Scenario: You come home from picking up the kids from school, after walking the dog, visiting the grocery store and stopping for a fill-up at the gas station. You’ve trudged though gas, grass and “goo” all along the way, but you run into the house (with bags of groceries flung over your shoulders to get them to the freezer before the ice cream melts!) and don’t remove your shoes before you get to the kitchen.
Have you ever thought about what is on your shoes?
The fact of the matter is, your shoes encounter a lot more than you’d ever want to know… chemicals, pesticides, toxins and lead that rest on every inch of the ground where we walk. And when you don’t remove your shoes everything you walked through becomes embedded in your carpets or rugs and transfers to your floors, and THEN it literally becomes airborne so you ALSO inhale those same contaminants that were once a part of your shoes!
Another scary fact: studies have shown that wearing shoes indoors is a larger source of children’s pesticide exposure than eating non-organic fruits and vegetables!
Time to remove those shoes at the door… and it’s okay to ask your guests to do the same! What is tolerable for your “soles” is not tolerable for your health or your most “beloved souls”!
Disclosure Policy
My husband and I always remove our shoes but not sure how to ask guests to without seeming rude.
.-= Lisa @Retro Housewife Goes Green´s last blog ..What’s In That Sippy Cup? =-.
[...] A simple way to keep your home healthier? Take off your shoes, says Mom Goes Green. [...]
Now that we are putting in our Bamboo floors we want to be even more careful with it and have started thinking about the amount of dirt and filth that was in our carpets! We are doing the no shoes now!!
.-= smilinggreenmom´s last blog ..Earth Hour 2010 ~ Let’s Roll! =-.
Lisa – “the power of suggestion”, my friend!
If you know you will have company, place a large rug near your entry door. Place a few pairs of your family’s shoes on the rug and it will “suggest” the removal of shoes without a single word! 
smilinggreenmom – good for you! Wise choice! (bravo on the bamboo floors too!)
Well it is a good thing I installed that vacuum sealed air-lock entryway.
Maybe someone should come up with a chemical neutralizing shoe scrubber that you step through before entering the house – since even if you do take off your shoes I would imagine those chemicals still filter throughout the house.
.-= Earth Friendly Goodies´s last blog ..This Post Stinks, But Not as Bad as Beijing’s Landfill Problem =-.
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