In the news again were some chilling findings that a slew of everyday bath products made for kids had dangerous levels of carcinogens. Like any Mother, my reaction is deep resentment and anger for these big companies that let things like this happen for years, and how lethal ingredients like formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane is found in every day items we put on our bodies. Both substances are known to cause cancer, so when you think about it, it somewhat explains why so many people in the world today have the terrible disease.

What I find especially disturbing is that in the list are brands that most families like mine have trusted for years, believing they were safe for our children. Products like Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, which my husband still loves! The group who uncovered the dirty facts were non-profit Campaign For Safe Cosmetics, and here’s some of what they said:

” Despite marketing claims like “gentle” and “pure,” dozens of top-selling children’s bath products are contaminated with the cancer-causing chemicals formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane, according to the March 2009 Campaign for Safe Cosmetics report, “No More Toxic Tub.”

This study is the first to document the widespread presence of both formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane in bath products for children, including baby shampoos, bubble baths and baby lotions. Many products tested contained both chemicals.
The chemicals were not disclosed on product labels because they’re contaminants, not ingredients, and therefore are exempt from labeling laws.

Formaldehyde contaminates personal care products when common preservatives release formaldehyde over time in the container. Common ingredients likely to contaminate products with formaldehyde include quaternium-15, DMDM hydantoin, imidazolidinyl urea and diazolidinyl urea.

1,4-dioxane is a byproduct of a chemical processing technique called ethoxylation, in which cosmetic ingredients are processed with ethylene oxide. Manufacturers can easily remove the toxic byproduct, but are not required by law to do so. Common ingredients likely to be contaminated with 1,4-dioxane include PEG-100 stearate, sodium laureth sulfate, polyethylene and ceteareth-20.

The key bit there I think is: “Manufacturers can easily remove the toxic byproduct, but are not required by law to do so.” So when the group conducted the study, they found that there were still large amounts of the toxins which meant that the companies didn’t bother to remove the poisonous byproducts. WHY?

Around the world, several countries have already taken measures to ensure that their baby products are safe, like in China, where they are being removed from supermarket shelves and undergoing more testing. Japan and Sweden have already banned formaldehyde from personal care products.

Aside from 1,4-dioxane and formaldehyde, watch out for these baddies too:

peg-100 stearate, sodium laureth sulfate, polyethylene and ceteareth-20, quaternium-15, DMDM hydantoin, imidazolidinyl urea, diazolidinyl urea and sodium hydroxymethoylglycinate.

For the full list of tested products as well as more information, check out the article here.

Effects Of Cell Phone Radiation With Green Planet Armour

For years, my spouse, an anti-technology dinosaur, has been preaching the danger of cellphones. He’s always owned one though (pre-paid), rather begrudgingly, never turning it on unless absolutely necessary, much to my annoyance. Well, the other day he told me it was time I did some research on the dangers of cellphones and do a post on it on YURTO as he reckoned most people use their cellphones at home even if it was invented for use outside of the home.

What I found was basically that cellphones emitted radiation, which when given in large doses, is indeed dangerous. In fact, I read this very disturbing article in the UK Telegraph, wherein a noted brain specialist says that “mobile phones are more dangerous than smoking” and was the reason for the rise in brain tumors.

Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take “immediate steps” to reduce exposure to their radiation.

The study, by Dr Vini Khurana, is the most devastating indictment yet published of the health risks.

It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long.

Obviously, the mobile phone people has dismissed the professor’s claims as baloney, and a large study in the UK has shown little evidence, BUT it also said:

Professor Challis, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Nottingham, said: “It all sounds pretty reassuring and that is good. But we cannot rule out the possibility that cancer could appear in a few years. The epidemiological evidence is not good enough and most cancers take longer than 10 years to develop.

So I am inclined to agree with hubby, but am not quite prepared to give up my phone (what if there was an emergency with the kids while I was out?). Luckily, there is a company addressing this, and their product is something we should all get, short of giving up your portable.

Green Planet Armour is a nifty little product you can easily connect to your electronic device which uses nano technology to combat the ill effects of radiation. Check out their website today.

Global warming or climate change means that the Earth is being affected by the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere largely because of man, industry and globalization. Think of the carbon like a thick wooly blanket that keeps the hot air in, making the Earth hotter than it has been in 650,000 years, resulting in shocking images we’ve all been suddenly exposed to – like polar bears clinging onto tiny patches of ice because so much has melted. And have you noticed that there seem to be an awful lot of tropical storms around the world, more violent and more widespread than you remember growing up?

Do you find the picture above as disturbing as I do?

Here are some of the shocking facts, according to the National Geographic:

• Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

• The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century’s last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia, according to a number of climate studies. And the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that 11 of the past 12 years are among the dozen warmest since 1850.

• The Arctic is feeling the effects the most. Average temperatures in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia have risen at twice the global average, according to the multinational Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report compiled between 2000 and 2004.

• Arctic ice is rapidly disappearing, and the region may have its first completely ice-free summer by 2040 or earlier. Polar bears and indigenous cultures are already suffering from the sea-ice loss.

• Glaciers and mountain snows are rapidly melting—for example, Montana’s Glacier National Park now has only 27 glaciers, versus 150 in 1910. In the Northern Hemisphere, thaws also come a week earlier in spring and freezes begin a week later.

• Coral reefs, which are highly sensitive to small changes in water temperature, suffered the worst bleaching—or die-off in response to stress—ever recorded in 1998, with some areas seeing bleach rates of 70 percent. Experts expect these sorts of events to increase in frequency and intensity in the next 50 years as sea temperatures rise.

• An upsurge in the amount of extreme weather events, such as wildfires and strong tropical storms, is also attributed in part to climate change by some experts.

To become more active and do your bit to stop this, visit Stop Global Warming.

Enter “Eco Balls”, amazing little balls which, when thrown into your wash, do all the work your regular soap does (and claim to kill bacteria too) without any chemicals, detergents and the like. When you work out what you save on soap, the savings are enormous, with something like 6 cents a load with the balls, to approx. 80 cents with detergent, more depending on what brand you buy. You can buy kits which come with refills, stain remover (it doesn’t do that great with heavy stains) as well as dryer balls for “fabric softer” role.

So does it really work? While I wait for my order to arrive, I found a good review worth checking out. The verdict? Some liked it, others were disappointed with its cleaning power. There was also one complaint about how the ball came apart and broke her washing machine. Either way, its a product I think worth trying out for yourself -because I think eliminating detergents would be a great thing.

So which schools are the coolest? (Drum roll, please!)

1. University of Colorado at Boulder (Boulder, Colorado)
2. University of Washington at Seattle (Seattle, Washington)
3. Middlebury College (Middlebury, Vermont)
4. University of Vermont (Burlington, Vermont)
5. College of the Atlantic (Bal Harbor, Maine)
6. Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington)
7. University of California at Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, California)
8. University of California at Berkeley (Berkeley, California)
9. University of California at Los Angeles (Los Angeles, California)
10. Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio)
11. Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
12. University of New Hampshire (Durham, New Hampshire)
13. Arizona State University at Tempe (Tempe, Arizona)
14. Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut)
15. University of Florida at Gainesville (Gainesville, Florida)
16. Bates College (Lewiston, Maine)
17. Willamette University (Salem, Oregon)
18. Warren Wilson College (Asheville, North Carolina)
19. Dickinson College (Carlisle, Pennsylvania)
20. New York University (New York, New York)

If your school is in that list, good for you! If not, you may want to start an initiative that will get your school to do its part in the fight for conserving and preserving the only home that we all have.

But did you know that forests are being affected negatively because of the tissue paper industry? (Of course you cannot discount other paper products.) I just read a report by the National Resources Defense Council and this is what it contained.

If every household in the United States replaced just one box of virgin fiber facial tissues (175 sheets) with 100% recycled ones, we could save 163,000 trees.

That’s a LOT of trees. It’s hard to imagine using “bad” facial tissues not made of virgin fiber, though. How about toilet paper?

If every household in the United States replaced just one roll of virgin fiber toilet paper (500 sheets) with 100% recycled ones, we could save 423,900 trees.

Okay, that’s a much higher figure! I guess I can deal with non-virgin fiber toilet paper much easier. And how about kitchen paper towels?

If every household in the United States replaced just one roll of virgin fiber paper towels (70 sheets) with 100% recycled ones, we could save 544,000 trees.

Here is my suggestion: more than using kitchen towels made of recycled paper, maybe we can start using cloth rags every now and then?

One of the mantras in my household is “Wash your hands please”. When the kids get home from school, before mealtimes, before cooking, after playing, after touching the pets and so on. But when you’re out of the house, using water and soap obviously isn’t the most convenient thing. And the solution a lot of people have been using come in the form of antibacterial gels, which are cheap, plentiful and found just about anywhere. The problem with it though, is that terrible ingredient, triclosan, an antibacterial agent found in a lot of products nowadays, from soap to socks! But the fact remains: Triclosan is no better than plain soap.

Several months ago, I read a very disturbing article by a Mom, aptly called: “Cancer or Germs? I’ll Take the Germs!”. She took the time out to do research on the stuff (the things a Mom will do!- bravo) and it made me ban triclosan from my household forever – why? because among other nasties, it causes cancer and is bad for the environment. Enough said. If you want to know more about it, or what products contain it, please go here.

Okay. So we know antibacterial gels with triclosan are bad, but that doesn’t really solve our problem about killing germs while we are on the go. Mind you, soaps have it too, so be wary and always read labels. Well, the best solution is to buy the natural stuff (like Clean Well), or better yet, make it yourself.

Here are some ideas:

Grapefruit seed extract: diluted with distilled water, makes a great all-around germ-killing spray for hands, air, surfaces and even wounds!

Vodka and essential oil: Mixing vodka, essential oil (like lavender) and distilled water, is another easy and cheap alternative. Put it in a spray bottle and keep it handy.

Essential oils and water: Simple yet effective, take your favourite essential oil and mix it with water to create a very natural antibacterial. The most potent are: cinnamon, cloves, verbena, lavender, angelice, juniper, sandal, cedar, thyme and lemon.

Earth Day 1970

Not many of us know that Earth Day has been around for a while. Nearly 39 years, to be precise. The first Earth Day took place on April 22nd 1970, marking the day when the movement for modern environmentalism was born.

The beginnings though, can be traced back as far as 1963, when Senator Gaylord Nelson, a democrat from Wisconsin, first voiced his concerns about the state of the planet. In 1969 he proposed Earth Day “to shake up the political establishment and force this issue onto the national agenda. It was a gamble… but it worked.” Nelson said.

And on April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans rallied with Nelson – in parks, auditoriums, schools and streets – for a healthier Earth. Millions protested the industrial destruction of the environment and the results were tremendous:

” Earth Day 1970 achieved a rare political alignment, enlisting support from Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, city slickers and farmers, tycoons and labor leaders. The first Earth Day led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species acts”

Do you have living plants inside your home? Just the other day I realized that while I made sure my garden was in good condition, I hardly had any living plants inside. When we first moved into this house a year and a half ago, I had two large houseplants inside, one very tall, reaching my double height living room ceiling, and the other one of those spider plants, like the one above. I’m not sure why, but both languished for the next few months, and when I found a nasty termite hole under the pot of the large one, I moved both plants outside.

This I now regret, because I have since learned that the amounts of chemicals inside our homes were huge – and this is just from ordinary, everyday living. And one way to combat its ill effects (like cancer) are non-other than the humble houseplant. Here are some examples of the big baddies which are most probably in your home as we speak.

Formaldehyde
This nasty one causes cancer and is shockingly found in pretty much everything (if you bought your furniture/clothes etc. etc. at regular stores) – your dining table, your carpet, your pad of paper – even the gas for your stove! In the past I always associated it with preserving the dead, so it’s an even scarier idea, for me especially, that this stuff is actually on the tabletop my family eat off on, and maybe even my makeup.

Benzene
This is another bad one, and a known carcinogen found in a huge assortment of everyday stuff like ink, plastic, glue, solvents, rubber, oils, paints, detergents, and even some meds. It can affect you even with low levels, from milder maladies like headaches to anemia and blood diseases like Leukemia. There are actually lawyers who are dedicated in litigating against the environmental effects of Benzine, and their website has a concise list on what products have Benzine in it.

Trichloroethylene
Exposure to this (in high doses) affects your nervous system, heart, lung and can seriously cause severe damage to your liver. It is found in dry cleaning materials, paint and adhesives.

Carbon Monoxide
We all know this one, which is found cigarette smoke, gas ranges, fire places, car exhausts, wood stoves and other gasoline-powered equipment. You cant see or smell it, but high levels can kill you FAST.

So aside from being more careful the next time you purchase a piece of furniture, decide to do some dry cleaning, or have the house painted, you can also protect yourself and your family by surrounding your home with chemical-fighting houseplants – more on that in my next post!

Yes, that romantic and (sometimes dreaded) holiday is upon us again, when restaurants, candy and flower shops get ready for a very profitable day! Not that there’s anything wrong with that, who wouldn’t want to dress up and go to a fancy restaurant for dinner rather than slave away at home? Who wouldn’t like to receive a big bouquet of fresh flowers or a box of sweets? Well, for the romantic-at-heart, you don’t have to give up your traditional Valentines treats to keep green.

Simply follow some of these tips below:

The Card
Instead of buying a store-bought Valentines card, the most obvious choice is an E-card, which is free (or very cheap), immediate and doesn’t use any paper or delivery energy. If you must go for the paper variety, opt for one that uses recycled paper. Tiny Prints has some adorable ones, which are easily ordered online. So while I’m sending my husband an e-card this year, I’ll get the kids to use some of our leftover computer paper, draw, paint and embellish, and voila!, Dad and Grandma have lovely keepsake cards.

The Flowers
Not that I’ll be sending flowers to anyone (this is actually a hint to my husband), but nowadays one can get green flowers. Florists who specialize in this will have their products come with special certified stamps, like Sierra Eco, which lets you give twice through fair trade or Veriflora. If you don’t have a green florist in your area, here are some key questions to ask your florist or vendor:

Where do these flowers come from?
Were pesticides used?
Do you know who were the workers involved? Were there child labourers involved?

Next: The Romantic Dinner and Sweets for your Sweet