Phthalate Concerns Cause Company Makeovers

  • Women marching on behalf of a campaign to remove phthalates and other chemicals from cosmetics. (Photo courtesy of the Breast Cancer Fund)

There are new concerns that products we use every day to keep us clean and make us beautiful may contain toxic chemicals. The targets are things like shampoos, deodorants, hair dyes and cosmetics. Some companies are taking these concerns seriously and giving themselves a makeover. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie Halpert has this story:

Transcript

There are new concerns that products we use every day to keep us clean and make us beautiful may contain toxic chemicals. The targets are things like shampoos, deodorants, hair dyes and cosmetics. Some companies are taking these concerns seriously and giving themselves a makeover. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie Halpert has this story:


(Sound of woman and child talking)


Teri Olle is playing dress-up with her two-year-old daughter, Natalie, in the family’s bathroom. Teri is applying lotions to her daughter’s chubby cheeks, while Natalie puts lipstick on her mother.


Little girls like Natalie have been playing dress-up for generations. But Natalie’s game is slightly different. She’s using nail polish, lipsticks and creams made without man-made chemicals.


That’s because her mother is an environmental activist who lobbies against toxic chemical use. With cosmetics, her biggest fear is a group of chemicals called phthalates. Phthalates increase the flexibility of plastic and keep nail polish from chipping.


“Phthalates are testosterone-suppressing synthetic hormones, essentially. And they’ve been linked with all sorts of developmental problems, including, most dramatically, a set of male genital defects that show themselves as birth defects in infant boys.”


Last month, scientists released the first study on male babies. They found a strong link between high levels of phthalates exposure in pregnant women and damage to their sons’ reproductive tract. Studies like this, and others on lab animals showing possible links to reproductive problems, prompted the European Union this past March to ban two types of phthalates from all products sold in Europe. The states of California, New York and Massachusetts are also considering similar plans.


Olle is five months pregnant with her second child. She doesn’t know if she’s carrying a boy, but she says chemicals in cosmetics could be risky for any fetus. So she’s not taking any chances.


“For me, as a person, if someone said to me, ‘You can either use this product that may cause a genital defect in your baby boy or not’, I would think most people would go, ‘Really, we probably shouldn’t be using these products.'”


And it’s not just phthalates that could be a problem. Environmentalists say that the ingredients in cosmetics haven’t been evaluated for health or safety effects. The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t do that kind of testing. And in 60 years, it’s banned only nine ingredients. So there are other chemicals, like coal tars used in hair dyes and formaldehyde used in nail polish, that might cause health problems as they’re absorbed by the skin into the bloodstream.


Because of these concerns, a group of environmentalists called the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics has convinced 136 natural cosmetics companies to sign a pledge to check for potentially toxic chemicals and eliminate them.


One of those companies is Avalon Organics. Over the past year, Avalon’s spent two and a half million dollars to reformulate their products and switch to more natural alternatives. Gil Pritchard is the company’s President and CEO. He says the jury’s out on whether these chemicals definitely cause harm. Even so, he didn’t hesitate to make the investment.


“It’s convincing enough for me and our company to exercise what we call a precautionary principle – to adopt it and say look, we may not have direct scientific evidence, but there’s enough evidence here to say whoa, I can feel the heat from the stove. I don’t need to put my finger on and burn myself to know that that’s one of the likely outcomes.”


But not all companies feel this way. Procter & Gamble, in Cincinnati, Ohio, has not signed the pledge. Nor have any other major cosmetic companies. Tim Long is a company spokesman. He says environmentalists are blowing this issue way out of proportion.


“The amounts of most of these ingredients that the activists have concerns about are, in fact, extremely small and at the doses used in our products, there’s no scientific evidence to support that they’re resulting in any harm to consumers.”


Long says Procter & Gamble complied with the EU directive and took the banned phthalates out of all of its products both in Europe and the U.S. But he says that wasn’t necessary, since phthalates, along with all other cosmetic ingredients, simply aren’t dangerous. He says his company wouldn’t be using them if they were. And the FDA says that these cosmetics are safe.


Environmentalists say that more research needs to be done to better understand the effect of chemicals used in cosmetics on the body. But Teri Olle says that with so many natural alternatives available, it makes sense to be careful.


“When I became pregnant, I definitely became more conscious of what I was putting on my body. I mean, if you’re supposed to avoid soft cheeses and cake batter, it certainly can’t be good for you to be spraying petrochemicals on your body. That definitely can’t be good for the baby.”


So when the baby’s born this September, instead of using products with man-made chemicals, Teri Olle will be spreading diaper rash ointment with beeswax and apricot oil on her newborn baby.


For the GLRC, I’m Julie Halpert.

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Essay: Mourning the Destruction of a Flower Garden

It’s the time of year when many gardens reach their peak – and even grow a little bit wild. That has made one essayist’s loss all the more painful. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly remembers a special garden:

Transcript

It’s the time of year when many gardens reach their peak –
and even grow a little bit wild. That has made one essayist’s loss all the more painful.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly remembers a special garden:


It looked like a crime scene.


Everything in the garden was gone.


The morning glories no longer crowded the sidewalk. Sunflowers were cut down in their
prime. There was a hole instead of the lilac. And one stubby trunk – where someone had
hacked off the sand cherry tree.


We started the garden just over a year ago. I found out I was pregnant and next thing I
know, my husband is incubating black-eyed susans on top of the refrigerator.


He seemed to have that nesting instinct. Suddenly, he was spending every weekend at
the nursery. He came home with tools and soil and plants and even trees.


The scraggly yard in front of our apartment building was being transformed.
For me, it was just what I needed – a patch of nature in the middle of the city.


This summer, the flowers came back. And we shared the garden with our 6 month old.
We were pointing out the buds on the trees, and the bees buzzing around.


We didn’t tend it much as we got ready to move. And it grew pretty wild.
There were flowers, but also grass and weeds.


Two weeks after we moved, all that life was torn up. Eleven different kinds of plants – all
carefully chosen and tended. We visited them every time we walked in or out of the
building.


I can’t imagine the person who could just rip flowers out of the ground. It was a tiny,
imperfect oasis. Now, it’s just dirt.


Ironically, the only thing that survived was a plum tree we planted on the city property –
between the sidewalk and the road. We thought city workers might pull it up – since it
wasn’t official. Instead, they plunked an iron gate around it and now, every week, a city
truck comes to water it.


We always laugh about how it survived its brush with the city officials.


Now, that tree has proved it really is a survivor – but all that perennial color that was
once a backdrop to it is gone. It was not just a bit of our past, but an investment in the
future as well.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Karen Kelly.

“24 Carrot” Farmers

According to the USDA, the number of farmers’ markets in the United States has increased nearly 80 percent in the past decade, with roughly 3,100 in operation. Like many other Midwesterners, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Julia King buys much of her warm-weather produce from local growers. But King thinks those farmers grow something else that might be just as important as food:

Transcript

According to the USDA, the number of farmers’ markets in the United States has
increased nearly 80 percent in the past decade, with roughly 3,100 in operation. Like
many other Midwesterners, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Julia King buys
much of her warm-weather produce from local growers. But King thinks those farmers
grow something else that might be just as important as food…


Not long ago, my ten-year-old daughter gathered her allowance, dropped her coins into a
see-through, polka-dot plastic purse and journeyed with me to our local farmers’ market.
Inside the old warehouse-turned-emporium, we strolled up and down the aisles. She
sniffed bars of soap and fragrant candles, poked bags of cheese bread and gazed at
almond croissants. But it was a large butternut squash that finally caught her eye.


She smiled and pointed at the unusual treasure. The farmer behind the counter called out
a price and I watched from a distance as she dug into her little plastic purse, pulling out a
quarter here, a dime there. As she calculated the numbers, her smile faded; she was fifty
cents shy of the total.


“Oh, you go ahead and take it anyway,” he told her. “It’s a little bit old, really.”


She paused, uncertain. I stepped into view and offered a dollar to the farmer, but he
stood his ground. He wanted to sell the squash to my daughter for the price she could
afford. He said it was a fair exchange. We thanked him repeatedly and my daughter took
the big pear-shaped vegetable in her arms like it was a baby doll.


It was not the first time one of the market’s farmers had put kindness before cash. Shop
there long enough and someone is bound to say, “Oh, take two, they’re small” or “This
one’s a little bruised; I’ll throw it in for free.”


These aren’t “blue light specials” or “supersaver sales;” they’re gifts from people who
never tire of the magic that springs from the earth. In a year of Saturdays, I’ve been
invited to marvel at the shape of a carrot, to behold the size of a potato, to delight in the
beauty of a snapdragon.


In a nation of box stores and billionaire wannabes, a nation where “excess” is master, the
men and women who labor in the soil offer a glimpse of something different. It’s a
commerce measured not only by what they gain, but also by what they give.


John Greenleaf Whittier put it best in his poem, “Song of Harvest”:


Give fools their gold, and knaves their power;
Let fortune’s bubbles rise and fall;
Who sows a field, or trains a flower,
Or plants a tree, is more than all.


HOST TAG: Julia King lives and writes in Goshen, Indiana. She comes to us by way of
the Great Lakes Radio Consortium.

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