Ask Johnson & Johnson to Stop Using Carcinogens in Baby Products

From our partners:

The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics released a report revealing that toxic chemicals, like 1,4-dioxane and formaldehyde, are in baby products. Both of these chemicals cause cancer in animals, and formaldehyde is also known to cause skin rashes in people who are sensitive to the chemical.

Johnson & Johnson responded by saying "The trace levels of certain compounds found by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics can result from processes that make our products gentle for babies and safe from bacteria growth,” and the Campaign should stop “alarming” parents. Please email Johnson & Johnson and let them know that that "a little bit of carcinogen in baby shampoo is OK" is NOT an acceptable stance! Click here to act http://bit.ly/jjaction.

David Korten: Agenda for a New Economy

A friend sent this to me today. If you have ten minutes, watch this clip about how Obama's economic stimulus plan doesn't get to the heart of our current economy's problems:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/26/david_korten_agenda_for_a_new

David Korten does a good job of linking together our concerns about consumerism, sustainable living, and not having our lives dictated by our jobs. Can we do this all while stabilizing our economy? He definitely has some ideas that are worth listening to.

Shadows of Consumption

In this economy and holiday season, we're all thinking about how our consumption is affecting our lives.

Peter Dauvergne, a professor at the University of British Columbia, has a new book linking consumer culture to the environment. Here's the description. Enjoy:

What are the environmental consequences of rising consumption? To answer this, Peter Dauvergne will present his just-published book The Shadows of Consumption (MIT Press), which explores five very different histories: automobiles; gasoline; refrigerators; beef; and harp seals. For centuries, the direct consequences of consuming have been degrading local ecosystems; but, as these histories show, this is just a fraction of the costs. With increasing intensity and range, he will argue, the globalization of “unbalanced” corporations, trade, and financing is casting shadows of consumption, displacing much of the costs of supplying consumers into distant places and times. Such a process of change obscures responsibility for resulting global patterns of harm, stimulates wasteful consumption among the wealthy, and exposes all consumers to health risks. Over time the environmental costs tend to drift into ecosystems and onto people without the power to resist, tipping into crisis, for example, the rainforests of Brazil, the Pacific Ocean, the Inuit in the Arctic, the poor of sub-Saharan Africa, and future generations.

This analysis, he will further argue, helps to explain why so many of the efforts to manage the global environment are failing even as environmentalism is slowly strengthening. Years of consultation are necessary to transform the consequences of consumption. As a way to begin, he will discuss the value of a guiding principle of “balanced consumption,” both for consumers and the global political economy.

The Power of a Happy, Healthy Attitude

I got this email from my old gym today, and thought it was so great that I would pass it along. Remember, it's not stuff that makes you happy, it's the happy people around you!

Happiness Is Contagious
Do you ever wonder whether happy people have something that keeps them cheerful, chipper and able to see the good in everything? It turns out they do, they have happy friends.

New research from Harvard Medical School and the University of California suggests that happiness is influenced not only by the people you know, but by the people they know. The study shows that happiness spreads through social networks, sort of like a virus, meaning that your happiness could influence the happiness of someone you've never even met.

"We have known for a long time that there is a direct relationship between one person's happiness and another's," says study co-author James H. Fowler, PhD, University of California. "But this study shows that indirect relationships also affect happiness. We found a statistical relationship not just between your happiness and your friends' happiness, but between your happiness and your friends' friends' happiness."

They concluded that the happiness of an immediate social contact increases an individual's chances of becoming happy by 15 percent. The happiness of a second-degree contact, such as the spouse of a friend, increases the likeliness of becoming happy by 10 percent, and the happiness of a third-degree contact, or the friend of a friend of a friend, increases the likelihood of becoming happy by 6 percent.

Surround yourself with happy people, because happy friends can make you happy.
Source: webmd.com

Purchisil -- buy it today!

Here's a great video from one of my friends at the Yale Forestry School. It's a fun way to talk about consumerism while getting the point across too. Enjoy!

EcoWaste Coalition: Surviving the Crisis with Cost-Cutting Tips for the Pocket and the Planet

I came along this blog posting by the EcoWaste Coalition in my work. The posting talks about what you can do to save money. Suggestions include turning off lights when you're not using them, walk instead of drive, and buy less stuff.

Thing is, these suggestions are for people who live in the Philippines, and are arguably less wealthy than we are. Yet, they are finding the same ways to cut back as we are. Shouldn't that mean we should be cutting back more, since arguably we could afford to do so?

Healthy Cleaners in a Changing World, part 4

The bloggers at Conscious Consuming are off on a well-deserved break this week. Instead, we're posting a section of this article each day, Monday-Thursday. Read Section 1, Section 2, and Section 3.

HEALTHY CLEANERS IN A CHANGING WORLD

(or: How Bad Could it Be? -- I Bought it at the Supermarket.)

By Katie Silberman

IV. What can we do at home?

First, it's important to think precaution and prevention. You may have someone in your household questioning whether you need to make this switch. Some of these products might cost more than the ones you're using now -- and some cost less.

I think the most compelling argument for taking action, right now, is something called cumulative impacts.

Cumulative impacts describes the situation that each one of us is in right now when it comes to toxic chemicals: sure, maybe one squirt of air freshener won't hurt you. Maybe breathing those scrubbing bubbles a few times won't hurt you. But what happens when you start to add these things up?

What happens when you're surrounded by dusting spray and scented laundry soap and squirt-on window cleaner and plug-in air fresheners and car exhaust and diesel emissions and mercury from power plants and chemicals in toys and makeup and pesticides in food?

Every single day of your life? We're all living in a grand experiment without our consent: we have no idea what all these chemicals do in combination with each other. And that's why it's so important to take precautionary action and remove any exposures that you can.

Five simple steps to a greener home

1.) Educate yourself. Learn enough to make good choices. A non-profit organization called Women's Voices for the Earth, at www.womenandenvironment.org, has a lengthy report on cleaning products that is available for free downloading. The green cleaning company Seventh Generation has a comprehensive web site at www.seventhgeneration.com that lists the ingredients in their products, has a "guide to a toxin-free home" and has coupons.

2.) Use fewer products, and less of them. I have a little secret for you that the cleaning product companies don't want you to know: you do not need a different product for every room in your house! Soap and water work for lots of things -- you can get a big bottle of castile soap that will last you for months. Baking soda and vinegar, which cost pennies per use, have many uses.

Question whether you need the products you're using -- maybe instead of spraying an air freshener, you could simmer a cinnamon stick on the stove (this is what realtors do when they want to sell a home, it makes the house smell so good!) Put half a lemon in your disposal. Open your windows when you clean to let the bad air out and the good
air in.

3.) Make your own cleaners. These are several great web resources with recipes for inexpensive, effective cleaners. Have a green cleaning party! Womens' Voices for the Earth has a fun "green cleaning party kit" that you can download form their website,
womenandenvironment.org. They'll send you an educational DVD, fact sheets, and supplies you need to invite your friends over and have fun getting healthy.

4.) Buy good brands. These are several great companies out there right now who are making safe, healthy products for the home, and working hard to push this market. Only buy products that list their ingredients. Don't buy anything that says "caution" or "warning" or "use in a well-ventilated room." Support the companies who are doing the right thing and creating this market, such as Seventh Generation,
Method, and other brands you'll find at Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and natural food shops.

But there is a corollary to this: watch out for greenwashing, the practice whereby companies try to make themselves look good by claiming to be healthy, but actually are not. Words on the label like natural, green, eco, and even organic are not regulated in this market. Think about which companies you want to support.

5.) Perhaps most important, join together and speak up: join a non-profit organization such as Women's Voices for the Earth, the Science and Environmental Health Network (www.sehn.org), or the Center for Environmental Health (www.cehca.org). Continuing to use these same old dangerous chemicals are political and economic decisions, and both respond to consumers when we join our voices
together.

Just as an example of recent results of consumer advocacy, Wal-Mart is pulling Bisphenol-A baby bottles form their shelves, and Target is phasing out PVC plastic. This is a direct result of great advocacy by non-profit organizations and the members who support them.

You can do some easy advocacy from home too: call the 800 number on the back of your cleaning products. Ask the manufacturers to list all of the ingredients on the product label, and to remove chemicals of concern from their products. Companies are thinking about doing this, but they need to hear from their customers to push them over the edge. You can also sign an online petition and leave comments at
http://www.womenandenvironment.org (click on "Take Action on Toxics").

This is a great time to get involved in issues of household environmental health. Consumers are learning more and demanding more from the marketplace, and manufacturers hear this and want a piece of that market. The market is shifting to healthier products, and it is because of each of us asking for products that don't harm our children or our planet. It's the perfect time to be gorgeously green.

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Katie Silberman is Associate Director, Science and Environmental Health Network, www.sehn.org. Contact Katie@sehn.org. This piece was originally printed in the Environmental Research Foundation's "Rachel's Democracy and Health News" and is adapted from a presentation to the Jewish Environmental Initiative, St. Louis, MO, May 15, 2008. The author wishes to thank Alexandra Gorman Scranton of Women's Voices for the Earth for her research assistance.

Healthy Cleaners in a Changing World, Part 3

The bloggers at Conscious Consuming are off on a well-deserved break this week. Instead, we're posting a section of this article each day, Monday-Thursday. Read Section 1 and Section 2.

HEALTHY CLEANERS IN A CHANGING WORLD

(or: How Bad Could it Be? -- I Bought it at the Supermarket.)

By Katie Silberman

III. What's the Dirt on Cleaners?

Let's look at household cleaning products. Now we understand how a chemical that may cause asthma, cancer or birth defects could be in this product, sitting on the shelf at the grocery store. But there's one more piece to the non-regulation of cleaning products in this country, and that is that they are not required to list their
ingredients on the label.

A leading laundry soap, for example, has more than 400 ingredients, but the manufacturer calls them a "trade secret" and doesn't list them on the box. So the first thing to look at, when you are buying cleaning products, is the ingredient list.

If the manufacturers won't tell you what's in their product, do you trust it enough to spray it in your tub and literally put your naked child in that tub? Choose only products that list all ingredients on the label, so you know what you're getting.

What are the chemicals of concern in cleaning products? This piece focuses on two categories of chemicals: those that cause asthma, and those that cause reproductive harm like birth defects. We focus on these because they affect women and children, who are most likely to be using the cleaning products, and home when they are being used.

Some of the known health effects of chemicals in common cleaning products are: -- several are known to cause occupational asthma in cleaning workers. -- animal studies have shown reproductive harm: testicular damage, reduced fertility, maternal toxicity, early embryonic death, and birth defects.

So where are we with the science? Obviously we can't say "this bottle of cleaning fluid caused this child to get asthma." What we do know is that several studies have linked exposure to these chemicals with asthma in cleaning workers -- the people who are exposed to them every day. We do know that janitorial workers have twice the rate of asthma as other workers.

With the reproductive toxins, obviously it would be unethical to expose a pregnant woman to these products and then see if it hurts her baby. So instead we rely on animal studies. (Some people, of course, also find animal studies unethical.)

We do know that several of these chemicals get absorbed through the skin, and by breathing them. As previously mentioned, we find chemicals of concern in our blood, urine, breastmilk and umbilical cord blood.

So what do we do in this situation? The evidence is piling up, but we can't say for sure that any single product is harming any one of us. Well, what would you do if something was potentially harming your child? You'd take it away!

In the face of scientific uncertainty, which is where we are now, how do you take action? That part is simple: you take precaution. You think "better safe than sorry." You think "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." These are time-tested ideas for a reason: they're smart, and they keep us safe.

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Katie Silberman is Associate Director, Science and Environmental Health Network, www.sehn.org. Contact Katie@sehn.org. This piece was originally printed in the Environmental Research Foundation's "Rachel's Democracy and Health News" and is adapted from a presentation to the Jewish Environmental Initiative, St. Louis, MO, May 15, 2008. The author wishes to thank Alexandra Gorman Scranton of Women's Voices for the Earth for her research assistance.

Healthy Cleaners in a Changing World, part 2

The bloggers at Conscious Consuming are off on a well-deserved break this week. Instead, we're posting a section of this article each day, Monday-Thursday. Section 1 can be found here.


HEALTHY CLEANERS IN A CHANGING WORLD

(or: How Bad Could it Be? -- I Bought it at the Supermarket.)

By Katie Silberman

II. How bad could it be? I bought it at the supermarket.

I want to digress for a moment and discuss chemicals policy in this country. I know that sounds really boring and you're thinking "how wonky can you be?" -- but it's important to understand how chemicals are regulated in the U.S. so we can see how a product that is known to cause asthma or birth defects can be perfectly legal.

This is also the key to understanding a whole constellation of issues - from toxic toys to lead in lipstick to BPA in baby bottles -- that have been in the news lately. I think sometimes these news stories start to feel so arbitrary and overwhelming that it's hard to make sense of them -- is everything toxic? So I want to explain where we are.

As mentioned, most of our laws governing the use of chemicals in consumer products -- the stuff we use every day, like shampoo, makeup, toys, water bottles, furniture, paint, and cleaning products -- come from a mid-20th century ideal that all industry was good.

As a result, the main law governing chemicals in this country, the Toxic Substance Control Act, passed in 1976, literally assumes everything on the market at that point must be safe. This was not based on scientific testing, epidemiology, health studies.... nothing but the political expediency of regulating hundreds of thousands of chemicals: how do you do it?

The way Congress chose was to grandfather in everything on the market in 1976 and leave it on the market with no scrutiny at all. This is still over 90% of chemicals in our products today, almost none of which have ever been tested for their effects on human health.

The law then says that for future chemicals to come on the market, they would have to be submitted to the government before going on the market. And what do you think is required in that pre-market notice? The manufacturer would have to test the chemical and show that it didn't harm human health? No. It didn't cause environmental damage? No. At least it wasn't the worst tool for the job? No.

Basically manufacturers don't have to show any health or safety information at all, unless they happen to have done it on their own. Government has a brief chance to try to spot a problem if they can; otherwise industry can legally put substances on the market without testing them for safety , label them for any variety of uses, and they're good to go.

The end result is that thousands more chemicals have been put on the market since 1976 with little or, often, no information about their safety at all.

So, you might ask, where's the regulation in this regulatory system? As it stands, the EPA has the power to remove a toxic chemical from the market only if the EPA can prove that it's dangerous. This takes years of scientific testing, and often ends in the EPA being sued by the manufacturer of that chemical.

So while years go by, real people are being harmed by these chemicals - the bodies are piling up. We know a whole suite of dangerous chemicals crosses the placenta and can affect a developing baby in utero.

We find chemicals in umbilical cord blood and breastmilk. And still this is not enough for the EPA to take action. In fact, with over 81,000 chemicals on the market, the EPA has restricted only five since 1976.

This is backwards. Instead of the EPA having to prove that a chemical is dangerous before they can take it off the market, a manufacturer should have to show that it's safe before putting it on the market. This is called "shifting the burden of proof," and it is the main reason why so many of the products we live with every day have the potential to harm our health.

It's worthwhile to note that the European Union actually passed a sweeping chemicals reform law recently that does shift the burden of proof and require safety testing from manufacturers before a product is allowed on the market. And as we know, Europe's economy is stronger than ours. In fact, some US manufacturers are now making two parallel product lines: one with dangerous chemicals, for the US market, and one without, for the European Union (you see some products now, like Avalon Organics cosmetics, that say "EU compliant" -- meaning they're selling the same, safer product in the U.S. that they're selling in Europe).

Manufacturers know how to make their products safer in a cost- effective way. There is no reason for this backward system in the US other than bad political decisions.

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Katie Silberman is Associate Director, Science and Environmental Health Network, www.sehn.org. Contact Katie@sehn.org. This piece was originally printed in the Environmental Research Foundation's "Rachel's Democracy and Health News" and is adapted from a presentation to the Jewish Environmental Initiative, St. Louis, MO, May 15, 2008. The author wishes to thank Alexandra Gorman Scranton of Women's Voices for the Earth for her research assistance.

Healthy Cleaners in a Changing World, part 1

The bloggers at Conscious Consuming are off on a well-deserved break this week. Instead, we're posting a section of this article each day, Monday-Thursday. Here's Section 1.

HEALTHY CLEANERS IN A CHANGING WORLD

(or: How Bad Could it Be? -- I Bought it at the Supermarket.)

By Katie Silberman

The other day I noticed that Oprah.com had a feature on going green. No crunchy Birkenstocks for Oprah, no: instead this was the "gorgeously green lifestyle checklist." It had a long list -- change your light bulbs, use healthy cosmetics, eat organic -- but my favorite part was the end. It had a checklist for your intentions.

Do you wish to become healthier? Do you want to live according to your deepest values? You actually had to check these off.

And I realized that Oprah is right. Like any other behavior change - diet, exercise, that guy you really need to break up with -- first you have to make up your mind that you're ready to act. And to do that, you need some compelling reasons. This article aims to lay out some compelling reasons for changing your life by changing your cleaning products.

I. Are we ready? or: Times Have Changed

To decide whether to change direction, first we have to know where we are. It's important to understand that much of what we currently know as American culture developed in a different time. Our laws, economic system, shopping habits -- the way we manufacture, transport, use, and throw away all our stuff -- was developed in the late 19th and early-to mid-20th centuries.

This was a time when we thought the earth was limitless -- that we could produce as much as we could, extract as much as we could, and therefore dump as much as we could and pollute as much as we could, and there would be no consequences.

Now we know that isn't true. Now we know there are consequences. First, the Earth has only a certain amount of abuse it can handle, as we clearly see with global warming, drought, wildfires, extinction of whole species, and the perfect balance of nature disrupted.

Currently in the San Francisco Bay Area, several counties are rationing water because the snow pack in the Sierras has fallen so much in the past few years that the reservoirs can't serve the cities.

We now know we are capable of destroying our only home.

But our bodies also have a limit to what we can handle. We see this with rising incidence rates of diseases that are linked to environmental exposure. Things like childhood asthma, childhood cancer, and breast cancer -- diseases that could not be rising so fast based on genetics alone.

I don't like to cite statistics because they tend to be more confusing than helpful, but I want to highlight just one: pre-school asthma rates have gone up 160% in less than 15 years. Obviously toddlers haven't changed that much -- trust me, I have one. So what has?

Something is different in the world than it used to be, and our bodies are fighting hard to keep up.

So we see that the Earth has its limits, and our bodies have their limits. But there's one other thing we now understand more clearly than we did 50 or 100 years ago: corporations don't always tell us the truth.

This is relevant to the marketplace of cleaners, because hundreds of products are on the market, sold to us as healthy for our families. We've all seen the ads with adorable babies crawling on sparkling clean floors. What they don't reveal is which chemicals are absorbing into that baby's skin while she's down there.

In fact, we are still living with the consequences of a mid-20th century, post-War conviction that all industry is good, chemicals are the wave of the future, and government should stay out of the way. So where has this gotten us?

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Katie Silberman is Associate Director, Science and Environmental Health Network, www.sehn.org. Contact Katie@sehn.org. This piece was originally printed in the Environmental Research Foundation's "Rachel's Democracy and Health News" and is adapted from a presentation to the Jewish Environmental Initiative, St. Louis, MO, May 15, 2008. The author wishes to thank Alexandra Gorman Scranton of Women's Voices for the Earth for her research assistance.

Xanadu design is less than eco-friendly

It turns out that Xanadu, a huge shopping mall in New Jersey, is not exactly eco-friendly. The developers are doing all the requisite greenwashing things, like installing low-flow toilets and reserving spaces in the parking lots for hybrids, but they couldn't even get it together to put solar panels on the roof, or go as far on a limb as considering a LEED-certified building.

My question though, is, why should they even bother attempting to be environmentally-friendly, or even pretending to be? What will be the largest building dedicated to selling consumer goods in the United States will basically be a shrine to consumerism, and if you're going to be the worst of the worst, why not go all the way?

Will this man make you happy?

This slightly too long article on Richard Layar, Britain's "Happiness Czar" still has some good ideas about happiness and what affects our individual happiness levels. Turns out it's not how much stuff we buy!

"It's a world in which one's accumulated possessions depreciate in value. Like Jacob Marley's chains, they drag us down rather than make us happy."

One Farmer's Experience

Here's an interesting article about one family's experience as farmers in the U.S. and how our current agricultural system has changed their lives. It makes great points about the decline of the environment as we move away from local food systems, and makes links to both the obesity crisis and the opportunity to create new jobs in local agricultural sectors. The debate about the solutions in the comments is worth reading, too!

"How Green Is Your Brand?"

This blog post is one of the many questioning the truth behind green advertising and green products that are popping up everywhere. The biggest companies are getting involved... but to what end?

"Making more stuff — no matter how green that stuff is — will not really help combat global warming or reduce our collective carbon footprint. Companies need to produce things and need to make money by selling them — understood — but to me, the idea of simply creating more (albeit greener) product is pretty much on par with lowering gas prices as a solution to skyrocketing oil costs. When will we consider behavior? When we will commit to innovation?"

The Bridge at the Edge of the World

Renowned environmentalist James Gustave Speth has released a new book today: The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability.

Gus Speth is also the Dean of my school, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He has been instrumental in the environmental movement as a whole, and these days continues to educate us on many things, including on the effects of consumerism on ourselves and the environment. His book speaks to this as well as how we as individuals can make a positive difference for the environment.

Birthday Presents Get a Timeout From Parents

This article in the Boston Globe gives a great perspective on what local people are doing to reduce consumption in their children's lives. We definitely like the idea of no-present birthday parties and the lessons it teaches kids. Benefiting non-profits like Horizons for Homeless Children, is an even greater reason to do so!

Thanks to Tim Burke at African Health Foundation for this article.

Being Poor in a ‘Charge It’ Society - New York Times

Another article I am remiss in posting on time.

I liked this article, "You Are What You Spend," not only for the article but for the exchanges it produced in its
letters to the editor.

Do others have opinions?

Cindy

EcoMoms Parties

Hmm, these EcoMoms parties sound a lot like our new Discussion Series. It's great to know that people are getting together all over the country to discuss environmental and consumption issues and taking steps towards sustainability. Let's keep it up!

Labor standards in the cut flower industry

You're Invited to....

The Thorns of the Global Cut Flower Industry

Valentine's Day is coming up?

Any Idea Where Your Flowers REALLY Come From?

Presented by: Nora Ferm, International Labor Rights Forum

Tuesday, February 12th @ 4pm
Starr Auditorium, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA

Refreshments will be served.

If you have any questions, please contact
Karen_vega@ksg08.harvard.edu or Emerita_Torres@ksg09.harvard.edu

For information about the International Labor Rights Forum's
Fairness in Flowers Campaign, visit:
http://www.unionvoice.org/ct/MdLOLeY1kP0n/
--------------------------------------------------

Visit the web address below to tell your friends about this.

http://www.unionvoice.org/join-forward.html?domain=laborrights&r=T7LOLeY1_W8E

If you received this message from a friend, you can sign up for
International Labor Rights Forum at:

http://www.unionvoice.org/laborrights/join.html?r=T7LOLeY1_W8EE

Go see Reverend Billy's movie!

Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping is one of our favorites, which is why we're so glad that his movie is in theatres! Produced by Morgan Spurlock, What Would Jesus Buy? is an entertaining lesson to us all about how obsessed Americans are about shopping.

If the movie isn't in a theatre nearby, never fear! Reverend Billy may be preaching in your hometown very soon!