It did cross my mind to wonder if I was endangering my flatmate's health with my green cleaning approach. If I don't use Harpic is she going to catch something off the toilet seat?
But a health officer of my acquaintance tells me that vinegar should work well enough, because an acidic environment works to kill bugs. (The same reason that pickling preserves food.)
So, no guilt.
You probably shouldn't be feeling guilty in any case --- people seem to way overestimate how dangerous toilet seats are. Google "toilet seat hygiene myth" and read all about it.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that the seat is a pretty inhospitable place for germs: It's shiny, so doesn't have much of a surface area in which to harbour germs. Also it's usually dry and not nice and warm; also making it an uncomfortable place for the germs. (I guess though that these points wouldn't hold if the seat were visibly dirty, of course.) Finally the parts of people that come into contact with the seat are pretty clean to start with: We wash ourselves, and then tend to spend the rest of the day covered in clothes, which keeps us clean --- mainly it's our hands and faces that get dirty.
Unless you have a particularly high aesthetic tolerance for griminess, if the toilet looks clean enough to you, I'd suggest that it probably is clean enough. In other words the sanitary benefits of toilet cleaning probably saturate faster than the aesthetic benefits. So, rationally, you might be able to save yourself some time and guilt, and the environment the use of some cleaners (even if they are green) if you just clean your toilet enough to be happy with how it looks.