Some new research shows that Mexican-American children living in California have higher levels of polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame retardants in their body than children who live in Mexico. The new research shows that California-based kids involved in the study have PBDE levels that are three times higher than their mothers’ levels during pregnancy and a whopping seven times higher than the levels found in the children living in Mexico. In one interview, study leader, Brenda Eskenazi, notes:

“Only Nicaraguan children who lived and worked on hazardous waste sites had higher reported levels of PBDEs in their bodies than the California children.“

Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) are a class of flame retardant chemicals that are seriously found just about everywhere. Persistent PBDEs are considered a pollutant and are found in many consumer products and household materials, including foam padding used to make furniture, carpets, baby products and cars. PBDEs are also found in plastics, textiles, including children’s clothing and electronics. There was even a PBDE butter contamination – yup butter, in which the culprit was thought to be food wrappers.

This isn’t the first time that PBDE levels in California have been called into question. In fact, studies have shown that PBDE levels in California homes are possibly four to 10 times higher than in other states. Still, these chemicals aren’t bound to California.

The United States has much higher reported levels of these chemicals found in blood, breast milk and house dust than Europe, which of course is consistent with the U.S. using more chemicals than other areas. In smaller amounts though PBDEs are found elsewhere. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), environmental watchdog programs in Europe, Asia, North America and the Arctic, have found traces of various types of PBDEs in human breast milk, fish, aquatic birds and elsewhere in the environment.

Why give a hoot about PBDEs? Well, for one thing, they’ve been linked to many health risks, such as…

• Altered thyroid hormone levels in pregnant women.
• Some researchers guess that PBDEs may be linked to cancer, skin conditions and adverse immune system functions in children.
• Mother’s Milk: Health risks of PBDEs, points out that health risks of PBDEs may include lower IQ, neurological deficits, delays in sensory-motor development, hearing deficits, plus changes in activity levels and fear responses and much more.
• Reduced fertility.

Additionally, PBDEs are persistent. Much like organochlorine pesticides, PBDEs have been known to not only hang around for God knows how long, but to multiple quickly in scope as well.

While levels of PBDE serum concentrations found in kids have long been assumed to be largely linked to exposure in the womb and breast milk, the new data blames the bulk of PBDE serum concentrations in children on postnatal exposure, suggesting that house dust was actually the major source of the California kid’s exposure to the flame retardants.

Soon, we’ll look at some ways to limit your family’s exposure to PBDEs.

+ A Comparison of PBDE Serum Concentrations in Mexican and Mexican-American Children Living in California

Hopefully, you’re already greening your hand washing routine with reusable soap dispensers and other tactics. However, another way to keep it green and clean is to reuse all those weird soap slivers you end up with.

Homemade hand soap made with left-over soap slivers:

Collect old soap slivers. You’ll need a bunch. If you just want to make some homemade hand soap, and you have zero leftover slivers, you can buy a natural, organic, detergent-free bar of soap, but really it kind of defeats the reuse purpose. This is more for folks who already use bar soap.

Make some distilled water. You can buy some, but it’s cheaper to make your own. Simply leave a gallon of water sitting out on your counter for a couple of days. This allows any odd stuff in your water to evaporate out.

1. Chop your soap slivers up into super tiny pieces or grate the slivers.
2. Boil 3-4 cups of your water. Once it’s nice and hot, add the soap pieces.
3. Mix then allow the mixture to sit on a low boil.
4. Watch the consistency and if needed, add more soap and or water.
5. Once it appears to be the right thickness, do a final really good mixing session. The mixture needs to be completely blended or little soap hardened pieces will show up, which of course will clog your pump.
6. After the final mix, run a test. Your test is to let it sit out overnight. If you come back and it’s too thick, heat and add more water. Getting the thickness right is the hard part. It depends on the soap. If you add 3 oz of soap or so, start with 3-4 cups H2o and go from there. It will turn out different depending your soap, so this is a project you need to watch, at least the first time you do it.

EXTRAS:

• Experiment with adding a few drops of organic essential oils.

• You can also make scrubby shower soap. Start with the liquid soap then add scrubby bits, such as ground almonds or oatmeal. DO NOT put this in a pump. It’ll clog. You need to put it in a bottle.

• To make a herbal hand soap, boil organic herbs in the distilled water BEFORE you add the soap silvers. Remove the herbs and strain before adding soap slivers.

• If you want to play and get fancy try adding a few tablespoons of Aloe Vera, honey, coconut or olive oil, vanilla or cinnamon (boil whole sticks), flower essences and more – really whatever you like. This is an almost 100% free project, so mess-ups won’t kill you.

You can also use this to clean your house, not just your body.

Think you don’t have the time to get green? You do! Here are 10 easy eco-friendly steps you can try that won’t take more than 30 seconds.

1. Recycle your old phone book: According to Waste-Free Mail There are enough phone books created each year to measure 106,700 miles when lined up end to end; enough to circle around the earth about 4.28 times! It takes just seconds to toss your old yellow pages in the recycling bin. The entire phone book is 100% recyclable and can be used to make new phone books.
2. Hang it up: After a shower, you’re clean (or so I presume), so hang your towel instead of tossing it in the laundry bin. Washing towels after one use is so overrated.
3. Wipe out your microwave: A dirty microwave has to work harder to heat food AND it’s totally gross! If it takes you longer than 30 seconds to do this, you’ve already waited too long.
4. Buy a recycled role: It takes less than 10 seconds to pick up a recycled package of toilet paper at the store vs. new toilet paper, yet this choice makes a big difference. Recycled toilet paper helps save water, trees, oil and landfill space. NRDC notes that if all households in the U.S. alone bought one 4 pack of recycled TP vs. new, it would save a million trees and eliminate 60,600 pounds of pollution.
5. Turn on the tap: It’ll take you about 30 seconds to fill up a reusable water bottle with good ol’ tap water vs. the 30 minutes it would take to drive to the store for a new case of bottled water.
6. Hit a button: Most computers uses 90% less energy while in sleep mode and it takes mere seconds to hit that button and save some energy.
7. Clean some rubber: When that long rubber seal on your fridge door gets all crusty and gross, the door doesn’t form a tight seal, won’t close properly and energy is wasted. It takes mere seconds to wipe this down with a cloth.
8. Cancel your catalogs: Amazingly, the average person in the U.S. use 700 pounds of paper products a year. Paper catalogs in the mail help contribute to this issue. Luckily, it’ll take you just 12 seconds per title to opt-out of mail order catalogs using Catalog Choice.
9. Pull the cord: During daylight hours pull up your blinds vs. flipping on the lights. I can’t tell you how many homes I’ve been in where the lights are on, the shades are down and it’s flipping daytime! Crazy? Yeah, I thought so too.
10. Turn off the shower: Not for good! Smelling nice is a good thing. However, if you turn the shower off just while you scrub the shampoo into your hair, you can save up to 50 gallons of water per year.

In the comments – add your idea – one easy green step for the rest of us.

A while back, Seventh Generation sent me some green-cleaning products to review. I’ve already reviewed their toilet bowl cleaner and I’ll be posting more reviews soon, but thought that it’d be easier to first take a look at the company as a whole; check out some of their eco-pros and cons.

BASICS: Seventh Generation has been around for about 20 years and is arguably one of the most well-known green companies on the consumer market. They were one of the first self-declared “socially responsible” companies and they manufacture many eco-friendly products. Some of their products are very green and some could be greener, but all in all, they offer a good variety of green product choices for eco-friendly households. Seventh Generation product categories include…

• Laundry Products
• Dishwashing Products
• Household Cleaners
• Household Paper & Supplies
• Products for Baby
• Feminine Care
• Free & Clear cleaning products
• Their newest products are a line of EPA registered disinfectants that kill germs naturally.

COMPANY PERKS:

• Seventh Generation notes that they’re committed to helping consumers make informed choices and I’d say that they’re doing a good job in this area. They fully disclose all ingredients at their website and on their packaging plus offer MSDS sheets. If you want to know what’s in your Seventh Generation cleaner, they make it ultra easy to find out, unlike some eco-companies.
• Some of their packaging is made with recycled content (2 bottles (18%) are 75% PCR; remainder are 25% PCR; 1/3 of our boxes are 100% PCR; remainder are 30–40% PCR). Almost all their packaging is easily recycled and they disclose
• They donate 10% of profits to non-profit community, environmental, health, and responsible business organizations working for positive change.
• They recently eliminated synthetics in all fragrances.
• They make non-toxic products with zero chlorine bleach, phosphates, dyes, NTA or EDTA.
• Because the company makes recycled paper products and less toxic goods they’re helping save trees, water, petroleum, and energy.
• Zero animal testing.
• They have green corporate office policies in place – for example using recycle paper and recycling.

One of the best perks about Seventh Generation is that this is actually a green company that works. By works I mean that there are plenty of green companies around that I personally like, however, a green company is only as good as their outreach to consumers. If your average consumer can’t locate products or can’t learn more about a company then they won’t buy those green products from said company. Consumers will buy what they know about and what’s available. Since many green companies lack marketing skills consumers may end up purchasing non-green, toxic products.

Seventh Generation has worked hard to build up their company. The average consumer can locate Seventh Generation products at many local stores and online. The company promotes their products and have actually built up a successful green brand, which is something I wish more green companies would work on. They’re also affordable and offer coupons often.

COMPANY CONS:

• They make disposable diapers that do not biodegrade. They also make diapers with SAP which is a questionable ingredient in green debates right now – it might be ok but maybe not. Their baby wipes also do not biodegrade.
• There’s non-biodegradable synthetic polymer in their auto dish powder and gel.
• While their cleaners are less toxic than many conventional cleaners out there, you’ve still got that new bottle to recycle. It’s still more eco-friendly to make your own cleaners, although, of course some people will always want to simply purchase cleaning supplies.
• They use plastic backing on their feminine care products; plastic, which yes, is made out of oil.
• Some cleaning products could be improved – for example, I’ve tried a few green liquid dishwasher detergents that clean better than Seventh Generation’s liquid brand.

OVERALL SCORE:

3.5 trees out of 5. Seventh Generation is a pretty good green company in my opinion with many products that work well. They also have some products that don’t work as well as homemade green cleaners and they could make some eco-improvements say, with their disposable diapers. However, I do love their disclosures and the fact that they’re continually setting and meeting new eco-goals. Stick around for some product specific reviews coming up.

LEARN MORE:

• Follow Seventh Generation on Twitter.
• Join them on Facebook.
• Read their blog.
• Read their latest corporate responsibility report online (flash) or get the report in pdf.

I’m what you might call fairly germ obsessive, but probably not in the way you think. My aunt probably is a little germ obsessive in the way you might think – she ALWAYS uses those paper toilet seat covers, never drinks off other people’s drinks, and loves her anti-bacterial hand wash and bleach cleaners. Actually this is likely not germ obsessive now that I think about it. I’d say it’s normal for Americans. Here in America we buy untold amounts of dangerious cleaners each year along with mountains of sanitizing products and paper towels all meant to do one thing – protect us from germs.

I’m germ obsessive in an opposite way from most people. Germs fascinate me because of how they’ve captured everyone’s attention. Germs astound me because people are so freaked out by such a little organism. Most of all though germs make me laugh because although people must know that germs are everywhere, that they touch us all, that we absolutely cannot win a war waged with germs, still many people try.

It’s not like I don’t take basic germ precautions. I wash my hands and make my son wash his. I wash food well (even organic) and use a tissue when I have a cold. That said I also don’t condone anti-bacterial products or bleach and other harsh cleaners. I use cloths not paper towels to clean with. I guess you might say I have a lackadaisical approach to germs – yeah I know they’re there. Yes I know some can be very dangerious. But overall, I ignore them because I know they outnumber me. Why bother fighting to the max?

My lack of issue with germs started when I took Microbiology for health sciences in college. We swabbed for germs and other icky stuff on ‘clean’ cafeteria trays, money, library books and a slew of other seemingly harmless everyday objects and guess what – everything, and I do mean everything had some sort of icky germ on it. After seeing that germs are always with us the two positions available were freak and become a total germ-a-phobe or take basic precautions and try not to worry. I choose the second stance obviously.

Why bring it up?

I recently got a new product to review – PeopleTowles. PeopleTowels are 100% organic cotton, reusable personal hand towels meant to be carried with you on-the-go which will eliminate the need for paper towels or electric hand air dryers when you’re out and about.

I asked my boyfriend to be part of said review and he said, “Why would I want to carry a personal hand towel around?” then went on to explain that paper towels serve more than one purpose – they dry your hands sure but they also protect you from germs. For example, he said he washes, then uses that same paper towel to open the bathroom door on the way out. It’s a perfectly valid concern and I’ll for sure be adding it to my review, but what I’m wondering is if that concern is valid enough to warrant the use of millions of paper towels each year.

For example. You use the paper towel like my boyfriend to dry your hands in a public restroom at a store. Assuming you did a good job washing your hands you should now be germ free. Then you take that paper towel and use it to open the bathroom door. Germ free check!

What about however, when you venture further into the store?

In the store you come into contact with carts, produce, boxes of cereal, money, the pen you use to write your check (or god forbid the ATM machine), plus a slew of other objects that thousands of folks before you have touched. Your point with using the paper towel to avoid germs has now been blown to heck and back because I assure you, all those other objects you’ve now touched are covered with germs of people who also came out of that bathroom but didn’t wash their hands and now sadly those germs are on you.

Is it worth it to have used the paper towel?

My take is no. No it wasn’t worth it. All that toxic bleach. All those anti-bacterial products that contain icky chemicals. ALL those paper towels… probably not worth it in the grand scheme of things. It just makes me wonder. My boyfriend is smart. He’s reasonable. He’s actually pretty green minded too. So are plenty of other people in America. However, we still buy the cleaners and paper towels which makes me think that maybe a lot of anti-green behavior is caused by germs; an issue we can’t easily (or maybe at all) control.

It’s something to think about. In fact, why not tell me what you think about it… Are germs a major issue behind why people are still using anti-green tactics like paper towels and bleach?

Washing your hands seems simple enough – rinse, lather, hum happy birthday as you scrub, then rinse. Easy! However, there’s a green way and the not so green way to wash your hands. Below are some common barriers to greener hand washing – this by the way is a perfect first green step for little kids because it’s easy, necessary, and a good way to open up a conversation about green living.

BARRIER one – you lather up with antibacterial soap: Antibacterial products are all the rage but many are not so green or even necessary. Many antibacterial products contain nastytriclosan. Triclosan (pdf) is a synthetic, broad-spectrum antimicrobial agent found in products such as deodorants, toothpastes, cosmetics, fabrics, plastics and of course antibacterial soaps. The downside; according to Beyond Pesticides is that, “Studies have increasingly linked triclosan to a range of health and environmental effects, from skin irritation, allergy susceptibility, bacterial and compounded antibiotic resistant, and dioxin contamination to destruction of fragile aquatic ecosystems.” There is zero current data that demonstrates any extra health benefits from having antibacterial-containing cleansers, over basic soap and water, for either hands or other items in a healthy household.

The World Health Organization (WHO) notes the same (pdf), stating that while children who wash their hands regularly with soap and water have 53% lower incidents of diarrhea, there’s no added benefits for kids in a home using antibacterial products. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also advocates simple hand washing with warm water and soap not antibacterial soap.

Furthermore, when you use antibacterial soaps you’re basically lathering with pesticides. Antimicrobials are considered pesticides by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (first used to to destroy or suppress the growth of harmful microorganisms on inanimate objects and surfaces). However these sameantimicrobials , when put into products used on the human body or in processed food or food wrappers, are regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) not the EPA, even though their toxicology is the same.

If you really want to get into the nitty gritty of why antibacterial soap is no good, take a look at why using it may cause bigger and badder super germs – which I’m guessing is just the opposite of what you’d like a good hand washing to accomplish.

Skip the antibacterial soap. It costs more, it’s a pesticide, and it’s not any more effective for home use. Get some non-toxic, natural hand soap and wash your hands properly with warm water.

BARRIER 2 – you waste water: We all know that leaving the water running while we brush our teeth or wash dishes wastes water. However since it’s recommended that you rinse your hands under running water AND wash for just 20 seconds (much less time than brushing teeth or washing dishes), you’re not going to save much by turning the water off while you scrub up. That said you can still conserve water while washing your hands by installing a simple aerator (check at a Home Depot type place) which screws directly onto your faucet. An aerator reduces the splash factor, slows down the flow and saves water.

A bigger issue I’ve seen is kids who unknowingly waste water when hand washing. At my house the kids tend to turn off water faucets but not quite all the way. Teach your kiddos to turn the faucet all the way off. Water drips don’t amount to much in a day, but over time can add up.

BARRIER 3 – you use paper towels: With all the worries about the flu, many people think that paper towels are the only way to keep hand washing germ free – and yeah that makes sense in public spaces. However, at home using paper towels is an unnecessary step. If your family washes their hands properly, you all can use the same cloth hand towel unless one or more of you is sick. In the case of illness, the Canadian Lung Association notes that you should give the sick individual their own hand towel and switch out hand towels frequently.

IF you strongly feel the need to use paper towels use only 100% recycled paper towels. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) notes that, “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.” That’s a shockingly large number.

BARRIER 4 – you use plastic soap dispensers: Reusing a refillable soap dispenser is a much greener choice than buying brand new plastic hand soap containers over and over again. In many cases not all components of hand soap containers can be recycled either. I buy natural soap in bulk (in a reusable container) from my local natural grocery store and simply refill my reusable containers. Another option is to buy natural bar soap in unpackaged blocks, which also are available at most natural grocers.

There, now don’t you feel like lathering up right now!