Chemicals are everywhere: In the products we use daily, in the foods we eat, on the surfaces we touch and in the formulations we use to clean.

Our lifestyles — more specifically, the way we clean our buildings — produce adverse and unintended health, safety and ecological consequences.

Our current practices injure over 180,000 cleaning workers a year; they pollute two-thirds of our waterways; and they affect the reproductive, respiratory and immune systems of over 10,000,000 workplace occupants each year.

Countless maladies, including cancer, asthma and autism are being linked to the way we clean our homes and workplaces.

Who can fix this?

In a very real sense, all of us.

As more information becomes available as to the potentially negative ramifications of the overuse of chemicals, the populace is pushing for reduced chemicals in everyday life.

A growing trend in the JanSan industry is emphasizing extreme green products and processes that some are calling a logical progression of the environmentally friendly mentality.

Building on the basics of green, chemical-free is the new buzzword du jour.

While traditional chemicals do serve a purpose in certain situations, many are discovering that cleaning aims can be largely accomplished without introducing foreign substances into the environment.

The chemical-free mindset transcends individual market segments and encompasses virtually every aspect of cleaning — both residential and commercial.

Breakthrough Technologies

Chemical-free cleaning is one of those things that, if you can fathom it, it can likely be done — eventually.

There are literally dozens of applications for chemical-free technologies, but the following are just some of the players.

For more information about each category, including images, videos and explanations about the technologies, simply click on a term of your choice.

• Electrolyzed Water

Electrolyzed water is made in a specifically designed technical scouring device by forcefully instilling ordinary faucet water that has had a small amount of normal table salt added to it with actuated oxygen foams, which is then activated and energized by passing an electrical charge through it.

• Activated Water

This innovative procedure is able, through 21st century magic, to transform ordinary faucet water into an exceptionally forceful sanitizing cleanser merely by running a little electrical charge through it.

• Spray And Vacuum

Clinical test results have proven that spraying, vacuuming and cleaning commercial and residential indoor surfaces created a median of 89 percent decrease in adenosine triphosphate (ATP), while a more traditional technique was responsible for only a 54 percent decrease.

• Steam Vapor

Although water reaches the boiling point at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, the procedure of warming water to well above that temperature generates a highly activated and energized steam, which can be utilized to extensively sanitize practically any non-electrical surface.

• Liquid Ozone

Ozone, a regular molecule of conventional water which contains an extra atom of oxygen, is one of the most effectual sanitation and disinfection aids available, proving to be as much as 10 times as effective in purifying surfaces as common household bleach solutions.

• Microfiber

Microfiber is a synthetic fiber derived from a blend of polyester and polyimide whose individual fibers are roughly 1/16 that of a human hair but are able to hold more than six times their weight in liquid.

• Self-cleaning Surfaces

The photocatalyzing capabilities of titanium dioxide have been extensively proven to be able to disintegrate a broad range of natural organic soils when activated via energy from the ultraviolet end of sunlight's spectrum.

• Absorbing Plants

Photosynthesis, the ability of plants to "breathe" in carbon dioxide and then "breathe" out oxygen, means that many plants have the capability to purify a range of toxic airborne chemicals such as carbon monoxide, benzene, formaldehyde and even arsenic.

• Air Washers

These relatively tiny units utilize only ordinary tap water and do not need any type of toxic or dangerous chemicals to inactivate and nullify the viruses and bacteria that collect within common air filtration process devices.

• Hydrogen Peroxide

When an indoor space is clouded with the highly weakened hydrogen peroxide atomization, the atoms will counteract or oxidize nearby contaminants, leaving behind nothing buy basic water humidity.

• Floor Matting

Matting is able to extract soil and contaminants from shoes at a significant rate, proving remarkably effective in cleaning and drying the soles of shoes coming in to the structure and reducing necessary cleaning frequencies.

• HEPA Vacuums

Some of the top high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filtration units available can reach an astronomical filtration competence classification of 99.995 percent efficiency, which means that they will allow through one molecule for each twenty thousand that they catch.

• UV Light

Most bacteria come to be inactivated inside just a second or two and totally demolished inside as little as 10 seconds after coming into contact with ultraviolet (UV) light; viruses are even more delicate than bacteria, so they inactivate much quicker.