LILL's LIST

Sometimes I feel like the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland, running just to keep up with developments in Green products. Bisphenol-A is discovered, then it’s banished, then we find out it didn’t really go completely away.

We learn which companies to trust – then find out that some of them have been lying on their labels or just leaving ingredients out of their label list. What’s a concerned consumer to do?

Take 1,4-dioxane, a known carcinogen and petrochemical. Now, wouldn’t you think that companies like Seventh Generation, Ecover, Method, Nature’s Gate and Aura Cacia – to name just a few – would do the right thing and list it on their products that contain it? And how can they get away with NOT listing it if it’s in their products?

Well, there’s a little loophole in the labeling laws – one that I wouldn’t expect ethical companies to take advantage of – but they do. 1,4-dioxane is considered a “contaminant”, not an ingredient. So, it doesn’t have to be listed as an ingredient. It’s produced as a by-product when a process called “ethoxylation” is used to cheaply make products milder when they contain harsh ingredients.

So, it’s in the product, but they don’t tell you it’s in the product, so you don’t KNOW that it’s in the product and that makes everything all right. Right? After all, consumers won’t mind when they find out that they’ve been putting this carcinogen in their dishpan, in their washer, on their kids, on their pets and on themselves.  And, so what if a little bit of it gets into the environment and filters through to the water table and into the soil. It’s not on the label, therefore, it’s not really there and it can’t hurt anyone, right?

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty burned up about this. If you can’t trust supposedly ethical, Greener than thou companies like Seventh Generation and Ecover, who can you trust? I’ve been paying more for their products over Clorox and other mega-companies who’ve just jumped on the Green bandwagon, because I wanted to support the companies who were Green before it was popular. Now, I’m rethinking that whole idea.

Do they really deserve my loyalty if they’re willing to lie by omission about a known carcinogen? I expect this kind of thing from mainstream manufacturers who have been doing it for years and getting away with it. It’s not a shock when I find that Dial, Lever, Johnson and Johnson, Ajax, Palmolive and Olay, for instance, also sell products with 1,4-dioxane in them and don’t list it on the label.

I need to hear from these companies that they’re not going to do this kind of thing again. I want to be assured that they’ll tell me everything – and I do mean everything – that’s in their products, no matter if it’s an ingredient, a contaminant or something that leeches out of the container into the product.

In the meantime, if you’d like to make sure that your personal care and cleaning products don’t contain 1,4-dioxane, The Organic Consumers Association, where I got most of this information, has a really nice Pocket Safety Guide to Personal Care and Cleaning Products that you can print out and take with you when you shop.They also have a lot of information on this and other subjects of interest to Green consumers.

Or, if you’d like to read about alternatives to products with carcinogens and hidden ingredients, you can stop by “Best of Mother Earth” where my friend, Karen recommends and sells several. I’d like to thank her for her post which alerted me to the 1,4-dioxane scandal in products from “natural” companies and for all the posts she writes about something she’s passionate about – the earth and all who live on it.

This is a post from my other blog: News From Hawkhill Acres. I wrote it for Bloggers Unite For Refugees. It’s very much a “Green” post, because there’s no way the Earth can heal and recover with war raging and ravaging populations all over the planet.

Pumpkins are melting into sodden orange lumps on doorsteps. Womens’ magazines feature yet another recipe spread for a low-fat Thanksgiving dinner, which seems terribly surreal to me. No matter what anyone may say to the contrary, eating real food instead of the processed fast food we eat the rest of the year is the whole point of Thanksgiving for most of us. Well, that and waiting for Santa to arrive and open the official Christmas shopping season after we’re entertained by huge, inflated creatures bopping each other and threatening to injure spectators. (This could be a description of either the Macy’s Parade or a football game. Take your pick.)

Yes, once again, the season of goodwill and peace on earth is upon us, which means it’s time to get out our skinny little wallets and shop for America. Unfortunately for the retailers, this year things may be a tad less remunerative both online and off. I’m not buying the hype that online sales will be higher than last year, because people can’t afford mall prices. I think online and offline sales will both be smaller than last year.

I know my budget is having a hard time stretching to cover oil and gas and food and I assume I’m not alone. I know this because of the posts in parenting forums where mothers are trying to figure out how to have the Christmas they always have on a third of the money they usually spend. We don’t overdo on Christmas. As a matter of fact, we celebrate more of a Solstice-y, Winter Holiday as an excuse for celebrating sort of thing and presents aren’t a big part of it. But we’re still cutting back.

Perhaps as we all tighten our belts around our bulging American bellies, it might help us to feel a little less deprived if we consider the families around the world who aren’t having a problem figuring out how to fit toys into their December budget. I’ve been doing that a lot lately and it really gives me a different perspective on the holidays and our whole way of life.

Even if you don’t watch the news, it’s impossible to ignore what’s happening in Darfur, Rwanda, DR Congo, Iraq and so many other places. That the brunt of this falls onto the already overburdened shoulders of women and children is what bothers me. As Slaid Cleaves sings,

” Women cry as the men kill
Always have and always will
You know we’re never gonna run out of blood to spill”

But while the men fight the wars, women are left behind to try to feed and shelter their children. You see them digging up roots in Africa, even though the roots make their children sicken and die. There’s just flat out nothing else to put into their bellies, and the roots do keep them alive a little longer. I know without being told that I’d do the same thing, hoping that the war would end and food would come from relief organizations in time to save my child.

They’re starving to death in tiny rooms in Iraq, because if they go out without a male family member, they’ll be beaten and maybe raped. We’re texting in our cars and IM’ing our friends about the latest surprise on Survivor. Their orphan sons are foraging in gangs and getting kidnapped by rebel armies where they’re taught to kill by the people who killed their parents. We worry that our sons spend too much time online playing World Of Warcraft.

Their toddlers are watching their mothers starve while ours are watching their mothers try to stick with the latest diet. We obsess about picking the best pre-K for our daughters. Their mothers gave up on school for their girls when the teacher was gunned down by militant fundamentalists in front of the class for teaching their daughters how to read.

We have so much stuff that we need books to help us figure out where to put it all. They cling to a battered pan, scraps of cloth to cover their children at night, a cracked cup just in case they find something to put into it. Their husbands, sons and brothers are lost to them, whether or not they’re killed in the war or missing or prisoners, or just too tired and dispirited to come home. Ours are in the living room watching sports, stealing marshmallows off the sweet potatoes in the kitchen and cuddling with kids on the couch watching the parades.

But what can we do, eh? We didn’t start the wars. Well, maybe the one in Iraq, but really it was Saddam’s fault for saying he had weapons of mass destruction. Besides, the people are a lot better off now than they were then, just like we’re better off now than we were before the Iraq War. Or not.

Maybe, though, we’re a little less smug and a little more able to sympathize with what’s been happening in so much of the rest of the world all this time. As we slide back on the scale towards where so many women and children are trapped in poverty, war and disease, maybe we can understand a little better a tiny portion of what they feel when they can’t give their kids what they need.

In their case, of course, it’s food, shelter and health care. In our case – this year – for most of us – it’s toys and luxuries and the standard of living we and our kids are used to. Next year? Who knows. Maybe things will turn around and we’ll be back to “normal”, if normal means consuming over a quarter of the world’s oil and ruining the environment in the name of jobs.

But maybe, just maybe, things won’t turn around. Maybe things will get worse and next year we’ll be even closer to a Rwandan or Congolese mother, unable to afford medical care for a sick baby or heat for our house. Worse, maybe we won’t be able to afford a house at all. If we’re forced to go into an apartment or even a homeless shelter, where will we put our stuff?

Is that why we turn away from the despair and hopelessness on the faces of women who cradle babies who are so still that even their mothers can’t tell if they’re still alive? Is it because we know that it’s only a fluke of fate that keeps us from what they’re going through, and fate is very fickle?

They could be us. She could be me. I could wake up some morning and find that my world is gone, taken by war, taken by losing all my wealth, taken by disease. You could too. That’s why I’m doing what I can now to help the women who can’t help themselves. My first present this holiday season was to the Women’s Commission For Refugee Women and Children. Quick, affordable and I didn’t even have to wrap it.

I would be so chuffed if this post got one other person to donate or to write a post in aid of aid to women and children who are displaced by war, threatened with starvation, subjected to gender-based violence or forced to live without food, shelter and peace for any reason. I know how lucky I am no matter how bad things get for me financially. I hope that the small gifts I make will give another woman a little bit of what I’m so fortunate to have.

(Drum roll.) Bisphenol-A IS bad for kids and human beings in general.

Que sorpresa!

I’m shocked!

Who knew?

Well, actually, most of us in the Green blogosphere had a clue about this way before DHHS. Europeans and Canadians knew it and banned it months ago. Of course, in Europe, unlike in the US, substances are banned if there’s evidence that they MAY pose a threat to human health, not AFTER they’ve been shown to cause harm. What a concept, eh?

The reason we don’t adopt that process in the US is because we’d lose jobs if we did that. Jobs, jobs, jobs, the Republican mantra that we hear so much about is the reason we don’t do a lot of things in the US to protect human health. But, pardon me for asking a stupid question here, are jobs worth harming our health? Will we look back on our career at the chemical plant and say with pride, “Well, my kid may have birth defects, but at least I kept my job and it sure was worth it.”?

Do the countries that make up the European Union seem to be suffering the downturn that the US is right now? Is there any proof that the European Union’s policy of chemical regulation is hurting their economy? Is there any proof that the US policy of letting Big Business influence the FDA and other regulatory agencies is helping our economy and making it competitive with the rest of the world?

The US needs to stop protecting corporations and start protecting its citizens from harmful substances in our food supply and consumer goods. Until it does, calling itself a world leader is just hollow rhetoric.

I’ve just been looking at the second annual Climate Counts Report. You can get the short version here or the complete report here. It’s certainly an eye-opener. There’s also a pdf version that you can print out and take along with you when you shop, which I’ve done, because the older I get, the shorter my memory gets.

It’s encouraging to see that so many companies improved their scores, but why in the world are the food service industry big-names, like Darden (Olive Garden and Red Lobster) so far behind the green curve? They rake in billions and can’t clean up their act? Well, the local Red Lobster closed years ago, but there’s still a nearby Olive Garden where people stand in line every day to get a table.  They can count me out until they’re a lot greener.

Also on the Climate Count list in the Internet/Software category, I was happy to see that Google is more than halfway to a perfect score, but what’s up with e-bay and Amazon.com, both with scores of 5 out of 100? That’s just not acceptable for those two giants. Shame on them and they can show some eco-action before I’ll be using them again. Of course, seeing as how I’m one of billions who use them, they’re probably not going to lose any sleep over my defection, but it’s the principle of the thing.

In the Household Products category, Proctor and Gamble got a 69 for their efforts to clean up the planet with their cleaning products and L’Oreal managed to snag a 58 as did Kimberly-Clark. That’s good news. In the Media category, I was surprised to see that General Electric got a 71. I’ll have to look into that further and see why they got such a high rating.

It’s important that we keep up on reports like these that measure the progress – or lack of progress – that companies make toward a sustainable and socially responsible future. I urge you to read the report and check out the Climate Counts blog where the latest climate news is always arriving on the ticker. And don’t forget the Pocket Shopping Guide on the homepage. Don’t leave home without it.

Stevia has been around for a long time. So why is it that the FDA says it’s not a sweetener; it’s not been proven safe and it can’t be sold as anything but a food supplement? And if that’s all true, why are major soft drink manufacturers trying to get a patent on their version of it? After all, for years they’ve been telling us that aspartame and splenda are completely harmless, all the while using stevia in their products in Japan, Germany and many other countries. So why is (their version) of stevia okay for the US now?

Stevia was “discovered” in 1903 by an Italian botanist in the jungles of Paraguay where the native people had been using it for a sweetener. When it was grown commercially and introduced to the US a few years later, sugar producers were alarmed at the threat that stevia presented to their industry, but nothing came of it until researchers isolated stevioside from it, a pure, white powder with remarkable sweetening power.

Then, in the 1960′s, the Japanese, who had an aversion to artificial sweeteners, discovered stevia and started putting it into everything from drinks to gum. Their restaurants feature little green packets of stevia on the tables, the way ours have pink, blue and yellow artificial sweetener packets. Soon, other countries including China, Germany, Israel, Malaysia and others adopted stevia. Because it was used over several decades, stevia’s safety record was readily apparent. There were no side effects and it was not carcinogenic.

Stevia has a glycemic index of zero, so it doesn’t raise or lower blood sugar, which makes it ideal for diabetics or those on low-glycemic diets. (However, the American Diabetes Association won’t endorse it because they follow FDA guidelines and the FDA says it’s not safe.) It comes in both liquid and powder form – the powder has more sweetening power than the liquid – and a little goes a very long way. A mere quarter teaspoon is the equivalent of two tsps of sugar! Research supports the theory that stevia lowers blood pressure also when used on a regular basis.

I use liquid stevia in my tea and prefer Sweetleaf Stevia Products which doesn’t seem to have the licorice aftertaste which many stevia brands have. I buy it online at Drugstore.com. I buy a lot of things at Drugstore.com, because I like the 5% back I get in Drugstore dollars and I’ve always gotten excellent customer service and shipping from them. And, yes, I am an affiliate. For cooking, I use stevia in combination with other sweeteners such as honey and organic raw sugar and use the Sweetleaf Powder.

Whether or not stevia will catch on when the major soft drink manufacturers introduce it in their colas and other soft drinks, or whether it will be another “New Coke” debacle remains to be seen. I’m just hoping that the soft drink giants’ adoption of stevia will lead to its general use and acceptance in other foods and beverages. Now, that would be a sweet scenario.