162: Are Your Cleaning Products Dirty?

Many of our Dirties begin their health journey by eating more plants. As they start feeling better on the inside, they become curious about the quality of products they use on the outside—from skincare to household cleaning products.

In this episode, I sit down with Lauren Taylor, founder of Alter:Bio, a home cleaning product company created to meet European ingredient standards while delivering products that actually work. Lauren shares why she started the company after seeing the gap between conventional cleaners and health-conscious alternatives, and explains how the U.S. and Europe take very different approaches to regulating household products.

Save 15% off select Alter:Bio products with the coupon code Molly15.

In this episode, we talk about:

• The differences between U.S. and European regulations for household cleaning products
• Common marketing (and often misleading) terms like “non-toxic” and what to look for in a true cleaning product.
• The surprising lack of regulation for many cleaning products sold in the U.S.
• What SLS and quats are and why you should watch out for them
• What “human-safe tested” involves and why it matters
• The shocking percentage “naturally-derived” products can be
• The connection between the products we use, our health, and the environment
• Lauren’s journey building Alter Bio and why creating safer products took years longer than expected
• How regenerative farming, sustainability, and healthier ecosystems fit into Lauren’s bigger mission

Helpful links:

• Shop Alter:Bio
• Kiss the Ground Documentary
• Clean Food Dirty Girl Meal Plan Club
• Clean-ish Cleaning Products

About our guest

The importance of having a healthy, balanced lifestyle was ingrained in our founder at a young age, from cooking seasonal and local produce, spending time outdoors, and minimizing processed and chemical products from beauty to home. She grew up learning to garden from her mother, spent time on her grandparents’ farm learning about our soil and environmental ecosystems, and worked with impact-driven businesses practicing conscious capitalism and supporting female founders. When it came to cleaning, she used to look for labels like “cruelty-free” and “eco-friendly.” Lauren trusted what was marketed to her, until she started getting rashes and eczema from exposure to harsh chemicals, heavy fragrances and oils, and plastics she didn’t even know she was consuming. Family members had flare ups and allergen issues during COVID-19, and she thought there has to be better solutions. Lauren began learning about ingredients, chemistry, scientific innovations, and bans in Europe and felt inspired to build something better, something you could actually trust, but that was still highly effective at cleaning. Cleaning products need to work, after all! Then Alter:Bio was born and made for everyone to have access to healthy, smart solutions.

Transcript, auto-generated, may have errors

Molly (00:01.618):
Hey there, thanks for listening to—and watching—this episode of the Clean Food Dirty Girl podcast. Today I have Lauren Taylor on the podcast with me, and I’m really excited to talk to you, Lauren. I know that our community is really going to learn a lot from you and be into this conversation. I know that I am.

Lauren founded the company called Alter Bio, and the tagline on your website just spoke directly to my heart. It says: “The first US-based home cleaning brand designed to meet European standards.” Right off the bat, I’m in. You got me. We need more of that. So welcome, Lauren. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me and sharing your knowledge. Welcome to the podcast.

Lauren (00:55.75):
Thank you so much for having me. I love all the work that you’re doing and I’m honored to be here having this conversation with you.

Molly (01:03.618):
Me too. I love the work that you’re doing. We’re very aligned in many different ways. As we were talking a little bit before I hit record, the Clean Food Dirty Girl community is really into eating more plants and the journey of eating cleaner or healthier—however you want to define that. What I see is people usually start with the food. Once their food is on track and they’re feeling energized and have gotten the processed food out, they start to look at other areas in their life.

One of the next things is cleaning products and what they’re using in their house, on themselves, and on their clothes. We talk about this a lot because it is a big thing. If people don’t know, there’s a lot of bad shit in products that people really need to know about to make informed decisions. To start out, what inspired you to start this company, and why European standards? Let’s start unwrapping that and the difference between European and American standards.

Lauren (02:28.283):
I love this question and I have so many different parts to answering it. It really started with COVID—or even before that. I grew up in a very healthy household that taught me about mindfulness and awareness of what you’re bringing into the home. We’ll dive into that separately because I think we both have backgrounds that shared some of that education at an earlier age.

When COVID hit, I was quarantining with my partner in London. He has horrible asthma and allergies and was getting these flare-ups from exposure to the chemical cleaners being used at a time when everyone was hyper-cleaning. I noticed the space between products marketed as non-toxic and ones that were extremely healthy, but I didn’t know if they were actually working. Then there was this pocket of these really heavy, antimicrobial, kill-everything products. I wanted to have a safe home that actually felt clean.

Our association for decades is that in order to be clean, we have to be using this heavy chemical pocket of things. I was looking at products marketing as clean, but they still had a lot of ingredients like SLS (sodium lauryl sulfate), which is known to cause allergens and eye irritation, and a lot of products using fragrance that is undisclosed and not human-safe tested or toxicologist reviewed.

When I was in the UK, I started to realize how differently the two regulatory bodies operated. In Europe and the UK, they operate on the principle that if there’s a potential risk of anything hurting humanity or the environment, they look into it and often go ahead and ban it. In the US, until the risk occurs—and often at heightened scenarios—it’s not even reviewed.

Lauren (05:54.298):
As I started to dive into this space, I knew I wanted to build a product that meets these top health standards and actually cleans, following European regulations. Eventually, I came across amazing biotech solutions coming out of Europe. They use good bacteria to kill the bad bacteria in the same way you think about food. You eat healthy and fermented things to have a healthy immune system. By building that up, your body is stronger to fight off disease.

It’s that same mentality of what you’re putting into your body, you should also think about what you’re putting into your home—whether it’s your skincare or your cleaning products—because that’s what you’re living in and breathing in. Our skin is actually our biggest organ. Whether it’s body lotion or surface spray, your skin is absorbing those particles. When you start thinking holistically about that, you start thinking about the broader picture outside of just food.

Molly (07:35.958):
That’s amazing. You filled the gap. Some of the best shit is invented when the thing that you want doesn’t exist, and you are a badass and decided you were going to create this thing. Bravo to you. You were in London during this time when you were starting to look into this more. Were you there just for lockdown, or were you living there?

Lauren (08:11.917):
Kind of back and forth. My previous partner’s business was in Switzerland, so we were lucky to spend a lot of time in the mountains. Switzerland also has very strict regulations on meats, vegetables, and hormones. They really think holistically about everything that is marketed and sold to consumers. That really broadened my horizons of how I think about that whole ecosystem of what you bring into your home. I was toggling between London, Switzerland, and I had a little bit of time in Paris as well. I still have a lot of partners I work with in Europe, but the products are made in California.

Molly (09:55.85):
The interesting thing is that you already had this base of being aware of what you put in your body because of how you were raised. I can really relate to that. I was born in 1980 and my parents were like hippies living off the land. My mom always said, “Molly, your skin is your biggest organ. Anything you put on your skin, you want to be able to eat and not get sick.” I always grew up knowing that, even if I thought my mom was really annoying at the time. Can you talk a little bit about your upbringing and how that helped shape your journey?

Lauren (11:42.758):
I love that you have that too. I grew up primarily in Texas. My parents were vegetarian since I was five years old. At the time—this was the 90s—I remember getting pushback from teachers when I was seven or eight telling me I need to be having a steak, and I’d come home crying. It was a more challenging time; now there’s a big protein wave, but I think people understand you get protein from different sources. I was vegetarian for almost twenty years and I’m probably eighty-five percent plant-based now.

I also went to Montessori school, so we were doing multiple things against the norm in the nineties in Texas. It taught me to think differently about my own journey and stay true to yourself. All the ingredients in my company are biodegradable, human-safe tested, safe for pets, and safe for pregnancy. Building things that are improvements for humanity and the environment—even if they’re a tiny little step—is what matters to me. When I was first doing it with labs, they were like, “Why would you want to do European standards in the US?” And I said, “Because it’s so much healthier for us.”

Lauren (17:30.691):
My dad grew up on a farm in Oklahoma. He knew from a young age that he did not like the farming space or eating meat. When COVID hit, I was living in the countryside in England and I had regenerative farming around me where everything was chemical-free and healthy. They were rotating crops and animals. I asked my dad if we still had that land in Oklahoma. I watched the documentary Kiss the Ground, reached out to them, and told them I want to make our farm regenerative.

I got connected to these farmers in Oklahoma. She had cured her autoimmune disease by growing her own food and having control over everything she was putting into her body. We’ve now transitioned the land to regenerative farming. It includes cattle, chickens, and regenerative wheat. They take the leftover wheat yeast and convert it to beer and make regenerative pasta. It’s a very sustainable and circular system.

Molly (20:54.165):
We have a lot in common. I grew up in New Mexico—neighbors! I went to Montessori school as well. My great-grandfather was a butcher and my mom grew up seeing the slaughterhouse, which was so traumatic that as soon as she left for college she became vegetarian. In the late 70s, she started a bulk-buying co-op that eventually turned into a member-run food co-op that is still going after forty-five years.

I’m in France right now and whenever I’m in Europe, I feel more protected. In the US, it’s like I will not buy cleaning products in a regular place; I’ll go to a health food store and read the ingredients. But in Europe, I know I can go to any corner store or pharmacy and buy something that is not toxic just because we’re more protected. Can we talk about specific ingredients like SLS that people should watch out for?

Lauren (26:07.205):
Because of the regulation within the US, I can create my cleaning products and just start selling them. Unless you are an antimicrobial or a disinfectant, you don’t technically have to register them on the EPA. This allows ingredients like sodium lauryl sulfate to get to market without any warning labels. There’s a lot of health-washing occurring.

I’ll use blanket terms like “functionalized alkaline,” but ours is coconut-derived and 100% plant-based, whereas other ones are chemical-derived but use the same name. I put details in parentheses like “plant-derived” to provide transparency.

SLS is one of the biggest things, especially if you have skin sensitivities. Another one is Quats (quaternary ammonium compounds). I met Dr. Paul Tesar in Cleveland who tested Quats on mice and found they contribute to neurological diseases such as MS. If you’re going to look for two ingredients, Quats and SLS are the most harmful to humans. Biodegradable ingredients were also important to me because what we put down our sinks goes back into our water streams and eventually what we’re drinking.

Then there is fragrance. A lot of things will just say “fragrance” or “nature inspired.” “Nature inspired” could mean zero percent natural ingredients. I only wanted to do a scent if it could meet the same strict standards as my base formula. I worked with a French fragrance house for a year. The scent uses upcycled ingredients like leftover orange peels rather than pure essential oils, which can be allergen-prone for some people.

Another confusing term is “non-toxic.” It’s such a vague terminology and there’s no actual third-party testing for it. It’s like saying you live “healthy”—every person has a different definition. Because you can’t get a certification on it, it’s almost false advertising. My toxicologist suggested human-safe testing instead. We did a thirteen-week study where a patch test goes on humans—ages eighteen to seventy—with all sorts of skin conditions. We were a hundred percent approved on both products, so I was able to get a human-safe certification.

Molly (37:53.858):
There’s so much room for products to manipulate consumers. If people see “non-toxic,” it feels like an easy win, but what does it actually mean? Are the people you work with based in the US but testing to European standards?

Lauren (39:09.092):
It was a strenuous process. I worked with my lab partner in the US to create the formulas. I wanted to be able to say it was safe for pets, pregnancy, and babies. Cleaning products should be safe for all of us collectively. I worked with two toxicologists and received a 178-page report on the full chemistry structural breakdown of every ingredient. All these partners were in the US, but they knew the EU list of banned ingredients they had to look for and abide by.

Molly (43:08.173):
You have a lot of integrity and desire to make this happen. How many years did this process take from having the idea to the first bottle being done?

Lauren (44:23.867):
It was so much longer than I thought. I had the idea during COVID while I was doing a Master’s degree in social business at the London School of Economics. My professor, Professor Chambers, told me that while food is fantastic, I could have a huge human impact with this cleaning business idea and European standards.

I finished school in 2022 and was working on this full-time starting in 2023. I thought I was going to launch early 2024, but everything took longer with supply chains and custom packaging. Someone told me to double or triple the time they tell you. We were finally able to get to market in 2025. It really tested my patience, but with anything you’re passionate about, you find the resilience to power through.

Molly (50:05.645):
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. The most important thing is that you just don’t stop.

Lauren (50:50.747):
If you stop, it definitely won’t happen. It took a lot of collective learning to push the boundaries. I’m excited to see what ten years from now looks like as these things become more mainstream.

Molly (52:35.969):
Thank you so much for sharing. I know people listening are going to want to buy your stuff. Where can people find you?

Lauren (52:56.22):
The website is shopalterbio.com and the Instagram is the same. I launched with two cleaning essentials: the Active Surface Spray and the Active Dish Soap. Both have our good bacteria symbiotic that helps break down the bad bacteria. The dish soap is very moisturizing—I use it as a hand soap too. I’ll provide a code for your listeners!

Molly (53:59.15):
Do you ship to Hawaii?

Lauren (54:05.393):
We ship to all 50 states.

Molly (55:00.685):
Thank you for spending an hour with me. I appreciate you bringing such integrity to your process.

Lauren (55:28.957):
Thank you. Have a wonderful day and enjoy the beautiful time in Paris.

Molly (55:33.786):
Thanks. Bisous.