Plastic, Plastic, and More Plastic: Green Moms Carnival at Fake Plastic Fish
Head on over to Fake Plastic Fish today to check out a compendium of nearly 20 posts from the Green Moms Carnival members about trying to deal with lives encumbered by plastic!
Our carnival hostess, Beth Terry of Fake Plastic Fish, kicks off the carnival with a short satiric video about plastic pollution in the San Francisco Bay. Did you know there are 100 plastic bags in the Bay for every seal, duck, and pelican in the Bay? Enough’s enough! Remember what I say: Just Say No to Cheap Plastic Crap! (And the bags it comes in, too!)
Lynn
Copyright OrganicMania 2009
Filed under Cheap Plastic Crap | Wordpress Comment (1) |The Aftermath of the Green Moms Carnival: Hysterical Mommy Bloggers?
By now, I thought my mind would be on blogging about Tips for an Eco-Friendly Easter. But instead, I keep thinking about how the personal care products industry responded to the concerns raised by last week’s Green Moms Carnival. The Green Moms asked questions about the safety of the tens of thousands of untested, unregulated chemicals used in personal care products such as shampoos and household cleaners, and the presence of small amounts of probable carcinogens such as 1,4 dioxane and formaldehyde in products such as baby wash.
The industry’s response was to:
1) ignore our questions – even when we telephoned;
2) send out form emails like this one that didn’t address our questions; and
3) engage this “crisis management” PR firm to leave comments on our blogs alleging that both the Green Mom bloggers and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and the Environmental Working Group, the environmental groups behind the studies, were “irresponsible,” were causing “hysteria,” and suggesting that we needed to do more “critical thinking.”
Check out my friend Jennifer Taggert’s post, “Oh, don’t worry, you’re just a mommy blogger & just a little bit of a carcinogen is okay.” Read the comments.
Prior to the carnival, I was a bit skeptical of the need for the Kid Safe Chemicals Act. Because Ad Age recently reported on J&J‘s new social media campaign and their desire to “deepen engagement” with Mom bloggers, I expected they would welcome a call from a blogger asking for J&J’s perspective prior to publishing a blog post. Regrettably, that was not my experience with J&J, nor with the Personal Care Products Council.
I hoped that my efforts to reach out to industry before publishing my post for the Green Moms Carnival would lead to more confidence in the state of the industry and the existing regulatory system, not less confidence.
As Mary Hunt says here, “I find it amusing that if women are surveyed by a paid for research firm, their answers are sanctified and considered valid feedback. But if women give the same opinions freely on the web without “being asked,” then they are hysterical or overreacting. The only difference is that someone in the middle was paid to ask the question. Go figure.”
Happy Easter, Happy Passover, everyone. I’m going to try to go off and focus on dying eggs the natural way. I’ll try not to eat too much Fair Trade Easter chocolate. But this isn’t over. If anything, the industry’s response to our concerns has galvanized us to action.
Lynn
Copyright 2009 OrganicMania
Filed under Baby, Cancer, Green Cleaning Products, Green moms, Organic Personal Care Products, Product Recommendations | Wordpress Comments (21) |It May Be April Fool’s Day, But Toxins in Baby Bath are No Joke
It sounds incredible: probable human carcinogens like formaldehyde in children’s bubble bath. Yes, today is April Fool’s Day, but this is no joke. This is the sad reality of the state of our personal care products industry.
How did we get to this point? It’s a function of our regulatory system (or lack thereof as some might say). According to the non-profit Environmental Working Group, “The nation’s toxic chemical regulatory law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, is in drastic need of reform. Passed in 1976 and never amended since, TSCA is widely regarded as the weakest of all major environmental laws on the books today. When passed, the Act declared safe some 62,000 chemicals already on the market, even though there were little or no data to support this policy. Since that time another 20,000 chemicals have been put into commerce in the United States, also with little or no data to support their safety.”
And if this is news to you, you may be asking why you’re learning about this only now. The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics just last month released its “No More Toxic Tub” report, which included lab results showing that personal care products are commonly contaminated with formaldehyde or 1,4-dioxane – and, in many cases, both. According to the report, “These two chemicals, linked to cancer and skin allergies, are anything but safe and gentle and are completely unregulated in children’s bath products.”
But you know what? This isn’t new news. It may be new to you because perhaps you’re a new parent who is just for the first time paying careful attention to what goes into the bath water with your baby. But the fact is, you can find reports like this one about 1,4 dioxane and formaldehyde dating back to 2007 – and I imagine, even earlier. (Updated 4/3: Here’s a link reporting that in 1982, “the industry-funded Cosmetic Ingredient Review panel noted that the cosmetic industry was aware of the problem of 1,4-dioxane in cosmetics and was making an effort to reduce or remove the impurity.” )
The makers of these products claim they are completely safe and meet all government requirements. J&J’s products are bearing the bulk of the criticism from today’s Green Moms Carnival because of J&J’s ill-timed “Big Bubblin Stars” video campaign. But the fact is, J&J does meet all US requirements. Levels of formaldehyde in the J&J products are even below EU levels, which is significant because many American consumers try to follow EU standards for personal care products because they believe them to be safer than the US standards.
But the issue is not J&J’s products alone. Why? We are exposed to thousands of personal care products over our lifetimes. If each one of these products leaches trace amounts of potentially toxic chemicals into our bodies – as tests like the EWG’s “Body Burden” test have shown – then the effect is a cumulative one. And when you’re talking about infants, small children, and young people in their reproductive years, the potential effects are really unknown. We do know that chemicals have been linked to cancers. We do know that we’ve seen a marked decrease in fertility in this country and an increasing number of reproductive diseases. Are they connected to repeated chemical exposures from birth on? I agree with Dr. Philip P. Landrigan, Professor and Chair of the Children’s Environmental Health Center at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He says, “Children are not simply ‘little adults’. They are uniquely vulnerable to toxic exposures in the environment. Exposures in early life can affect human health over the entire life span. We need to find definitive answers about the relationship between toxic chemicals and health so we can protect our children now and in the future.”
In response to past criticism, J&J’s spokesperson Iris Grossman has said, “It’s important to stress that all our products are within the FDA limits.” But that’s just the problem. Are the FDA limits appropriate? Unfortunately, one of the legacies left us by the Bush Administration is the public’s fundamental distrust of our regulatory system. The public has just been burned too many times by lax oversight. Look at our financial markets. The SEC claims it wasn’t aware of the extensive use of derivatives in our secondary markets. Heck, I remember learning about derivatives way back in ’97 when I was at Georgetown’s Business School. No, I didn’t understand them, but I still remember scribbling this note: Derivatives: Stay Away!!! Then there’s the sad state of our food safety oversight. How many more people will have to die of salmonella before we get that under control? What about the lead in children’s toys? I shouldn’t have to cart my toys over to The Smart Mama for a thorough lead inspection.
Many will advocate for more regulation, such as the Kid Safe Chemical Act supported by the Environmental Working Group. But regulations don’t always work as intended. The CSPIA, enacted to prevent the sale of items containing lead, has inadvertently caused many small makers of children’s products to go out of business because they couldn’t afford to comply with the testing requirements imposed by the new law. Then there’s the response to the banking crisis. While the government was celebrating the passage of TARP, the bankers were celebrating the fact that the law didn’t require them to start lending again. How do I know that? I first learned about it at a Washington Christmas party, well before that scandal had finally hit the press. And now that spring is here? The credit markets still remain frozen.
So is The Kid Safe Chemical Act the answer? Will it cause more problems than it purports to solve? Will it inadvertently cause harm to the natural and organic purveyors, by causing them to comply with burdensome regulation, just like what happened when the USDA Organic regulation and the CSPIA was passed? I don’t know. I don’t claim to be a regulatory expert. But I do know something about marketing. And I know that the profit margins on personal care products – beauty products in particular – are incredibly high. It is a very lucrative business, and in most cases the biggest expense is not producing the product, it’s marketing. It’s paying for all the free samples and glossy magazine ads that personal care products companies routinely hand out.
Of course, it’s a different matter in the natural and organics market. There, the cost of all natural alternatives to synthetic chemical ingredients is high. And consequently, on a percentage basis, they spend less on marketing than companies like P&G or J&J.
As an MBA and a New Jersey native, I have very dear friends who have worked at leading personal care companies like J&J, Bristol Myers Squibb, and P&G. Of course they believe their products are safe and comply with US law. But that’s not the whole issue. Someone – either the personal care industry as a whole – or the US government – needs to take a closer look at the 82,000 chemicals used in our personal care products to assess the likelihood that they are contributing to our sky high cancer rates and the increasing incidence of reproductive abnormalities.
And as a former newspaper reporter, I know that there are two sides to every story. So I called J&J before publishing this blog post. I wanted to understand their stance on the Kid Safe Chemical Act and the possible adverse affects of long term exposure to the multitude of chemicals in our personal care products. Their spokesperson, Iris Grossman, could not respond to these questions, although she did offer to put me in touch with their “Mommy blogger” person. I pointed out to her that if she couldn’t answer my question, I didn’t think a “Mommy blogger” specialist could either. Then the shock set in. As a marketing and communications professional, I know that every company has a set of standard Q&As used to respond to the media. I asked her if this meant that NO ONE had ever asked these questions before:
– What is J&J’s stance on the Kid Safe Chemical Act?
– What does J&J think about the adverse affects of long term exposure to the thousands of chemicals used in personal care products?
– Is this issue even being discussed at the industry level, through groups like the Personal Products Council?
So what can you do? Here are a few choices:
1. Sign this petition in support of the Kid Safe Chemical Act.
2. Fill out this web form to contact J&J and tell them you want them to lead an industry-wide effort to overhaul the Toxic Substances Control Act. Or, leave a comment on the J&J blog.
3. Contact the Personal Care Products Council here and tell them you expect a better response to the EWG report than the one that their Chief Scientist gave US News & World Report. “These are issues that have been around for many, many years, so it’s not new news. The thing that impressed me was the low levels of dioxane that were found in these products, which indicates to me that the industry is doing its job in keeping this potential contaminant down to a low level.” (And yes, I’ve called the Personal Care Products Council and am just waiting for a call back).
4. Check the EWG’s Skin Deep data base to find safer alternatives to the products identified in the Campaign’s report.
5. Use fewer personal care products and try to find those with fewer, simpler ingredients.
6. Contact your Congressional representatives to let them know you support Kid Safe. Support is especially critical in Pennyslvania and California. This press release from Senator Lautenberg’s office includes good background information on the bill. If you or someone you know lives in PA, check out this link.
If you live in CA, check out this link.
What do you think? Please leave a comment and share. And if you want to talk about the issue, I’ll be on the radio today along with Jennifer Taggert, The Smart Mama, and Lisa Frack of the Environmental Working Group. You can listen to us here and call in with questions at (530) 265-9555.
Thanks for reading this far! This was a longer than usual post, but I felt I needed the space to make these arguments.
— Lynn
Copyright OrganicMania 2009
Filed under Green Cleaning Products, Green Ideas & Stuff, Green moms, Marketing, Organic Personal Care Products, Organic Product Needs, Product Recommendations | Wordpress Comments (17) |More on Spring Cleaning: Green Moms Carnival is Up!
Be sure to check out the more than twenty submissions about green ways to clean at this month’s Green Moms Carnival on Spring Cleaning over at Tiny Choices.
— Lynn
Filed under Blog, Green Cleaning Products, Green Ideas & Stuff, Green moms, Green Moms Carnival Home Page & Calendar | Wordpress Comment (0) |Made with Love: A Video Tribute to the @GreenMoms Community
Many thanks to fellow Green Mom Anna Hackman of Green-Talk who felt moved to put together this tribute video to the Twittering women of The Green Moms Carnival in honor of our winning the Shorty Award for Best Green Content on Twitter.
The video is 5 1/2 minutes long and provides an introduction to 15 of the 30-odd women behind the Green Moms Carnival. Among us are authors, environmental activists, Moms taking a break from the workforce, businesswomen, marketing consultants, LEED-certified attorneys, green building experts, entrepreneurs, educators, and more. We are Moms and we are “Mothers of the Earth” — no children of our own, but a responsiblity to everyone’s children to leave the Earth a better place for future generations.
Anna is a LEED certified attorney – she’s not a marketing or video whiz, but she took it upon herself to create and execute this video. What you’ll see is proof of an enormous amount of goodwill towards the Green Moms community and all we have accomplished and hope to accomplish in our fight to leave a better Earth for future generations.
Thank you, Anna, thank you for your hard work, kind words, and thanks to all the other women of the Green Moms Carnival, and thanks to those who support, inspire, and encourage us in our work.
— Lynn
Copyright 2009 OrganicMania
Filed under Blog, Green Moms Carnival Home Page & Calendar | Wordpress Comments (2) |Spring Cleaning
Spring is in the air, and with Spring comes Spring Cleaning for many of us. But in the rush to clean, you may inadvertently be doing more bad than good.
Most of the cleaning products we grew up with are full of trace amounts of chemicals that have been linked to health problems ranging from asthma to cancer, according to environmental watchdog groups like the Environmental Working Group.
So what can you do?
Here are three tips:
1. Go natural. Look for “green” cleaners, but be sure to read the labels. Unfortunately the terms “green,” “eco” and “eco-friendly” are unregulated and can mean anything from truly natural with no synthetic ingredients, to a mish-mash of chemicals with some natural essences thrown in for good measure. If you’re not sure what an ingredient means, go to the EWG’s Chemical Index here.
2. Avoid anti-bacterial products. These products are linked by health officials to the rise in microorganisms that are resistant to antibiotics. This is not new news. Read this Center for Disease Control alert from 2001. It says in part that antibacterial ingredients “are now being added to products used in healthy households, even though an added health benefit has not been demonstrated. Scientists are concerned that the antibacterial agents will select bacteria resistant to them and cross-resistant to antibiotics. Moreover, if they alter a person’s microflora, they may negatively affect the normal maturation of the T helper cell response of the immune system to commensal flora antigens; this change could lead to a greater chance of allergies in children. As with antibiotics, prudent use of these products is urged. Their designated purpose is to protect vulnerable patients.”
3. Consider going “back to the future.” Simple basics like baking soda, castile soap, vinegar, and lemon can do the bulk of the cleaning in your home. “Recipes” for these conoctions are available here.
And be sure to check out the other suggestions from The Green Moms Carnival, which will appear at Tiny Choices on Tuesday.
How do you clean? Leave a comment and share!
— Lynn
Copyright OrganicMania 2009
Filed under Uncategorized | Wordpress Comments (13) |Better Late than Never: Happy Festivus
The smell of fresh baked cookies greeted my brother-in-law, his wife and kids, as they arrived at the house today for our annual Christmas gift exchange.
No, this is not a re-tread post. It’s Presidents Day, and we’re finally getting around to closing out Christmas ’08. I do believe in stretching out the Christmas season (aka Slow Christmas), but even I’ll admit this was a bit extreme.
Yet in the Episcopalian-Jewish-Buddhist-Agnostic-Non-Religious-and Roman Catholic family I married into, Christmas celebrations are decidedly different than those I remember as a child.
And I couldn’t help but compare our belated celebrations to the tweets and emails I received earlier in the evening from my @greenmoms friends Janelle Sorenson of the non-profit Healthy Child, Healthy World and Sommer Poquette of Green and Clean Mom. Rather than miss participating in last week’s Green Moms Carnival, they added their posts today. “Better late than never,” I tweeted back to them.
It’s a motto this Mom can relate to.
— Lynn
Copyright OrganicMania 2009
Filed under Holidays | Wordpress Comment (1) |I Believe
For this month’s Green Moms Carnival, Jennifer Taggert of The Smart Mama asked us to blog on the topic: “I Believe.”
I believe that small steps make a difference.
I believe in God, and I believe that God wants us to take care of the Earth.
I believe in the power of the Green Moms Carnival. I believe that raising our voices together makes a difference, whether we are blogging about global warming, or urging the Obama Administration to adopt a prevention agenda, or any of the other upcoming topics, like plastics.
I believe that sometimes you need to step away from the blogging and writing and spend more time just being and doing. That’s one reason I’m not quite as active in the blogosphere as I was this time last year. I’m spending more time building my client base of green and wanna-be-more green companies, helping them to take small steps that cumulatively will make a big difference to us and our children. As business has taken off (good!), my time for blogging and visiting my favorite blogs has decreased (bad!)
I believe that it’s never too late to make a difference.
And I believe that for some reason, this was one of the hardest Carnival topics to tackle! What do you think?
Be sure to check out Jennifer’s site on Monday to see the other Green Moms Carnival posts!
— Lynn
Copyright OrganicMania 2009
Filed under Uncategorized | Wordpress Comments (9) |About the Next Green Moms Carnival: I Believe
Normally the Green Moms Carnival runs the first Monday of each month, which means by rights you should be enjoying the posts today. Coming on the heels of our win for “Best Green Content” on Twitter in the first Shortys Award Competition, we’re eager to kick off the next carnival.
Eager but tired.
My friend Jennifer Taggert, aka The Smart Mama is hosting the next carnival over at her site next Monday. She and I were up until 3 a.m. EST/midnight PST sending out a stream of crazy tweets trying to round up the final votes in the competition. I don’t know about you, but it takes me a lot longer to recover from staying up till 3 a.m. than it did in my single days!
Many of you have contacted me asking how to participate in the next carnival. Here’s how:
1. Write a post on the topic of “I Believe.” As Jennifer explains it, “This is an open topic. The idea stems from a website I read a year or so ago that asked people to do post 500 words starting with the words “I believe . . . ” The particular website was a toxicologist’s website, so the various posts were all technical in nature.
But, the idea here is to talk about what we believe – do you believe small steps can change the world? the power of the big green purse (Diane)? that we can (or can’t) solve global warming? that Obama means a new era? You could talk about faith & being green, or whatever. It really is open. Just start with the words I believe and reflect from there. But keep it green or healthy or non toxic in the theme of our carnival.”
2. Be sure to link to the SmartMama’s site and to the Green Moms Carnival Home Page.
3. Submit your post to greenmomscarnival@gmail.com by Sunday, February 8th.
Please bear in mind that due to the volume of submissions, there is no guarantee your submission will be chosen. Posts are selected purely at the discretion of the blogger hosting each month. Rules are posted here on the home page.
And if you just want to check out the submissions, be sure to visit my friend Jennifer, who truly is one SmartMama, next Monday, February 9th.
Thanks for your interest!
— Lynn
Copyright OrganicMania 2009
Filed under Green Moms Carnival Home Page & Calendar | Wordpress Comment (1) |The Shortys: Thanks from the Green Moms of Green Moms Carnival
UPDATE: SINCE THIS POST WAS WRITTEN, WE’VE LEARNED THAT IN FACT WE DID WIN THE SHORTY AWARDS COMPETITION! THANKS TO ALL WHO VOTED FOR US AND PLEASE JOIN US IN NYC FOR THE CELEBRATION ON FEBRUARY 11TH!
I’m just recovered from a late night of campaigning for a brand new award: the Shortys. The Shortys aim to honor the best content producers on Twitter. It appears my posse, my community, my gals – the Green Moms of the Green Moms Carnival ended up in second place among all the green twitterati on Twitter. It’s still a bit early to tell, but preliminary results make it look like the winner is Dr. Greene, whom we all adore anyway!
Thanks to everyone who voted for us.
Looking at some of the comments about why people voted was humbling. We’re so thrilled that you enjoy our tweets, learn from them and are inspired by them.
The Green Moms Carnival members are a very diverse group of bloggers who are united by our desire to help Mother Earth. Some of us are Mothers, some of us are child-free. Heck, we’ve even had some “Sons of Mothers” participate in our carnivals!
We’re published authors with popular books in the green space, stay-at-home Moms, law firm partners, business owners, grant writers, Sunday School teachers and non-believers. A few of us were at the forefront of the environmental movement 30 years ago, others came to understand the dangers of environmental degradation far more recently. Some of us blog for the sheer pleasure of it and refuse advertising on our blogs, whereas a few of us support our families with the money made through affiliate programs, advertising, and consulting.
We believe that together, our voices can make a difference in our collective stewardship of Mother Earth.
We thank you for your encouragement.
Members of the Green Moms Carnival: *
- Arduous
- Best of Mother Earth*
- Big Green Purse*
- Crunchy Chicken*
- Crunchy Domestic Goddess
- Eco ‘Burban*
- Enviromom*
- Fake Plastic Fish
- Foodie Tots
- Going Green*
- Gray Matters*
- Green and Clean Mom*
- Green Bean Dreams*
- Green Style Mom*
- Green Talk*
- In Women We Trust*
- Itsabelly
- La Marguerite*
- Milkweed Mercantile/Eco-Village Musings
- Mindful Momma*
- More Green Moms
- Non Toxic Kids
- OrganicMania*
- Surely You Nest*
- The Green Parent*
- Tiny Choices
- The Not Quite Crunchy Parent*
- The Smart Mama*
*Denotes Founding Member
Please join us or help spread the word! (Please bear with us if we don’t respond right away…this is an all-volunteer effort ).
Lynn
Copyright OrganicMania 2009
Filed under Blog, Green moms, Green Moms Carnival Home Page & Calendar | Wordpress Comments (6) |
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