The Seventh Generation Guide to a Toxin-Free Home
Part 1: Understanding what’s toxic
Introduction
Few products typify American consumerism as well as household cleaners. Capitalizing onour insecurities, manufacturers and marketers have transformed a mundane collection ofproducts into over an $18 billion market of household helpers. We’re constantly told we’llhumiliate ourselves if our toilet bowls and counter tops don’t sparkle as well as ourneighbors’ do.Marketing hyperbole aside, modern cleaners are significantly more effective than theirpredecessors. Synthetic cleaning agents, anti-redeposition agents, bleaches, builders,
enzymes and optical brighteners have produced a generation of products that work under
more varied conditions, against more forms of dirt, in colder water, and with less time and
effort than ever before. But in our attempts to get our clothes whiter than white and homes
cleaner than clean, we’ve accepted a plethora of chemicals whose presence in our homes
raises very serious health and environmental concerns.
What happens when I use traditional cleaning products?
More than you might realize! Today’s cleaning products are
made from an eye-opening number of surprisingly toxic
chemicals. When we use these products in our homes, the
chemicals they contain can stay suspended in the air for hours
or even days after the product has been used and can easily be
inhaled. These chemicals also remain behind as residues on
surfaces to which the cleaners have been applied. In this way,
they can be easily absorbed through any skin that comes into
contact with those surfaces. In addition, when chemicals from
different cleaners accidentally come into contact with each
other, they sometimes react to form new toxic substances.
Or this mixing can magnify the potential health effects that
are caused by either or both of the chemicals alone. The
results of all this chemical chaos can be deadly.
A 15 year study in Oregon, comparing women who didn’t
work outside the home with women who did, found a 54%
higher death rate from cancer in the women who stayed at
home. The study suggested that chronic exposure to cleaning
products played a role.Each year there are 5 to 10 million household product
poisonings reported—mostly of children.
With all these chemicals in our homes, it’s no wonder that the
EPA found the air quality in our homes to be 5 to 10 times
more toxic than the air outside and typically contaminated by
anywhere between 20 to 150 different pollutants in
concentrations 10 to 40 times those outdoors. Much of this
pollution comes from petrochemical cleaners.
Don’t product labels warn meabout hazardous ingredients?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. Though cleaners are the
only household products regulated by the Consumer Product
Safety Commission under the Federal Hazardous Substances
Labeling Act, they’re not required to reveal their ingredients.
These ingredients are considered “trade secrets” and
government regulations are designed to protect this
proprietary information rather than human health or the
environment. In short, no one but cleaner manufacturers
really know exactly what is in these products. The consumer
has little to go on beyond the warning labels manufacturers
are required to put on their products. Though mandated
signal words like DANGER, WARNING and CAUTION
give us a very general idea about the overall seriousness of the
unknown substances the products contain, they do little more
than that. In fact, a New York Poison Control Center study
found 85% of product warning labels to be inadequate.
Furthermore, these warnings only apply to the immediate
health effects a product causes and don’t address what really
happens when we use these cleaners regularly in our homes.
When is something toxicand when is it not?
An examination of the issue of hazardous chemicals hiding in
common household products starts with this simple question.
And the answer may surprise you because the toxic potential
of any given material is not so much a matter of what it’s
made from but rather how much of it to which you areexposed.
For example, during the 18th century, a pale
complexion was considered attractive and a sign of
good breeding. Tanning salons were definitely “out.”
To achieve their pallor, the members of King Louis
XVI’s court took arsenic, perhaps weekly. Although we
consider arsenic to be highly toxic, neither King Louis nor
his wife, Marie Antoinette, died of arsenic poisoning.
In fact, some level of arsenic in the diet is still
considered necessary for good health!
In contrast, many beneficial chemicals have caused
death. Aspirin, one of the safest and most versatile
medicines known, poisoned countless children before
packaging laws were enacted. Table salt is a common part
of our daily diet, and an adult would have to ingest close to a
half cup (400 grams) to receive a fatal dose. Yet, an accidental
substitution of salt for lactose in baby formulas has caused
fatal poisoning.What, then, makes a chemical a poison? One answer is
quantity (acute toxicity). Another is time (chronic toxicity).
When it comes to acute toxicity (or sudden death from
exposure to a chemical), it is the amount needed to induce
sudden death that determines whether a chemical is
considered poisonous or not.Safe doses are measured by a statistical standard known
as Lethal Dose (LD). The LD standard is a useful tool in
determining the toxicity of a particular chemical, but isunfortunately largely derived from tests conducted
on animals.(Because this issue is important to us, we’d like to pause
here to note that Seventh Generation neither conducts nor
approves of animal testing under any circumstances. We
believe there are better and far more humane ways to measure
toxicity, and we employ these alternative methods when
testing our own products. However, both the scientific
community and the cleaning products industry as a whole rely
on the LD standard almost exclusively, a fact which means
that no one has ever created an alternative set of similarly
comprehensive, animal testing-free data. Because the LD
standard is the only way to illustrate several crucial points,
we’re forced to use it here in spite of our reservations. The
good news is that this will only take a moment or two.)
The LD standard is based on a benchmark called the LD50.
The LD50 is the quantity of a chemical needed to kill 50%
of the animals in a test group (usually mice or rats). Because
larger animals require larger doses of a chemical to exhibit
toxic effects (i.e., it takes more arsenic to kill an elephant
than a mouse), the LD50 is measured as the weight of
chemical in milligrams (or mg) per kilogram (or kg) of animalweight needed to cause death.
For example, the LD50 of arsenic trioxide (a common form
of arsenic), when measured in rats, is 15 mg/kg. This means
about 15 mg (approximately one-half of one-thousandth
of an ounce, or 0.0005 ounces) would be needed to kill a
1 kilogram (2.2 pound) rat. By comparison, 3,000 mg
(approximately a tenth of an ounce, or 0.1 ounce) wouldbe needed to kill a 200 kg (440 pound) gorilla.
The LD50 of aspirin, measured in rats, is 1,500 mg/kg. This
means 1,500 mg (0.05 ounce) would be needed to kill a 1 kg
rat, and 300,000 mg (10 ounces, over half a pound) would be
needed to kill the 200 kg gorilla. The LD50 of table salt (also
measured in rats) is 3,750 mg/kg. At this rate, it would take
750,000 mg (nearly a pound and a half!) of salt to kill the
same gorilla.What’s important to note is that it takes 100 times more
aspirin to show acutely toxic effects in a given animal than
arsenic trioxide. In other words, arsenic trioxide is 100 times
more toxic than aspirin. It takes more than twice as much salt
to kill an animal as aspirin. Thus, salt is less than half as toxic
as aspirin. Confused? Don’t be. Just remember that almost
everything is poisonous in some amount. The less of a
chemical that’s needed to show acutely toxic effects, the
more poisonous it is.Aside from ingestion, other forms of acute toxicity that must be
considered for consumer products include inhalation toxicity
(especially for volatile, gaseous, and “dusty” substances) and
dermal toxicity (for substances that contact our skin).
The cancer/chemical connection: How little is little enough?
Fortunately, we are seldom exposed to sufficiently large
doses of chemicals to suffer acutely toxic effects. In most
circumstances, a person is regularly exposed to a substance at
levels significantly below the acutely toxic level. This is called
chronic exposure. Tobacco smoke, present in many homes,
contains many toxic chemicals. Most exposure to tobacco
smoke does not result in instant mortality because the levels
of exposure are below the acutely toxic level. Over time,
though, toxic effects are experienced from tobacco smoke.
The effects are most visible in smokers suffering emphysema;
lung, nose and throat cancer; and other chronic ailments.
Nonsmokers who live or work in smoke-filled environmentsalso suffer chronic effects.
Most people who come into contact with the chemicals in
our homes and environment do not experience acutely toxic
exposure leading to sudden death. They are more likely to
experience an array of far subtler symptoms, including
headaches, rashes, nausea, and others, which, while less
dramatic, can still be debilitating. Compounding this problem
is the difficulty of isolating which chemical present in your
home, office, or even car is causing the problem.
Measuring cancer risk from chronic exposure to chemicals
is no less difficult. The best data comes from occupational
If the LD50 is: The CPSC Defines the Hazard as(product would also carry the notice):
5,000 mg/kg or higher UndefinedBetween 50 and 5,000 mg/kg Toxic (“Warning, Keep out of Reach of Children”)
Less than 50 mg/kg Highly toxic (“Danger” “Poison”)
(Note that by this definition both table salt and aspirin are considered toxic materials. Arsenic trioxide is highly toxic.)The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) defines acute oral toxicity as follows:
chemical exposures that result in unique malignancies. For
example, chimney sweeps in 19th Century England developed
cancer of the scrotum much more frequently than the general
population. We now know this was due to exposure topolynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons in the soot with which
they had daily contact. Similarly, lung cancers in shipyardworkers implicated asbestos as a carcinogen, as did livercancers in workers manufacturing polyvinyl chloride (PVC).
Incidence among polyvinyl chloride workers of this form of
cancer is 3,000 times higher than among the generalpopulation.
There are strong links between increased cancer rates and
life in the industrialized world, where we are exposed to high
levels of suspected cancer-causing chemicals. In Sandra
Steingraber’s outstanding book Living Downstream
(see Further Suggested Reading), she documents somepowerful information:
• One-half of the world’s cancers occur among people
in industrialized countries, even though we are only
one-fifth of the population.
• Breast cancer rates are 30 times higher in the
United States than in parts of Africa.
• The International Agency for Research on Cancer
has concluded that 80% of all cancer is attributable to
environmental influences (these include lifestyle
influences such as smoking, as well as exposure to
carcinogenic chemicals).
• During our lifetime, 40% of all Americans will get
some form of cancer—50% of men and 30% of women.
Amazingly, only a dozen or so chemicals have been directly
implicated in human cancers (for more information on why
this is so, read Toxic Deception, listed in Further Suggested
Reading). Most of the other “suspected” carcinogens have
been identified by feeding large doses of these chemicals to
specially bred mice and rats. If a chemical produces tumors in
one or more feeding studies, it is only considered a suspectedcarcinogen.
While many, many household chemicals fall into the category
of “suspected carcinogen,” regulations that might protect us
from them remain relatively few and far between. This is so
for two reasons:First, it is difficult to apply the results of animal studies
(which measure high levels of exposure for short periods
of time) to real-world human exposures (which typically
involve low levels of exposure for long periods of time).
Because chemicals can cause different effects in the body
depending on the dose and length of exposure, using short
term animal studies to predict long term human outcomes is
often an exercise in futility. Such studies simply don’t
accurately reflect the way ordinary people actually use and are
exposed to most chemicals. They do a good job of telling us
what will happen when we experience a lot of exposure over a
little time but not a little exposure over a lot of time. We may,
for example, know if you ingest a pound of chemical X in a
single sitting, you will sicken and die. But what happens when
you’re exposed to just a few thousandths of a gram of
chemical X every day for many, many years? The study that
told us what will happen in the first case simply cannot
predict what will happen in the second.Developing research methods that can accurately predict
real-world human consequences of long term, low-level
exposures to particular chemicals is an inherently daunting
task for a simple reason: the longer the study period, the
more potential risk factors are introduced. As time passes, it
becomes harder and harder to say with certainty that chemical
X is responsible for condition Y because so many other
variables, identified and unidentified, have likely entered the
picture and created health effects of their own that interfere
with the study’s results. At a certain point, separating these
unwanted factors and their effects from effects of the chemical
one actually wanted to study in the first place becomes
virtually impossible.There is also the very serious issue of research ethics.
Irrefutable evidence of human health effects from exposure to
specific chemicals can only truly come from one source: tests
on human beings over long periods of time, and clearly such
tests are out of the question.Because they cannot be conducted on humans and because
they suffer from built-in imperfections, those studies that do
attempt to gauge long term, real-world health effects are often
easy to dispute, and this brings us to the second reason for the
relative absence of strong consumer protections and other
chemical regulations: the power of the chemical industry itself.
Whenever the test results do manage to come close to
suggesting a certain chemical is dangerous enough to be
removed from the market, the chemical’s manufacturer is
likely to spend millions of dollars challenging the research
and any potential regulations based upon it. Take, for example,
the case of dioxin. Industry lawyers and lobbyists have claimed
that even though hundreds of tests and studies indicate that
dioxin is a very probable cause of cancer, we still don’t know
for sure because no actual tests were done on humans! The
result is that while most of Europe is satisfied with this 99%
level of certainty and has stopped bleaching paper with
chlorine because of the dioxin the process creates, we
continue to use chlorine here in the U.S. The 1% of
uncertainty that remains has been enough to quell
regulations here. In fact, the Chlorine Institute, an industry
lobbying group, admits that it spends approximately $150
million a year fighting anyone and everyone who challenges
the safety of this chemical!
Natural, organic and synthetic:
What’s the difference?
When it comes to understanding household chemicals, this is
a crucial question, and a point about which people are often
understandably confused.
All matter in our universe is composed of atoms. There are
approximately 110 types of atoms, or elements. Ninety-two
elements occur naturally, and just 10 elements account for
over 99% of the things we enjoy on Earth. One of those
elements, carbon, is uniquely associated with life. Hence,
chemical compounds containing carbon are called
organic chemicals.In the 19th century, humankind began to make its own
chemicals using carbon. Although they did not occur in
nature, these human-made compounds of carbon were
still called organic chemicals. They are “synthetic organic
chemicals,” rather than “natural organic chemicals,” which
is an important distinction.Synthetic organic chemicals:
A short history, Part 1
Hundreds of millions of years ago, Earth was covered by
oceans filled with millions of tons of tiny plants and animals.
As these plants and animals died, they settled to the bottom
of the oceans and were covered by thousands of feet of
sediment and rock. Over millions of years, heat and pressure
turned the layers of dead plants and animals into a viscous,
black material we call petroleum or crude oil. Petroleum
consists of many long chains of carbon atoms with hydrogen
atoms attached. These long chains, called hydrocarbons, do
not have much use. But when they are broken into shorter
chains, we get materials like ethylene (a building block for
synthetic detergents and plastics), propane and butane
(petroleum gases used as fuel), gasoline, diesel fuel, heating
oil, and lubricants. This process of breaking the long chains
of petroleum into shorter chains is called cracking.
Once petroleum has been cracked, all the products are
jumbled together. They have to be separated, and this is done
by boiling the mixture of chains. Because each product boils
at a different temperature, it separates from the mixture at
different times as the temperature of the boil gradually
increases. Once released, the product, whether gasoline or
ethylene, is captured and condensed back to a liquid state.
This process is called distillation, and it produces surprisingly
pure products called, cleverly, “petroleum distillates.”
Petroleum distillates can be used without further processing.
Liquid petroleum gas (LPG), gasoline, diesel fuel, and heating
oil are petroleum distillates used to produce energy. Similar
products, called naphthas, Stoddard solvents, or just plain old
petroleum distillates, are used as solvents on greases and tars
that will not dissolve in water.In addition to the toxic nature of the products petroleum
produces, our reliance on this material causes a host of
environmental problems in and of itself. Petroleum pollutes
the environment when we drill for it, when we transport it
(oil spills average 2.6 million gallons a month), and when we
refine it (refineries release 492 million pounds of hazardous
volatile organic compounds and over 71 million pounds of
toxic air pollutants into our air and water each year). Every
time we use a petrochemical cleaning product, we contribute
to this pollution. And, we further deplete an important global
resource whose supplies are expected to become scarce
around the year 2050.
  Infinite Health Resources does not at any point, for any circumstances suggest that you do not follow or stop medical advice of your physician. We do not advocate any drugs that has not been prescribed by your physician, nor suggest that we are medical doctors nor are we giving medical advice. Infinite Health Resources is here purely as a resource. |
