is enough to emulsify them and bring them up into the cleaning cloth as well. So what this does is it gives us a very complete solution. It deals with all of those various components of mold in a way that Actually physically removes them from the surface and binds them into the microfibers so that they can be tossed into the trash. And you've literally cleaned the surface to a huge degree. So one of the things that we see on the, on the Internet a lot is, oh, clean up mold with vinegar. Well, we all know that oil and vinegar don't mix. Oil is what's present on the surface of the spores. It's what's present in a lot of those various biotoxins. So trying to use vinegar is not going to work. Okay, so get yourself a bit of butter and smear it onto a plate. And now wash your dishes with vinegar. You're going to find that you're not going to get that grease off those dishes. But if you put just a few drops of detergent on that dish and you wash it, it just emulsifies it and takes it away. The other thing is, when you start mixing things together, you're doing chemistry. And if you're not a chemist and you don't understand what you're doing, you can get into all kinds of trouble. You know what people will say is, well, I use detergent, but I mix some vinegar in with it because it makes it better. Well, does it? So if you're using a negatively charged detergent and mixing vinegar with it, you've just turned it into salt and water. And salt and water is not as effective at cleaning as soap and water.

John, can you explain how microfiber cleaning can complement vacuuming?

If you have a HEPA vacuum cleaner, you can pick up that loose stuff, the things that are not bound to the surfaces by the molecular and the electrostatic forces. But it's not going to get it all up. I took a handful of bread flour and I dropped it accidentally on the floor. And if you were to come in with a HEPA vacuum cleaner, it disappears. Well, no, that's not true, because if you took your finger and you rubbed it across that floor and then looked at your finger, you're going to see that it's covered with this coating of flour. Why, we are better dust magnets than smooth surface floors. The vacuum cleaner can't break those electrostatic and molecular forces. So the floor isn't truly clean if we just vacuum it. But if we take a microfiber cloth, well, you could take the microfiber cloth and very gently rub your finger on it. And now all that flour is going to transfer from your finger onto the microfiber.

This next point is especially important. Microfiber cleaning helps protect us from Exposure routes beyond breathing dust. What about through our skin or through our mouths? As I discussed in a previous video, if you dampen a microfiber pad with the right type of cleaning solution, which I'll discuss later in this video, it can remove that thin film of particles. Oils, mycotoxins, and semi volatile organic compounds that vacuuming isn't that great at picking up. These compounds can absorb into our bodies through our skin when we touch surfaces. So yeah, research shows that our skin is permeable.

Stachybotrys, for example, the saturatoxin is a fat soluble biotoxin. You come in contact with it, with your skin and it can pass through that skin membrane and be absorbed right directly into the body.

Remember how I said earlier that when the floor is dirty, its ability to hold electrostatic charge diminishes, causing dust particles to stay airborne instead of being drawn down and settling on it. Cleaning the floor helps ensure that it retains its charge edge. Cleaning in particular prevents toxic substances like mold and mycotoxins from drifting further into the room.

If you have a mold problem inside a wall cavity, and you may or may not know that it's there, but what's happening is you've got the source, you've got a small opening, a pathway, and a crack the size of a human hair is like a freeway for mold to be escaping from those wall cavities. The negative pressure that usually exists in buildings is bringing those particles out of the wall cavity and they're sticking to that clean floor surface, and they start sticking right away. So you have the first buildup closest to where the wall is. So that would be right where the top edge of the floor meets the bottom edge of the baseboard. That fine crack that's right in there, it starts coming out and they start sticking and they use up the electrostatic charges and they use up the molecular charges, and then they start moving a little bit further out and a little bit further out. And that just keeps happening until they're far enough away from that opening that the particles now achieve escape velocity and they're not sticking during that first few inches. So now they're getting up into the air and they're floating around. And that's when the air purification device could come in handy. Except filtering them out after they're already in the in the air is a little bit like, you know, trying to get the horses back in the barn. And so we're better off keeping our surfaces as clean as we can and using that to help keep our air quality where it Needs to be.

And obviously, if moldy dust is coming into the living space from an area hidden behind a wall cavity, an air purifier will struggle to protect a person who spends a lot of time between that moldy area and the air purifier. Anyway, I created some images that show the dynamic between particle size, particle settle time and air purifier capture zone. In the images, there's a mold source behind a wall 20ft away. There's an air purifier in the room with a dome around it, denoting its capture. The first image shows larger particles, L for larger and the second shows smaller particles, S for smaller. In both images, particle buildup on the floor is at its highest concentration, closest to the source, which tends to be at the edges of a space. When comparing the images, it's apparent that the larger the particle, the greater proportion can be found on the ground, as opposed to airborne. This demonstrates how larger particles tend to settle to the ground faster than smaller particles. Figure 11 from Shao et al. Shows that decay rates are higher for larger particles, which means that they settle to the ground faster. An air purifier's capture zone effectively expands as particle size decreases. For example, when a person walks in the larger particles, the air purifier is less likely to catch them before they settle to the ground. If a person walks in the smaller particles, the air purifier is more likely to catch them before they settle. So again, larger particles like Stachybotrys mold should settle more quickly and the capture zone for them is effectively reduced. Unless you actually remove them from surfaces by cleaning, they tend to stick around. This is why some people with mold illness don't get better after remediation. Remediation has a part too, and that's proper cleaning. Most people don't know that. I want to reiterate that even toxins that aren't airborne can be absorbed through the skin. If body parts come in contact with surfaces, like when you walk to the bathroom barefoot in the middle of the night, air purifiers cannot fix this. Alright, so this wouldn't be a healthy home guide video if I just said, yeah, you should clean more and didn't tell you exactly how precisely what protocols should we use to clean? So first use a HEPA vacuum to remove the bulk of the dust.

It's important to use the HEPA vacuum cleaner to pick up the big chunks, because if you don't HEPA vacuum first, you're just going to load the microfiber up with all kinds of extra debris that's unnecessary by having it be a HEPA vacuum cleaner. It's not spewing it all back up in the air, only to settle back down on surfaces and recontaminate them when it lands on those surfaces four to eight hours later.

After vacuuming, use a microfiber mop. Focus on horizontal hard surfaces like counters and floors. Microfiber is not for carpets, I repeat, not for carpets. John and I both like the unscented Swiffer XL dry wipes and Excel Mop unscented please. Or the Rubbermaid Hygen disposable Microfiber cleaning System. Should you clean, dry or wet? The answer is, as usual, the middle path slightly wet. What should you use? Put five drops of unscented detergent to one quart of water in a spray bottle. John and I both really like Branch Basics concentrate, which I've been using for years. You can also use 7th generation unscented dish soap or any unscented liquid soap. Links to all the products are in the description. Anyway, put the pad on the mop and spray the pad two to three times. And again, it should only be slightly damp. It shouldn't leave a persistent trail of water on the floor.

Not spraying it directly on the surface, but spraying it on the microfibers and just putting enough on the microfiber. Usually we'll use about three spritzes and that's enough to dampen the cloth but not fill up the fibers. If you fill up the fibers with water, that doesn't leave as much space for the dirt to be accumulated and so it doesn't clean as well. And these are all things that have been discovered by the research done by the clean room industry.

So how to clean? First do edge cleaning like this, Then do s cleaning like this. So the leading edge of the pad is trapping stuff as it goes instead of leaving it behind. Unless the room is very dirty or large, it shouldn't take more than five to 10 minutes per room. An area is clean once you mop 40 square feet of it and the pad is still clean. The first time you microfiber mop, you'll likely pick up the most dust and and it'll take the longest to clean. This is how dusty my Airbnb was right after I had just HEPA vacuumed. After your first cleaning, it'll be easier to keep your space clean. You'll probably have to clean at least once a week, but it could be more depending on how quickly your house gets dusty or if you're environmentally sensitive. Or if you live in a moldy house, you'll have to determine how often you need to clean and where. A few of you who live in moldy homes have been asking about this, and I'm really excited to bring this to you. John, can you talk about a testing method you developed for people in homes with mold problems?

I developed this method of testing that we call pathways testing. And pathways testing is not sampling from older bacteria specifically what it is. It's sampling for peptide bonds and proteins. The testing for peptide bonds and proteins has been around for about 100 years. I came across this study talking about how all molds and bacteria have proteins. What I was able to do was collect tests at the bottom edge of the baseboard. There's usually a crack. So if you've got a problem inside the wall cavity and you've got the negative pressure differential, it's going to be drawing stuff that comes out. And when you collect the dust from those surfaces and analyze for the proteins, it tells you how much protein is in the sample. And from that we can surmise how much contamination there is. By figuring out how contaminated an environment is, we can clean it often enough to keep it under control. And then we can also figure out where hotspots are and give those hotspots a little bit of extra attention. The person might end up not so sick of having to clean it every day or every twice a week or something like that that they might decide they want to do the remediation. But I consider a success when you can clean a home once every two weeks. I don't like to go much more than three weeks just because of what's going to be coming in from the outside as well. But in a rental situation, in a condo situation where you share a common wall with a neighbor, or you might be in a financial situation where you can't immediately put out the money to do what needs to be done to remediate it properly. So these can be temporary measures that can be quite effective. If anybody's interested in more information about that, they can contact us.

What about using essential oils to clean Hot Take alert.

So if you are using essential oils, basically you're trying to clean up an oil with an oil. How well does that work? It really doesn't. Okay. Well, then the argument is okay, but the essential oils kill the organisms, it kills the mold. And that's important. Well, no, it's not. Dead mold is just as problematic as live mold. You're putting oil on the surface, that's not going to get rid of it, you're still going to have the dead bodies around. And those are the things that really seem to cause the greatest amounts of inflammation. Oh, well, how about if we use these things just in case, to be a preventative against future problems? The reason that molds create biotoxins in the first place is oftentimes defensive. These are secondary metabolites. They're not things that they need to produce all the time for life. They produce them when they need to as a defense mechanism. I think Alexander Fleming, with his discovery of penicillin, the antibiotic, demonstrated this. He was growing streptococcus bacteria in his laboratory, and his plates got contaminated with penicillium notatum mold. And it killed off the bacteria. There was this ring of death. And instead of throwing his plates out because his experiment was ruined, he asked the question, why? What has killed off my bacteria? And he was able to isolate this chemical that turned out to be the first antibiotic, penicillin. The mold, the penicillium notatum, was putting out this antibiotic to do battle with the bacteria. But antibiotics are just one form of biotoxin. Penicillin is not harmful to us, but there are a lot of other toxins that can be. And so when you use an oil based essential oil trying to kill the mold, you're leaving a coating behind that if for some reason the mold does become reactivated and start to grow now, all of a sudden, you're going to end up with an even more toxic situation. Gypsum drywall manufacturers understand this. Many, many years ago, they recognized that their paper coated products was a problem. It was growing mold. And so they did an experiment where they were treating sheets of gypsum drywall with different types of chemical biocides to try to kill the mold off. And then, of course, they had their control sheet that wasn't treated. And then they put them into various chambers at different relative humidities and liquid amounts of water, and they left them there for 30 days. And at the end of the 30 days, every one of those treated sheets of drywall had growth on it. Maybe it took a little bit longer for it to get started when it was treated than untreated, but every single one of them was contaminated with actual growth. But they didn't stop there. They looked at the toxin level, and what they found was that the treated drywall had a level of toxins that was at least six times higher than the toxicity of the chemical that they had treated it.

Fascinating.

And many, many times higher than the untreated Drywall. So the mold wasn't producing the toxins because it didn't need to. When we start using chemicals to try to kill mold, we oftentimes create conditions where you end up with greater problems sometime in the future. And people with multiple chemical sensitivities, a lot of people are very hypersensitive to essential oil based products. It doesn't matter whether it's a synthetic phenolic compound or a natural phenolic compound produced by plants. For people that are sensitive to these things, it can sure make you really sick. And then of course, chlorine compounds, chlorine bleach, a lot of people are very sensitive to it. And getting around to this concept of these chemicals causing problems with the DNA analysis that's known as MSQ pcr. Mold specific quantitative polymerase chain reaction. The common name for the test panel that EPA developed using MSQ PCR is ermi. PCR methodology is very sensitive to inhibiting types of compounds. If you've got natural phenolics or synthetic phenolics, or if you've got chlorine based cleansers that you're using, these will interfere with the DNA analysis, the ability of the equipment to analyze it and give you results. And so you get back these results that look really good. You know, nothing's there. Hey, the place passed? Well, no, it didn't really pass. It was inhibited. And that means that the results are totally inadequate. One of the ways that that we were able to show this, trying to figure out what types of compounds are inhibitors, did a study a while back. We were able to test 26 different compounds. And one of the things that I wanted to test was tea tree oil. We took a sample and we spiked it with stachybotrys of a known quantity. And we treated it with the materials that we were testing to see if they would cause inhibition. And the sample with the tea tree oil in it basically came back with no stachybotrys present. We added it to it, we knew it was there, but it wasn't showing us what we expected it to. And then when we tested it with culture, the same dust with culture, it actually would grow on the culture. It didn't grow quite as well as it would have if it hadn't been tested. Which means that, yeah, maybe it was killing some stuff off, but it wasn't killing everything. And people get sick from the dead stuff just as much as from the live stuff. And so if you're a fan of the crime scene shows, you know that chlorine bleach, when it's used on surfaces, will destroy the DNA. What isn't really explained very well on those programs is it doesn't actually get rid of the DNA, it just inhibits it so that the DNA analysis using PCR is unable to detect it. What this means is that a lot of the products that are out there that are being advertised, that they kill mold, they're not actually killing the mold. They are rendering the DNA analysis incapable.

A couple of you have asked about this. Does microfiber shed microplastics and is this a major health concern for people in your home? First, where does this concern about microfiber shedding microplastics come from? It comes from research showing that clothing with synthetic fibers sheds a lot of microplastics into the water when it's washed in a washing machine, which is obviously not good. Cleaning with microfiber is a bit different. First of all, John and I use disposable microfiber pads, so we don't wash them at all.

It's very difficult to clean a microfiber cloth that's reusable and actually get it clean enough.

The primary mechanism for microfiber release is through agitation and abrasion, which is much more intense in a washing machine than while cleaning surfaces. You shouldn't be vigorously scrubbing with a microfiber mop. You should be gently gliding it across surfaces. The thing is, though, consumer grade microfiber pads do shed during cleaning, but just a very small amount. So why not use other materials to clean, like a simple cotton terrycloth or even a paper towel? So I've tried each of these and paper towel and cotton terry cloth clean surfaces are just left a lot dirtier than microfiber cleaned surfaces. Microfiber doesn't leave surfaces with that dusty film you can feel with your finger. It also cleans a lot faster, which is a huge benefit. I mean, I don't want to spend all my time cleaning. I don't know about you, it's not a hobby of mine. If you don't believe me, try cleaning the top of a dusty ceiling fan blade with each material and let me know how that goes. So that brings me back to the question, is microfiber cleaning 100% safe? And I struggled with how to answer this for you guys, because I know you're interested in my opinion and I don't want to steer you wrong. I want to give you an answer with integrity. So here it is. I don't know for sure. I don't think anything we do is 100% safe. I mean, no matter what we do, we'll always be exposed to a little bit of something. I will say, though, with microplastics, our exposure through food and water is likely much greater than it would be from microfiber cleaning. Above all, to me, it's better to clean with microfiber than to not clean with it because it seems to shed a much smaller mass of stuff than the mass of stuff it picks up. In other words, microfiber leaves surfaces so much cleaner than they were before, and therefore you should be exposed to a much lower mass and variety of toxic substances. I mean, in some scenarios, maybe even less microplastic. At worst, I accept the risk of being exposed to a small amount of additional microplastic if it means I can drastically reduce my exposure to everything else to mold and mycotoxins, especially given how harmful mycotoxins are to virtually every one of our bodily systems from gastrointestinal to reproductive to nervous to immune. And given that I'm recovering from mold illness, as I've said now, do I feel bad that microfiber pads end up in a landfill? Of course I do. But microfiber has allowed me to effectively clean a lot of items that were contaminated by my previous moldy homes. So now I don't have to throw those items out. A microfiber pad is also pretty thin and small. I mean, it's not like a large volume of waste. Unlike food waste, for instance. Microfiber has also been so beneficial to me health wise that to be honest, I'm willing to generate a small amount of additional waste to offset it. I've started composting. I actually mean that. Check it out. But most importantly, I don't want to tell you what to think. I encourage you to take from this video what resonates with you and leave the rest. So, John, is there anything you want to plug or promote?

Thanks for asking me about that, Alex. I'm very proud of the book that I co authored with architect Paula Baker LaPorte and Erica Elliot, M.D. prescriptions for a Healthy A Practical Guide for Architects, Builders and homeowners. This is 25 years in the making. It's now been approved for use in two schools of architecture. This is not specifically a mold book. This is about healthy homes. Paula and her team at Econest did a great job of helping to come up with systems for construction based on biobiology types of principles. My primary contribution to this was the nightmare stories. What goes wrong when you use a lot of the types of things that are that are typically out there.

I hope this video helps you take your cleaning game to the next level in terms of both efficacy and efficiency, and helps improve the health of you and everyone who shares your home with you. You. If I've earned your subscription, please subscribe. And please like this video and share it with someone who might benefit from it Anyway, My fellow Renegades, I salute you.