Greenguy,
Excuse me if I am misreading what you are asking, but it seems to me you may be thinking “organic vapor” cartridges should be used with organic sprays, whereas “chemical cartridges” should be used with chemical sprays?
If this is not what you meant, then you can correct me, otherwise this is my explanation:
“Organic vapor” has a different meaning than “organic” sprays. In fact the word “organic” itself has different meanings which allows for a lot of confusion.
To a scientist, the word is best understood from a chemistry standpoint. Normal chemistry is simply the study of the properties of substances, and the way they react with one another. However, since we live in a world in which so much of the substances we encounter are partially made up of carbon atoms, scientists invented a whole new branch of chemistry for it, called “Organic Chemistry”. That is, with a few exceptions, organic chemistry is the study of substances which contain carbon atoms.
Organic in terms of popular culture is defined differently. It would be anything which occurs naturally. That’s why a product like Kaolin clay is considered “organic” (because it occurs in nature) even though it contains no carbon.
It gets even fuzzier because there is an “organic” agency, which defines what compounds are allowed for use in organic food production, and which aren’t. It is known as OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute). Omri generally won’t allow synthetic compounds to be used on food, but will allow natural compounds to be used on food, even if they are synthetically extracted. They also don’t necessarily allow all naturally occurring compounds to be used on food. So just because it is natural, doesn’t mean it fits their current definition of organic.
In popular culture, many people think organic food is not sprayed at all, which would be yet another definition.
Coming back to the respirator question, an “organic vapor” cartridge would use the word organic in the more scientific sense (i.e. organic [carbon] chemistry]). From a pesticide application standpoint, an organic vapor cartridge would be effective for use with current synthetic or organic pesticides used on crops, since both groups of pesticides contain carbon and would be filtered out by the cartridge.
They have different cartridges available for inorganic substances, like ammonia, hydrogen chloride, sulfur dioxide, even mercury vapor, but of course would not be useful or necessary for applying pesticides.
Rayrose,
I agree those 3M respirators are very inexpensive and seem to work well. The soft rubber molds easily to one’s face.