CULTURE
Simple Green
By Scott Jacobs
Last week, along with my Sunday newspaper, The Chicago Sun-Times delivered to my doorstep a sample bottle of “Simple Green.” Reading between the lines of fine print, I take it that Simple Green is some kind of environmentally friendly cleaner that is safe for all purposes – including saving the earth.
This is not so easy to detect by reading the label. When using it to clean upholstery and carpet, you should first spot test, then blot it dry to see whether it has an adverse effect. You should avoid using it on plastic instrument panels, leather, suede, unfinished wood, pearls and opals. KEEP IT OUT OF THE REACH OF CHILDREN. Avoid eye contact. Use in a well-ventilated area and do not dispose of its residue in storm drains, lakes or streams.
There’s a real question in my mind why I should use it at all. What do SIMPLE and GREEN and CLEANING DETERGENT have in common? Then it dawned on me: a brand.
Green is good. Al Gore says so. Simple is good. We can all understand simple. And detergents are bad. So a Simple Green detergent has to have something going for it. That’s why I decided to visit the company website.
In their list of frequently asked questions, there are many answers to questions you might not think of asking:
* Simple Green was invented by a father-son duo in Huntington Beach, California in 1975 as a biodegradable, non-toxic, non-flammable and non-abrasive industrial cleaner.
* The son, Bruce FaBrizio, is a former NFL linebacker once recruited by the Chicago Bears to fill the shoes of Dick Butkus. After a brief and unsuccessful attempt, he returned home to help his dad market the product.
* The exact contents of Simple Green are a trade secret, but it operates on the principle of Micro Particulate Fractionalization (MPF), which means it breaks up dirt into a water soluble solution.
* The first product was sold only in 55-gallon drums and is used for simple chores like washing rockets and nuclear submarines, cleaning up the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and restoring Kuwait after Saddam Hussein’s invasion there in the first Gulf War.
FaBrizio is a colorful and enthusiastic pitchman. After an early presentation to NASA, he once drank the liquid to prove it was harmless. In those early days when he and his father were perfecting the formula, “I felt like Michelangelo climbing into the Sistine Chapel,” he says. But banks were less than enthusiastic about his product. Facing a payroll he couldn’t afford, FaBrizio went to Las Vegas to bet the bank account ($8,700) at the tables. When that didn’t pan out, he turned to a loan shark named Rocco. But he kept faith in his discovery.
By the mid-eighties, he had contracts to sell Simple Green at Pep Boys and J.C. Penney. Then he discovered the home shopping networks – and competitors discovered him. Clorox filed suit with the Federal Trade Commission in 1995 charging he was “the Jim Jones of the cleaning business.” Rather than divulge his secret formula, FaBrizio spent $3 million running his product through university lab tests to prove it was strong, safe and effective. He signed up the U.S. military as his prime customer and set his sights on the consumer market. “It would be great if it could become a household word on a global basis,” FaBrizio told an interviewer.
The consumer spray bottle is presumably a tamer version of the original. Nonetheless, the label recommends diluting it up to ten times for heavy cleaning and 30 times for lighter tasks. I’m no expert on cleaning solvents, but a bottle that doesn’t reveal its contents and suggests adding 30 gallons of water for every gallon of product makes me wary.
There’s nothing simple about being green.
