02.14.10
Posted in Chemicals, Environment, Glad Ware Company, Green Companies, Green Household Products, Green Living, Recycling, Technology, pollution at 4:59 am by Administrator
The last blog post examined some ways that chemicals and particularly those in plastics harm animal life, both on land and in the sea. This post will examine how certain chemicals harm humans. During my reading on this subject in the last week or so, one thing became very clear to me. Human and animal health is directly linked to the health of the environment. That seems like such an obvious statement, but oftentimes humans would like to think of environmental problems as just nature or animal problems. But when chemicals are involved, what affects animals also many times directly or indirectly affects the health of humans as well.
I read several articles on the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” which went into more detail about how the effects of tons of garbage in the Pacific Ocean is poisoning or killing the wildlife. The really sad thing is that there seems to be no quick feasible way to clean it up because it involves several countries, is very far from land and just gets complicated. This will take a lot of concentrated effort on everyone’s part including governments, advocacy groups, scientists and engineers to name a few, not to mention the money involved. But the chemicals leaking into the ocean from this garbage eventually makes its way into some of the fish/seafood we eat which makes its way into our bodies. Some pregnant women have been warned in the past not to eat certain fish because of the levels of certain chemicals. The ole food chain quandary sometimes gets really complicated. You’ll find several articles on this subject on http://www.treehugger.com and http://planetgreen.discovey.com. One program in particular that is taking a proactive stance in research and is taking positive actions to help clean up and prevent future ocean littering is Project Kaisei. Read about their good work at http://www.projectKaisei.org. Their work gives me hope that there is a solution. They are researching how to use this garbage to recycle into fuel of some kind. Through them we all can help with the research and clean up by helping fund the effort.
The websites noted above present much information about the chemicals that make their way into our bodies, not just through the ocean garbage dump but in our own homes, in every day living. Over this last decade, discussions, research and concerns have continued to rise about the harmful affects of certain plastics, or the chemical compounds making up certain plastics. These are the ones we are in contact with the most and which this blog will concentrate.
Questions began to arise about the chemical compounds of some plastics back in the 1980’s and continued into the new decade and century. Finally, recently after many studies, disagreements between agencies, researchers, scientists, industry personnel, advocacy groups, and others that had invested interest on one side or the other, the FDA made an announcement which denounced their previous finding earlier in the decade about bisphenol A (BPA). The FDA agency does now find ‘reason for concern’ about bisphenol A. However, the FDA took no further action. The statement itself was good and encouraging that more research will take place. But even so, bisphenol A or BPA is still in hundreds of products we use in everyday life.
That’s not to say that all plastics are harmful. Some plastics are safe and certainly useful. From my reading, one type of plastic used in many products proves to be non toxic in our daily use of it. It is named polypropylene. It is one of the few plastics that have no harmful occupational or health hazards during the manufacturing process as well (which is rare). Since the packaging of plastic products are not required to name the type of chemical compounds used in the product, how can we know what products we buy are made of this safe plastic? You will not know in the store. But you can either take down the phone number or website and contact the company and ask. Or you can buy the product and call before you unwrap or use the product to find out what it is made of, which is what I did last week. My bowls and tops had gotten so misplaced, borrowed or whatever that I needed to replace them so that I could send my husband to work with lunch that had a sealed top and could be warmed in the microwave. Having read that heating plastics is suspected to be one of the ways that BPA is leaked into our food and bodies, I called before I used. I purchased Glad Ware Containers with their “most interlocking lids ever.” The package said they were microwave, dishwasher and freezer safe. When I called, the Glad representative stated the lids were made from polypropylene and the containers were made from Terephthalate which is another plastic compound that meets the FDA regulations for food containers and storage. (Regulations. U.S. FDA (1998) approved the use of PET as components of polyethylene phthalate polymers intended for use in contact with food in accordance with the conditions prescribed in 21 CFR part 177.1630.) Glad has on its website a declaration of safety and non use of BPA in their products including sandwich bags, plastic wraps, trash bags as well as the food containers.
After reading some of the literature regarding concerns about the leakage of potentially harmful plastic compounds the most widely known one, bisphenol A, there is still reason for everyone to be concerned until it is proven without a doubt non-harmful to animals and humans.
BPA is used in all kinds of everyday products including CD’s, baby bottles, sippy cups, lining in cans containing canned foods, water bottles, medical supplies, literally thousands of products we use everyday. Researchers at the CDC found that BPA was found in 93% of urine samples taken in a study of over 2500 participants. The levels varied somewhat with men showing 2.6 micrograms per liter, women with 2.9 and children between ages six to eleven showing a measurement of 4.5. The debate is ongoing that BPA does or does not accumulate in our bodies. The people that think BPA is not harmful say that the chemical leaves the body through the urine, therefore it doesn’t cause problems. The questions remain: does all the BPA leave the body or does it accumulate somewhere in the body? If so where and what are the lingering affects? Researchers have stated that BPA in low amounts have been harmful to lab animals and assume the same is so with humans.
Other researchers have found through tests with animals that BPA is suspicious or related to heart disease, complications in breast and prostrate cancer treatments, fertility problems and others. The FDA seems to be specifically concerned about how BPA affects infants and young children. Canada has taken the step to ban and remove BPA from baby bottles. Many manufacturers and retailers in the USA have voluntarily taken products off the shelves that contain BPA.
So while the jury is still out and the research still underway on BPA and other harmful plastic compounds, what do we do in every day life to care for our children and ourselves? Below is a list that can get us thinking and started. I will be doing these from now own, wish I’d known about such things when my children were young.
1. When in doubt, don’t use it. If you have a non plastic alternative, use it.
2. Contact the company and get their take on their products, then check the reputation of the company regarding violations of regulations, etc. The internet is a wonderful tool for this.
3. Use as little plastic as possible. Prevention on the front end is always better. Even if it is safe regarding human use, the disposal and recycling efforts of some plastics are not finely tuned. Much ends up in landfills (some say up to 22% or more of landfills are plastics) for millions of years to come – or in our oceans to cause havoc on the wildlife there and eventually making it back to our dinner table. Tons of other plastics just get thrown on roadways, parks, etc. where it stays forever until a good hearted human comes along and cleans it up. At least if it is an aluminum drink can littered in the park, it can be retrieved and easily recycled.
4. Advocate for better labeling of non-food products so we know what we are buying before we buy it.
5. Be on the safe side and buy glass baby bottles. Triple check the type of plastics in your childrens toys, especially teethers, rattles, etc. that will for sure go into their little mouths. Some harmful plastic are even in some childrens books that are bound in plastic. If you don’t know or can’t find out about safety, don’t buy it.
6. Aside from helping yourself and your family, get more involved. Some suggestions:
a. Celebrate Earth Day April 22.
b. Celebrate World Environmental Day June 5,
c. Celebrate World Ocean Day June 8.
d. Adopt a Mile clean up on a road near you.
e. Adopt a Stream, Creek, Lake, River, Bay, Ocean – any body of water will most likely have a clean up program. If not, get your community involved and start one.
d. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Reclaim energy.
e. Save energy and water.
f. Live as green as you can, garden, alternative energy, hybrid vehicles, etc.
g. Give, aside from giving of yourself, give money to valuable and needed earth friendly causes.
h. Teach your children and grandchildren the importance of taking care of the earth. Teach them about animals, nature and recycling to start.
i. Pick at least one of these to do, preferably more.
j. Inform others of risks and needs regarding our earth.
k. Enjoy Your Earth!
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01.01.10
Posted in Environment, Green Companies, Green Living at 6:24 pm by Administrator
Not quite to the Star Wars era yet, but we are moving in that direction. With my recycling efforts, I’ve found I recycle paper and cardboard more than anything else, with plastics coming in second. So we have a long way to go yet before trees are not used for paper.
I have spent most of December working on re-formatting my children’s book, Friends in the Meadow-Birds, to fit the formatting for an ebook so that all those tens of thousands of people who got their Kindles for Christmas have access to my book as an ebook as well as others. But before I started that project, I looked into the whole thing, ebooks and ereaders. My question is not a simple one, but is this just another electronic gadget, here today, gone tomorrow? If I determined that it was an electronic fad, then I wasn’t going to bother, as aside from Christmas, this project had dominated the whole month. What I found was that authors and publishers are thinking that ebooks and ereaders will change the publishing business similar to what iPod’s did for the music business. So a publishing revolution is just ahead it seems.
Upon further research, I found that the ebooks were a very hot item for Christmas and the ebook store sites are popping up all over the net. You can get many books for free to download, both classics and modern literature. The cost for those books for sale is about one third or less of the printed books. Many are sold for $1.00, which is not far from the royalties made on printed books sold in the major bookstores.
I doubted that my eyes would hold up to reading on an ereader, as they get very upset with me when I stay on the computer all day. So I went to Best Buy to eyeball the ereaders. From the ones that Best Buy carried, I liked the Sony most of all. I was pleased to see that you can adjust the size of the font to however large you need it so as not to strain your eyes. Most ereaders I learned have E-ink and special lighting so that you can read it clearly with little eye strain even in bright lighted situations. Except for physically turning the page, holding the reader was about the same as holding a book. After visiting Best Buy I felt most positive about the idea of ebooks and ereaders.
After this, I was sure I would find something on the internet to discourage my thinking about the positives of the ereaders. I found three very informative articles that were of most interest to me.
I was very curious to know if the ereaders and ebooks have the potential to really make a positive impact on the environment. I found an article on Epublishers Weekly titled “Ebooks Save Millions of Trees: 10 Ideas for sustainable Publishing”, by Michael Pastore. He is both a novelist and non-fiction writer. He has authored a book on the subject, 50 Benefits of Ebooks: A Thinking Person’s Guide to the Digital Reading Revolution. His article answered my questions in just the title. But he went into enough detail that gives hope that ebooks and ereaders are on the cutting edge of the publishing business and that millions of trees each year can be saved. One example he shared is the newspaper, New York Times. One Sunday issues consumes 75,000 trees and one year of the Sunday issues consumes more than 3,900,000 trees. This is one newspaper. There are millions of books published each year. Mr. Pastore shares that each year the publishing industry in the USA consumes 32 million trees for book. Books and newspapers together consume 125 million trees each year and “emit over 40 million metric tons of CO2 annually; equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions of 7.3 million cars.” His 10 ideas for sustainable publishing are good ideas for the publishing industry as well as each household in the country to take to heart. Read his full article at
http://www.epublishersweekly.blogspot.com/2009/09/ebooks-save-millions-of-trees-10-ideas.html.
Feeling even better about the whole idea, I went back to the internet to look for ebook comparisons and guides to buying. I found an article written by the Electronic Frontier Foundation which is titled, “EFF’s ebook-buyer’s Guide to Privacy.” This was the only red flag I found in my research. But it could be a serious one for some people. The article basically says that the ereaders that are made and sold only by certain brands, bookstores, etc., do keep information on the owners, mainly what ebooks have been purchased, what customers are reading at any time and the store can share the information with law enforcement and third parties for marketing efforts or other service providers. Some of the information sent back to the stores reminded me of cookies from different sites that monitor our use of computers, buying habits, etc. The article encourages those purchasing an ereader to read the terms of service agreement very closely before purchasing. If you want strict privacy regarding your ereader, look at what the article calls “open source” ereaders that can download books from a number of sources and does not have a service agreement with anyone, therefore no one is keeping records on the ereader or you. The web address for this article is http://boingboing.net/2009/12/21/effs-ebook-buyers-gu.html. Read it before you buy.
My last question at this point was what was the best one for me to purchase? So the comparison shopping begins. I found a neat chart comparing eight different readers. These included: Amazon KindleDX, Fugitsu FLEPia, Cool-ER, Kindle 2, Sony Reader PRS-700, Sony Reader PRS-505, ASTAK EZ Reader, and IRex Digital ReaderDR1000SW. This will be a hard decision because no one has everything I want. So I will probably wait a year or so while the bugs continue to be worked out and the ereaders become more user friendly. What I want is a reader that the screen size is 6 to 8 inches, has E-Ink with color and great lighting, touch screen, high resolution, weighs about 10 ounces, has a lot of memory or extendable choices, has a long battery life if wireless, but most importantly has as many document format choices as possible. But it must have EPUB, PDF, .Mobi, .PDB, HTML, Javascript, Plain Text, LRF, RTF and more if possible. There must not be a service contract regarding use of it. I do not want to be monitored in any way. You will see when you compare, that right now there is no such critter. But given a year or two of customer feedback, maybe there will be such an ereader or closer to it anyway, and maybe the price will have come down. This chart can be found at http://www.myebookreaderreview.com.
Until then, I can still download as pdf’s and read on the computer. At least I’ll still be saving trees and the environment. Good reading everyone! By the way, I’m getting my eyes checked and new glasses tomorrow. I’m good for another year or so with the computer! But still looking forward to my perfect ereader.
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10.27.09
Posted in Green Companies, Green Household Products, Green Living, Proctor and Gamble, Recycling at 7:41 pm by Administrator
Since my last post, I continued to take inventory of the products I use in my home and have been researching the companies that produce them. My goal is to see if these companies take into consideration sustainability and earth friendly products.
Most of what I use for house cleaning products, as I noted in the last post, were products made by S.C. Johnson Company. The research I did on them ‘passed’ my test of appropriate product research and development and their concern about decreasing their carbon footprint.
Most of the other products I use are produced by Proctor and Gamble Company. These products include: Tide (or Cheer or Gain) and Bounce for laundry; Cascade and Dawn for dish washing. For hygiene products almost all of them were produced by Proctor and Gamble. These include: Scope, Crest, Oral-B, Old Spice products, Secret, Head and Shoulders, Pepto-Bismol and Vicks products, Ivory and Zest soaps, Olay and Cover Girl products, Febreze and Charmin.
What it pretty much boils down to is that for my household, these two companies produce the majority of the products we use. So it has become more important to me that I know these two companies in particular care about the world.
As with S.C. Johnson company, during my research on Proctor and Gamble, I found some very interesting results. First of all, they have a Sustainability Strategy that contains five areas. These include: Products, Operations, Social Responsibility, Employees, and Stakeholders. Their web site has details about each area. I was impressed that not only have the products and operations areas made good progress, but their Social Responsibility area goes far beyond what I ever expected.
The company gears the Social Responsibility part of their strategy toward helping children in need of the basics like clean water, immunizations, health care, etc. These children are in countries that are in dire need of such help. In the last five years, the company has helped 87,000 children. Given that the welfare of children is high on my list, this one area really impressed me. Needless, to say they ‘passed’ my test as well.
Another fact that I didn’t know and probably most ordinary people in the U.S.A. didn’t either, is that Proctor and Gamble was added to the list of the Top 100 Global Sustainable Corporations in 2009. We’re talking global businesses! That’s a great honor. Please go and read more about Proctor and Gamble for yourself at http://www.pg.com.
As for me, I have started reducing, reusing, recycling, and researching companies where I buy my products. I am satisfied with both companies where most of my household and hygiene products are researched and produced. I was pleasantly satisfied that they are already into sustainability with products I use and that I do not need to change any products at this point.
I suppose now I maintain where I am with my recycling effort, but not consider it completed. There are two things I know I need to continue monitoring. One is the temptation to return to old life patterns. (Honestly, it is easier just to throw it in the trash.) The second thing is to research new companies when I consider a new product purchase.
But for S.C. Johnson and Proctor and Gamble, I say, “Keep up the good work for the green earth!” Also, thank you for your efforts in making our earth a better place to live.
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10.25.09
Posted in Green Companies, Green Household Products, Green Living, Recycling, S.C.Johnson at 4:57 am by Administrator
I have been taking inventory of the products that I use most often in my home. The reason is that I wanted to find the ones that are earth friendly and to determine the ones that are not. I want to support the companies of the products that are into sustainability.
Some of the products I use regularly include Scrubbing Bubbles, Oust, Shout, Windex, Off, Pledge, Raid and Drano. For wrapping foods I use Ziploc bags and Saran Wrap. As it turns out all these products are made by S. C. Johnson. I researched the S.C. Johnson Company to find out if they were into sustainability. I am glad to say that S.C. Johnson is big time into green living and research continues on their products to improve them to be as sustainable as possible.
Their website www.scjohnson.com covers everything from CEO reports, to reports on chemicals in products, to what we can do in our homes to help be more green thinking and living. I especially liked this part of their website. The suggestions given on the site of things we can do at home included ideas for every room in the house. Some are common and well known like turn the water off while brushing your teeth. But did you know that when the stove top burner pans become caked with burned on grease or other food over time that they absorb more energy and therefore costs more to use? Did you know that when we use a six inch pan on an eight inch stove top burner, we waste over 40% of the energy produced by the burner? We need to match the pan we use to the burner size so as not to waste the energy. There are many other helpful ideas on the “Doing Your Part,” in the ‘Around the Home’ section of the website. It is worth reading for the living green cause, and it also may just save on utility bills.
I encourage you to take a good look at the S.C. Johnson website. There is loads more information on products and even coupons. I was really impressed that the company that produces so many of the items I use every day has been into sustainability for years, longer than I have. The Company has received two Presidential Recognition Awards for their “greenlist” process and their overall efforts towards sustainability.
Thanks S.C. Johnson for the great work and concern for our good Earth.
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