Get it Together!

My inspiration has been pretty short-lived lately. Flaky. Like my dry little elbows.

Remember how I read "Urban Homesteading" and got all psyched up to transform the barren glass-strewn dirt patches of the neighborhood into verdant guerrilla gardened oases? Or when I made elaborate blog schedules and even mentally blocked off writing dates in my calendar? (Do you see what I did there? I only blocked off the dates in my head rather than committing to them on the binding agreement pages of my planner). I started researching definitions for my Word Nerd posts, but trailed off somewhere; assuming that if my attention was not being held by the subtle joys of household vermiculture, yours probably wouldn't be either. And trying to "cook from scratch" for the month of June was a complete flop.

I think I was so enamoured of this Chihuly sculpture because it reminds me of the chaos of my brain:

 
Reflecting on this scatter-brained refrain of "too many ideas and not enough steam" has given me some helpful insight into restructuring the G3 blog's future. The experiment is already 1/4 over, and so far the only "results" I can show you would be 5 inches of gray roots, some "Everything I touch/eat/smell is going to give me cancer" paranoia and my sock bottle.

But here's the good news: Just like I rarely hit my groove at work before lunch, I think the best stuff is yet to come. I've had a few months to try out the "Throw All Your Random Ideas at the Blog Whenever You Have a Spare Minute" approach, and now I'm ready for a new approach. Focused, calmer.

Less like yellow hot mess of Chihuly and more like lovely daffodils.

Word Nerd: Greenwashing

Since Earth Day is right around the corner, I thought it may be a good time to cover one of the most annoying "green" trends running rampant out there: Greenwashing.

Greenwashing comes from the more familiar term "whitewashing", which is defined in Merriam-Webster's dictionary as:
a. to gloss over or cover up
b. to exonerate by means of a perfunctory investigation or through bias presentation of data

In Greenwashing, companies try to make their products look eco-friendly when they are really not, or play up one way in which they ARE eco-friendlier to get you to buy it, while skillfully hiding all the ways in which they actually muck up the earth and kick Mother Nature in the teeth.

An example of this may be when a household cleaner touts that their new packaging now uses 33% less plastic! Whoo-hoo! While casually omitting any nods to the fact that the chemicals IN their product are toxic, carcinogenic, loaded with artificial fragrances, and generally all-around crappy for you and the earth.

I can think of about one billion other examples of this that I've come across since really getting neck-deep in this whole greeny makeover. Just as we would with food, we have to learn to read labels, and know what to look for. It's a chore. I'm glad that the Good Guide and Skin Deep (see Green Inspiration Links on the right) can help me with some of the research. But other times, I just have to dive into the interwebs and see what I can find.

Of course, one person's Totally Awesome LifeChanging EcoProduct of the Century is another person's greenwashed garbage.  Take a look at the (quite polite and reasonable) Yay! and Nay! comments about this cool-looking water bottle on ReNest. They bring up a good question about how much we know/care about how bamboo is harvested and processed. Better than plastic? Probably. Better than a re-used glass bottle with a sock around it? Maybe not.

So, to sum up, Greenwashing is out there. Everywhere. The website GreenwashingIndex.com  has some tips about how to spot Greenwashing. And Greenwashing.net has a list of who they consider the 10 Worst Offenders of corporate Greenwashing. You can read another article about the FTC's response (late as it may be) here.

I have scheduled a blog Book Review of the book "Garbage Land" to share with you soon, but one way in which Greenwashing and my main take-away from Garbage Land is the very simple yet oh-so-difficult concept of BUYING LESS STUFF. The fewer things I buy, the less likely I am to succumb to Fakey-McFakerson eco claims or be wooed by the trumpets of "Green!" "Eco!" "Organic!" "Sustainable!".

Which, of course, is a total buzz-kill on a day that I received a very very VERY tempting email reminder from JCrew that they are having an extra 30% off Sale Items sale this weekend. And I have a Blick Art Supply coupon burning a hole in my wallet. At least there's very little Greenwashing going on with high-end casual wear or art stores. I know what I'm getting when I shop there, and it probably ain't green. Sigh.

Word Nerd: Sulfates (Or Sulphates, if you are British)

Sodium Laureth Sulfate (SLES) and Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) are ingredients that clean things and make nice foamy suds. Unless your shampoo, body wash, or toothpaste label exclaims that it is "FREE!" of those particular sulfates, it probably contains them. They are cheap ingredients, and they work.

So what is so bad about them? I like clean things (like teeth and hair) and I also like some nice foamy bubbles to prove to me that my cleaning agents are cleaning. Is it just me, or have we all really convinced ourselves that lather means something is "working"? Would you want to use a shampoo that didn't produce any suds? I think it would be weird. Anyway, back to the investigation...

The good folks at Snopes.com looked into the claims that SLS and SLES are cancer-causing, and came up with ziltch. In fact, they trace the sulfates-cause-cancer scare to a shampoo contamination back in the 1970s that found that some shampoos contained trace amounts of carcinogens. But sulfates were not the culprit, and the two malevolent ingredients have since been removed from shampoo. Now, I'm not as eager as Snopes to get behind the "If the FDA allows the ingredient to be used in personal care products, it must be perfectly safe!" sloganeering, but maybe these sulfates-of-doom have gotten a bad rap. Let's keep reading....  

The main health problems associated with these ingredients are skin/scalp irritation and diarrhea if you ingest too much of it (thus the warning labels on toothpaste). I read elsewhere that they can also promote brittle hair/split ends, which the conspiracy theorist in me bets is a kind of cyclical marketing: The product you use to prevent something actually causes MORE of it, leading you to buy more product... But that's just my ramble.

Skin Deep Cosmetic Safety Database give SLS a 3 out of 10 on the hazard scale, but still lists quite a scary array of possible toxic effects, including: cancer, neurotoxicity, organ system toxicity, skin irritation, and a handful of "lesser or emerging" concerns about this ingredient. Snopes may have determined that sulfates are not related to cancer, but I'll take "One or more in vitro tests on mammalian cells show positive mutation results" as a flag that perhaps they are best avoided.

Skin Deep gives SLES a 4 out of 10 on the hazard scale, with the main concerns being skin irritation and organ system toxicity.

If you decide you'd like to try to avoid SLS and SLES in your home, better start reading labels. I was pretty distressed to discover that even my Tom's of Maine toothpaste has SLS in it. Grr....

According to this page of NaturalHealthCentre.com, there are all kinds of things that contain SLS or SLES:

Soaps
Shampoos
Bubble-baths
Tooth paste
Washing-up liquid / dish soap
Laundry detergent
Children's soaps / shampoos
Stain Remover
Carpet Cleaner
Fabric glue
Body wash
Shave cream
Mascara
Mouthwash
Skin cleanser
Moisture lotion / Moisturiser
Sun Cream

Bottom Line: Sodium Lauryl Sulfate and Sodium Laureth Sulfate may not be foaming you into an early grave. But on the other hand, they may be. For my future purchasing decisions, I'm going to tread lightly, look for low concentrations, and try to avoid it if at all possible.

Word Nerd! - What is a "Paraben", and why should I care?

PARABENS

I am a word nerd through and through. I want to know what words mean, where they came from, and how to use them. In undergrad, I took gleeful advantage of our free student membership to the OED Online and could spend hours trolling through the history and subtle nuances of a word's meaning. (Cut me a break, I was a Linguistics major).

But I confess that when it comes to health, science, technology, and general greeny-ness, I often throw words around without having even the slightest clue what they mean. Except maybe a dull sense that something is "bad" or "good". And so, to expand my own working knowledge of the buzz words and phrases relevant to the G3 experiment, I'm going to try to post a Word Nerd feature once a week.

This week, we're gonna start with PARABENS.
My general sense is that Parabens are BAD. But if you had asked me yesterday what they are and why we should chuck them all out of our shower caddies and cabinets, I would have said something like: "...umm... because they are BAD!".  And this confidence in their badness is largely derived from the fact that the expensive greeny shampoos often proudly proclaim that they are PARABEN FREE! So, I guess if they are really proud of that then that means that things without parabens are better, right?

Anyway. I did a little websurfing for us, and I found that while some studies say that parabens are not really that harmful, there are still some pretty sucky potential dangers, including possible links to cancer and messing with your hormones. The simplest explanation for all the fuss was found, of course, on Wikipedia, which explained that parabens can mimic estrogen. And, presumably (this is my editorializing), fake and/or extra estrogen seeping into your delicately balanced body is BAD!

Parabens are used as preservatives in products like shampoos, moisturizers, some pharmaceuticals, and even toothpaste. Some foods also use parabens as preservatives. Wikipedia calmly reminds us that some parabens occur naturally in foods like blueberries.

Seeking some non-wiki information, I turned to the good peeps over at Discovery Health, who have quite a bit of info about parabens and the controversy surrounding their relative danger and/or safety. They are much smarter than I am, so I'll let them speak for themselves.

If you'd like to read a more conspiracy-theorist-style take on the "Is my shampoo really giving me cancer??" debate, check out this article at the Huffington Post. While not specifically about parabens, it's chock full of good old fashioned scare-you-into-using-only-puppy-kisses-as-face-soap gloom and doom. I will probably come back to that article some other time after I've had a chance to read it critically and thoughtfully. Which I couldn't do today, because it is scary.

My Totally Unscientific Conclusion re: Parabens
There are paraben-free options out there that can work for my personal care needs, so why risk it? And parabens-in-food? I imagine that if I stop eating so much prepacked food, I will dramatically reduce my exposure to parabens-as-fungicide in the stuff that I eat. Because really, if it needs an anti-fungal ingredient, do I really want to be eating it?