Few products typify American consumerism as well as household cleaners. Capitalizing on our insecurities, manufacturers and marketers have transformed a mundane collection of products into over an $18 billion market of household helpers. We’re constantly told we’ll humiliate ourselves if our toilet bowls and counter tops don’t sparkle as well as our neighbors’ do.

We've all seen laundry detergents that contain something called optical brighteners. And while that may sound ideal for dirty clothes, these additives aren’t as helpful as they seem. Optical brighteners are chemicals that make fabrics seem brighter or whiter than they are. They remain behind on clean laundry as a coating of microscopic fluorescent particles. When invisible ultraviolet light hits these particles, they convert it into visible light to create an optical illusion that tricks the eye into thinking our clothes are super clean.

According to Project Laundry List, about 35 billion loads of laundry are washed each year in the U.S. The average household washes about 50 pounds of laundry in 7.4 weekly loads, cleaning some 6,000 items annually. About half of all loads are done in warm water, 35% in cold, and 15% in hot. Some 90% of those loads are dried in a gas or electric dryer. TEACHERS: Click here to get a lesson plan for Earth Day That much laundry makes a big environmental impact. So what can we do to keep both our clothes and the environment clean? Try these ideas on for size:

Given the amount of time we spend removing it, most of us need no convincing that the average home accumulates about 40 pounds of dust each year. This bane of housekeeping consists primarily of microscopic bits of materials that include skin, hair, pollen, fabric and paper fibers, plant matter, and insect parts, and we tend to brush it away without thinking much about it. But dust can also be contaminated by a wide variety of modern pollutants, including soot, pesticides, and hydrocarbons.

Modern household cleaners are significantly more effective than their predecessors. Synthetic cleaning agents, anti-redeposition agents, bleaches, builders, enzymes and optical brighteners have produced a generation of products that work against more forms of dirt and with less effort than ever before. But in our attempts to get our clothes whiter and homes cleaner, we’ve accepted a plethora of chemicals that pose serious health and environmental concerns. What happens when I use traditional cleaning products?