It's been a while since I've had to put much thought into the dangers of various cleaning chemicals; we use only Johnson/Diversey chemicals, monitor what's in our janitor closets and on our vans, and train our crews in safety and proper chemical usage. So an article from our good friends at Cleaning Maintenance Management, about the danger of mixing bleach and vinegar, served as a useful wake-up:
"While the hazards of mixing ammonia and bleach might be more widely known, there’s another common cleaning product that can cause a deadly situation if added to bleach, and that’s vinegar.
"When vinegar, often used to clean floors and glass as a natural and safe alternative to chemical products, is mixed with bleach, the combination produces chlorine gas, which according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) can be deadly."
As we point out to our crews, chlorine gas killed a whole lot of folks on the Western Front during World War I; we don't want to replicate that experience in our accounts.
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