In everyday life, people use antibacterial products to sanitize their homes. Some of the common active ingredients in household cleaning products are thymol, lactic acid, sodium hypochlorite, and ethanol (e.g. active ingredient in some hand sanitizers). The purpose of our experiment was to determine if antibacterial products lost effectiveness in killing common bacteria in everyday environments after repeated use. This is an important environmental issue because if these products are losing effectiveness, then our common living areas are not being properly sanitized and this could lead to more illnesses caused by the bacteria. The hypothesis in this study is that thymol will lose its effectiveness to kill bacteria after repeated treatments
