Water | Resources
Toxic Free Replacement for Down
Question from Suzanne
Hi Debra,
I am a vegan, but also care about living toxic free. So many vegan alternatives are made from petroleum. Yes, they are not made from animals, but it seems there is little concern about the toxicity of these vegan alternatives.
I don’t want to use down in pillow and comforters and other products, but neither do I want to use polyester and other products being offered to us as vegan alternatives.
What can I use as a toxic free replacement for down?
Debra’s Answer
I’ve noticed this too and I’d love to see more vegans find plant-based alternatives instead of petroleum-based.
There is a plant-based alternative to down, and that is kapok
Kapok is one of those old materials that used to be used a lot, but got displaced by plastic fillings and foam.
Kapok is a fiber taken from the seed pod of the kapok tree, which grows in the rainforest. The trees are laden with pods, which contain round seeds. After the leaves have fallen during the dry summer season, the pods burst open while still on the tree. Inside, a whitish cotto- like fiber surrounds the brown seeds, which carries the seed off in the wind. This fiber is called “kapok silk.”
The majestic trees are not cut down during harvesting, only the seed pods are removed, at the end of their natural cycle. Fibers are pulled from the seeds pods, then air cleaned by spinning at high speed, resulting in a soft, puffy, resilient material that has no dust or pod debris.
Kapok is soft, smooth, hygienic, hypoallergenic, sustainable, and free of toxic chemicals.
Kapok give the feel of down, but holds it’s shape, does not compress, and maintains it’s buoyancy for years. It has a unique ability to shape to the body and rebound instantly to it’s original fluffiness. It can be reused for decades without decaying. Because it is water-resistant, it doesn’t mold.
The fluffy white covering of the kapok seed traditionally has been used by indigenous rainforest peoples to fill pillows and mattresses and is again being offered today for these purposes, particularly for pillows.
Look for kapok that has been harvested in a way that protects the life ways and ecosystems of indigenous people.
White Lotus Home makes their own kapok-filled pillows with a 100% organic casing, spun in the USA from 100% organic, domestically grown, GOTS-certified cotton.
Ceiling Fan Blades
Question from Stacey
Hi Debra,
I would like to purchase some ceiling fans for my home. It seems a lot of the blades are made of ABS plastic, or plywood/wood veneer. Are either of these okay to purchase, or would you recommend finding a fan made with solid wood blades?
Thank you!
Debra’s Answer
It’s pretty easy to find ceiling fans with wood blades (I just searched on “wood ceiling fans”) but the problem with wood might be the finish. And they are very expensive.
Plywood with veneer would have adhesives and finish.
ABS plastic is plastic.
So…
I personally would choose the ABS plastic, as much as I prefer not to use plastic. Though it’s made with toxic chemicals, as plastics go, by the time they are reacted into the final material, the end result plastic is stable, non-leaching, and not considered toxic per the MSDS.
I’ve purchased several inexpensive white ceiling fans, and never had a problem with them.
Drylock Masonry Waterproofer for Sealing Basement
Question from Bonnie Johnson
Hi Debra,
My basement walls are concrete and need to be washed down for mildew and then painted with drylock. I hear it is very toxic. Even being out of the house for a week I am fearful.
Is there any other basement paint/sealer that is less toxic to use? Someone mentioned Sherwin Williams having something like that but I called and no one sounded like they knew. It is an old basement with just small upper windows for ventelation.
Thanks.
Debra’s Answer
I looked at the MSDS for Drylock and can see why you are concerned.
It contains several VOCs, including Diethylene Glycol Monomethyl Ether, which is one of those hazardous chemicals required by law to be reported if released into the environment (here’s the whole list if you are curious).
Better to use something nontoxic.
Fortunately, someone has already compiled the list: Green Building Supply: Concrete & Masonry Sealer
Eco-Leather is Toxic to the Environment
Still on my search for a toxic free office chair, I was browsing yet another site and found quite a few covered with “eco-leather.” So I had to find out what it is.
I’m not sure I can give you a definitive answer since I’ve found several explanations.
This seems to be a general term rather than a trademarked brand that has a specific description.
First, it could simply mean that there is some environmental benefit somewhere in the manufacturing process.
One description said that Eco-Leather is a new seating upholstery material made of 20% recycled leather, offered as an alternative to fully synthetic vinyls. The recycled leather is used as the backing, with the face made of polyurethane (60%) for “a softer-than-leather feel”. The remainder of the material (20%) is fabric.
It’s the recycled leather that makes the material “eco.” Leather is a renewable resource, and recycled leather is diverted to this additional use on it’s way to the landfill. But these benefits to the environment don’t make it nontoxic. It is well known that the tanning of leather uses various toxic chemicals, which would still be present in the recycled leather.
Recycled leather is also known as “bonded leather” or “composition leather,” which is a recycled man-made material containing elements of recycled leathers, leather scrap & tannery leather fibers, which otherwise would go to a landfill. Most bond the fibers together with adhesives and resins.
But there is one, known as E-Leather(r) that is made from “wet blue” leather that comes straight from tanning and has had no other treatments, and uses only water to bond the leather fibers together. Hmmm, aren’t there toxic chemicals in tanning?
Lots more to learn about leather and it’s alternatives, but for now, if you see the term “eco-leather” it means it’s recycled, not toxic free.
Are There Any Nontoxic Wedge Pillows?
Update September, 2020: Here are some options;
https://www.theorganicmattress.com/products/organic-cotton-pregnancy-wedge
https://www.sleepdesign.com/Talalay-Latex-Sleep-Wedge
https://www.beyondbeds.com/latex-bed-wedge.aspx#
Question from Barry
Hi Debra,
I just want to write to inform you of what has recently transpired (at least somewhat of a surprise to me) and perhaps ask a question.
I’m a caregiver for my mother. I brought her home from Life Care Center (where she had been “rehabbing” from breaking two bones on January 1 of this year) on April 29.
Due to an unbelievably complicated set of events, she is on a PEG (feeding) tube, and at this time I do not see evidence it is going away soon.
When she is getting 4 cans, that is 13 hours and 20 minutes. We both prefer for most of that time to be while she is sleeping, overnight. That way she can be disconnected from “that pole” more during the day, when she might want to go somewhere and do something without “that pole”. (She can’t stand or walk for very long, but she does make brief trips through the house for various things.)
She was laying flat, overnight, while feeding. I was aware of some warnings about don’t feed people while laying flat. I had — at that time — presumed that it was because a lot of people can’t eat right before bed, and if they lay down having recently eaten, various stomach problems, acid reflux, whatever, might develop. And, she didn’t have that.
But, early in August, I discovered that indeed, I don’t want Mom to feed while laying flat, because there is a risk that she may aspirate, whether she had ever had that problem occur yet or not!
I was talking about getting a hospital-like bed, so that bed frame itself could raise the upper body to about 30 degrees. But, she really didn’t want to.
As I was doing research, I found an article that was quite intriguing to me. The URL is: [link no longer available]
Reading that article, I know about gravity, and can affirm that many things talked about regarding that is true! I was convinced enough that I decided I also wanted to sleep with my upper body around 30 degrees, and I also got the ortho bed wedge so my legs/feet would also be raised!
I thought “it’s worth a try!”
Online, I found a foam bed wedge pillow. I got two! One for Mom and one for myself! They were delivered on August 20.
Well, fast forward, Mom loves hers, and she is now sleeping with her upper body at least close to 30 degrees (she doesn’t lay on it at the right spot, it is so hard for her to scoot herself in bed when she lays down). At least her upper body is raised now.
Well, within a week, I had absolutely concluded that I will sleep that way for the rest of my life! I no longer had morning congestion AT ALL! I did awake slightly more alert, most days! It was — as the article indicates, amazing!
But, two days ago, I stopped using mine. 🙁
Now, first of all, it DIDN’T EVEN OCCUR TO ME (!) things like “wait, so what is it made of”! 🙁
(It WAS appropriate for Mom, and having just read something that convinced me to try sleeping that way myself, hey! Let’s just get two!)
It was just late February of this year I discovered that I can’t have ANYTHING synthetic touch me. After replacing 99% of my clothes, all of my bedding, bathroom/kitchen rugs, towels, oven mitts, table clothes, etc., my
body got SO MUCH BETTER! That, too, was “amazing”.
That’s also when I discovered your web site. At first I didn’t believe you enough to act upon what you said, but I continued to “check you out” and concluded you DID know what you were talking about! (And THANK YOU!)
(I now get ALL of my clothes from cottonique, rawganic, faeriesdance, two wool-filled pillows and a wool-filled comforter from Shepherd’s Dream, etc.!)
So, back to August 20…
My itch came on.
Since February of this year, I am quite adamant in seeking to find “okay, this rash… this itch… what is causing it?” (I had given up trying to find out what I was eating nearly two years ago, because I couldn’t! I was quite disappointed in myself when I finally concluded that hey! Clothing and bedding and things touching me 24/7, if it touches my skin,
it enters my body! I’ve known for YEARS that I can’t have anything not natural, no processed foods, no preservatives, etc.!)
I have been successful in tracking down the cause, really, I believe every time, until this time, at least the first couple of weeks!
I SO LIKED SLEEPING THIS WAY! The covers are 100% polyester. Okay. I wear silk glove liners if I have to touch them, when I’m changing/removing the pillowcases I have for both of them. Both pillowcases are 100%
Egyptian cotton. I have washed them at least 8 times. Here is a URL:
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NZGLGU4?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00
I possibly was HOPING more than anything else that this itch and rash was something else! Maybe I got a tad of gluten or dairy, and didn’t realize it! (Both of those are absolutely HORRIBLE at bringing on this itch and
rashes! Not a crumb!)
It goes away slowly. If it’s bad, it will get noticeably better within a couple of days, but it is a couple of weeks before it completely goes away.
During the time since then, I’ve had more and more places itching. Even worse at night (while I was laying on them). Getting up for itch cream up to three times a night!
(Raw, almost bleeding again, which I hadn’t experienced since the middle months of 2013!)
With it getting no better, and I haven’t found anything else that I know of that would be causing it, now for the last two nights, I haven’t slept on them.
Both nights, I didn’t get up once for itch cream. Oh, it’s not gone yet, but the SEVERITY of it is so much better again. At this time, those pillows, my “chief suspect”, appears to be the cause.
This is a WONDERFUL and AWFUL discovery! 🙂
The wonderful part is my itch and rashes aren’t that bad any more! 😀
The AWFUL part is I WANT TO SLEEP THIS WAY!
The last two mornings, I’ve had a full share of morning congestion again and a couple of other though not as significant things.
I’m kind of wondering what the cause of this is…
After they arrived, the out gassing gave me a headache. Three days in our hot garage (I’m also in Florida) got rid of that.
I know the “100% Egyptian Cotton” pillowcases may very well have something
synthetic in the trim (there is a zipper on both, though that is on the bottom, I’m not laying against that).
Is it possible the 100% polyester covers — even though covered by the “cotton” pillowcase (and again, the “up” part, the part I touch, I believe that part would be all cotton) — might (what’s the word?) “seep” through, with the increased heat of my legs and back laying against them for hours?
Well, anyway…
I have told Mom that I WILL FIND A WAY to sleep this way again, and soon!
The problem is I’m existing on her savings account! 🙁 (I was last a software engineer on the SLRSC contract, which ended in April when RGNext took over. I was laid off, as were many others. I haven’t worked since. I haven’t even had time to THINK ABOUT “where might I go to look for work”, because Mom, my #1 priority, has needed me.)
I don’t know whether anyone else has even tried to sleep this way. (I hadn’t even heard of it until I was researching some things when I realized that Mom’s upper body had to be 30 degrees, and since she wasn’t open to a new bed, what else is there!)
If anyone has any suggestions: I’m open! (And this time, I most definitely do need to consider “what is it made from” before the next thing I try!) :-O 🙂
Thank you!
Debra’s Answer
So I think you are looking for wedge pillows made of better materials. Here’s one made from latex foam: www.thesleepstoreusa.com/catalog/oxygen-bed-wedge/
I see there are others, like one is made from soy foam, which is the same polyurethane foam with a little soy.
You know, what you want them to be made from is polyethylene foam, which is very nontoxic. You could get some from a local foam store or online and cut it to whatever shape you want. Use your smelly wedges for a pattern.
And then you could start a business making them!
Washing Out Flame Retardants
Question from Karen
Hi Debra,
I have recently been doing a lot of research on flame retardants and removing flame retardants from my family’s lives as much as possible. I can’t seem to find an answer as to whether washing clothes in a washing machine removes any flame retardants we may have come in contact with throughout the day?
I really hope you can answer this for me. Thank you so much for all your help.
Debra’s Answer
Yes, washing clothes in a washing machine WILL remove any flame retardants from clothing that you may have come in contact with throughout the day.
Here’s an interesting article that answers your question with a scientific study: Chemical & Engineering News: Fire Retardants Wash Out in Laundry.
Some scientists did do a science experiment in which they collected samples of household dust and laundry wastewater and compared the fire retardants found in each.
The scientists analyzed the dust and laundry wastewater samples with liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry and uncovered 21 flame retardants in the household dust, 18 of which also were in the laundry wastewater. The highest concentrations they measured came from chlorinated organophosphates, also known as Tris. These flame retardants, which have replaced banned or phased-out polybrominated diphenyl ethers, accounted for 72% of the retardants in the dust and 92% in the laundry wastewater.
This is good news. What I don’t know is if the washing machine is then contaminated with flame retardants.
NOTE: Simply washing items that are treated with fire retardants, such as children’s pyjamas, will NOT remove the fire retardant. Such items are required by law to be flame retardant for a minimum of 50 washings. If you want to try to remove fire retardant from fire retardant treated fabric, use soap or vinegar, but best is to not buy it in the first place.
Detox Your Dentures
My guests today are Merinne Mesku and Melissa Mesku, sisters and co-founders of Pure Cure Dental Technology, LLC, the first company to address the toxins and allergens in dentures. Their flagship product, Pure Cure Denture Detox, reduces the residual toxic and allergenic substances that have been shown to leach from dentures and into the mouth. Merinne Mesku, CEO, graduated summa cum laude from Loma Linda University School of Dentistry and is a practicing Registered Dental Hygienist. Melissa Mesku is a writer, editor and designer with a degree in Environmental Science from UC Berkeley. The two sisters founded the small family company after their father, an award winning dental technician, was diagnosed with demyelinating toxic neuropathy from working with denture chemicals. In 2010, the company became the first to offer denture detoxification as a dental lab service. Since then, they’ve become the leading provider of information for the general public on denture toxicity and offer their research findings via their Free Report on Denture Toxicity. www.purecuretechnology.com | www.denturedetox.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Detox Your Dentures
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Merinne and Melissa Mesku
Date of Broadcast: September 17, 2015
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.
It’s Thursday, September 17, 2015. And today, we’re going to talk about something we haven’t talked about before.
But before I introduce my guests, I just want to say that I’ve been researching all these subjects about what are the toxic chemicals in products for more than 30 years. And one of the things that I run into sometimes is that there are products where I just can’t get the information, that it’s not available in public sources.
Some products like food products are required to list their ingredients on the label. But there are a lot of products that aren’t required to be labeled. Some of them, like cleaning products, for example, are extremely toxic, yet they’re not required to be labeled by law. So you can’t even look on the label and find out what the toxic chemicals are.
So today, we’re going to be talking about a product where I’m so happy to have these guests on among other reasons. They’re going to be telling us about some toxic chemicals in a product that many, many, probably millions of people use on a daily basis. And there’s just not a place to find out what is toxic about them and we get to learn about that today.
So the product that we’re talking about today is dentures. My guests probably know how many people use dentures. They are Merinne Mesku and Melissa Mesku. They’re sisters and co-founders of Pure Cure Dental Technology. Hello!
MERINNE MESKU: Hi, nice to be with you.
MELISSA MESKU: Hi, there.
DEBRA: Thank you. And did I say your name right, Merinne?
MERINNE MESKU: I’m Merinne.
DEBRA: Marin County, California.
MERINNE MESKU: Exactly like that just spelled differently.
DEBRA: These two sisters are actually on two different phones in two different places. One is in New York and one in California. Is that right?
MERINNE MESKU: Yes.
DEBRA: Okay, good. So why don’t you start by telling us your story about how you became interested in toxic chemicals in dentures.
MERINNE MESKU: Well, the story of our family company really starts with our dad, Mark Mesku. And it really starts back in the 1990s.
This is when we were kids.
My dad had been working for the California state’s largest dental HMO for about seven years. He was in a really high production environment where he was making as many as 20 dentures a day just by himself.
And after about seven years working with these chemicals day in and day out, he started developing these strange symptoms we couldn’t really explain, things like panic attacks, irritability, mood swings, things that were very uncharacteristic for him. We didn’t really know what to chalk it up to until he started developing numbness and tingling in his hands. And that’s when he started seeing the doctors.
Eventually, he was diagnosed with toxic demyelinating neuropathy, essentially nerve damage. He was blindsided by this. And so his doctors helped him figure out what was the cause of it. And it turns out, it was the chemicals that he was working with.
Now, he had never heard any warning signs like, “Watch out for these chemicals.” And he had gone through the training program himself.
He was even an instructor teaching people how to make dentures. And he’d never come across this information. So he started to do the research himself.
Now, at the time, he wasn’t able to work. That was really devastating for our family. It plunged us into poverty and we had a really hard time.
Fortunately, my mom was able to make ends meet. But it really had a huge impact on the whole family.
While he was out of work and trying to recover, he started doing an incredible amount of research. What he found was really shocking. The fact that there was a growing body of research devoted to these denture-making chemicals and that these pieces of research were showing that not only are the people who are making the dentures affected, but the people who are wearing the dentures as well, that really shocked him. Here he thought he was making a product that people were wearing that was improving their quality of life and it turns out, it might be harming them.
So he wanted to try to get the word out. And this is back in the ‘90s before social media, so it was hard to get the word out about these things.
DEBRA: I remember that.
MERINNE MESKU: I think we all do here.
And what really bothered him deep down was that he was used telling people, “Hey, watch out.” There’s a problem, but he didn’t have a solution. So people were getting scared, but he didn’t have a place he could tell them to turn to.
Flash forward about 10 years, he had built his own laboratory up here in Northern California. He started to spend a lot of side time working on ways to fix the problem.
Now, at this time, I was finishing up my Bachelor’s Degree in Dental Hygiene and my sister had already been out of UC Berkeley and she had been involved in environmental policy. And we started to jump in with him and work on this problem together.
Now, he was able to develop a way to take toxins and allergens out of existing dentures without changing the way they fit and can make dentures that were safer for the people wearing them than what was on the market currently.
That was great. We were happy to help people. But that was just in our small community. We wanted to help more people. We were starting to get requests from all over the country like, “Hey, can you help me? I have these dentures. It’s causing problems.”
And there were a lot of laws especially in California that say, we, as a laboratory, can’t directly help patients. We have to go to a middle man, the dentist. And so we couldn’t have people just send us their dentures. We had to jump through a lot of hoops. And that adds up a lot of dollars and cents for people.
So we wanted to find a way to make this more available to people, so that for one, it’s not breaking the bank. Two, they don’t have to be away from their dentures for weeks at a time. And three, we can help more people faster.
So we all put our heads together and developed a way to do that so the people can take care of this problem at home.
DEBRA: Good! So you’re providing something that people can do themselves at home instead of sending their dentures to you.
MERINNE MESKU: Exactly!
MELISSA MESKU: Yes.
DEBRA: I am so interested in hearing about this. Let me ask you a question first because I have my attention on this. How many people wear dentures?
MERINNE MESKU: About [inaudible 00:08:11].
MELISSA MESKU: I’m not sure how many here.
There’s a lot of estimates but the most consistent one that’s been given is that there are 35 million people in the United States alone who wear some type of denture. And that estimate goes as high as 45 and as high 55 million. So we’re not entirely sure. But that’s just in the US and dentures are quite common abroad all of over world too.
So it’s a pretty decent segment of the population who may be exposed to chemicals that can be [inaudible 00:08:44] with dentures.
DEBRA: Well, let me just ask you about that sentence that you just said because I was about to say, “And they’re all being poisoned by these toxic chemicals.” I guess we could say there may be a question as to whether or not these chemicals are leeching out of these dentures. But virtually, all dentures have these chemicals in them, right? There isn’t a non-toxic denture you can buy. Is there? Can I ask a dentist for a non-toxic denture?
MELISSA MESKU: True. The phrase ‘non-toxic’ (and I’m sure you’ve come up against this in your show a number of times), the phrase ‘non-toxic’ is bandied about quite regularly. It’s a great marketing term.
DEBRA: Again, it’s not always. Things labeled non-toxic are not always non-toxic.
MELISSA MESKU: Yes, exactly, because something might not going to give you cancer if you use it, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have toxic chemicals in it that can somehow get into your system depending on what the product is.
And so the thing with dentures is dentures are essentially a form of plastic. So we know that plastics have the ability to leech.
For example, BPA is a really common thing that leeches out of water bottles, children’s toys, et cetera. And a couple of years ago, there was a big hubbub about it in the media. And now, products are being made that don’t contain BPA, but they contain some other ingredient that serves the same purpose in the product. But it hasn’t yet reached the point where people have figured out that it is also a toxin or an allergen.
DEBRA: I want to hear all about this, but…
MELISSA MESKU: And so, a product can come out and say that it’s – oh, go ahead.
DEBRA: We need to go to break in about two seconds. So let’s go to break and then come back. We’ll have plenty of time. I want to hear all about the toxic chemicals that are in dentures.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Merinne and Melissa Mesku. I’m looking at the wrong line here. They are from Pure Cure Dental Technology. They co-founded this company to help people get the toxic chemicals out of their dentures. We’ll be right back to hear about what the toxic chemicals are that are in dentures that you want to remove. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Merinne and Melissa Mesku, co-founders of Pure Cure Dental Technology. You can go to their website at DentureDetox.com.
Okay, tell us about those toxic chemicals in dentures.
MELISSA MESKU: Sure. Earlier, we were talking about how my sister and I founded this company because my father, who was a denture technician, developed demyelinating toxic neuropathy because he was exposed to the chemicals in making dentures.
So that caused us to do a lot of research. And it turns out, there is quite a bit of information out there scientifically, it’s just not the in the hands of the general public. And to the best of our knowledge, it’s not really being acted upon.
So what we found, in a nutshell, is that dentures have the ability to leech toxic and allergenic substances. There are residual chemicals that can seep out of the denture. And if these substances are coming out of the denture, where are they going? You wear your denture in your mouth. So these are substances that have the ability to reach into your system through the dentures that you’re wearing.
Well, in all of this, it’s important to remember that what we’re talking about is your typical, hard, resin-based denture. So if you’re not very familiar with dentures, when you think of a denture, the little pink piece of plastic with some teeth in it, that’s what we’re talking about.
DEBRA: Are there more than one type of denture?
MELISSA MESKU: Sure, there are other kinds. No, there are flexible partials. There are other types of dentures. But those are less common and they’re made from different materials.
So we focus on the most common type of denture, which is just your garden variety pink, half or full denture that’s made of the most common materials used to make dentures, which is called methyl methacrylate or MMA.
So methyl methacrylate is also the primary substance that’s shown to leech from dentures. It’s the pink base of the denture. It’s essentially the gums of the denture.
Now, numerous studies agree that methyl methacrylate is the most significant allergen for denture-wearing patients. In this context of dentures, methyl methacrylate is also referred to as residual monomer because it’s an un-polymerized substance that is residual in the denture. It doesn’t get converted into the hard plastic. It’s what’s left over that doesn’t get converted.
DEBRA: It doesn’t bond with everything else.
I was going to say when you’re making a plastic, they bring together these different chemicals and they bond together with little molecules that get all bonded together. And so then, this residual is the stuff that didn’t get bonded, but it’s still there.
MELISSA MESKU: Exactly! And there are different types of denture materials. There are different types of denture acrylic.
The process to make a denture, you have to start off soft so that it can be sculpted to shape to fit the mouth. And then it has to become hard so that you can actually do it. And the process of going from a soft to hard, that’s called polymerization.
Ideally, for your health, you would want to make sure that the denture had been polymerized surely as early as possible. Unfortunately, that’s not something that a patient can know just by looking at the denture. And often times, dentists have no way of knowing either. You’d have to submit your denture for chemical analysis to even find out. So that’s a huge problem.
There’s a big question that a lot of people have. “Was my denture made properly? Is it surely polymerized?” These are not questions that people generally think of, but as we’ll see, it’s definitely something that every denture-wearer should be concerned about.
So the main substance that leeches out of dentures is methyl methacrylate. It’s considered cytotoxic, meaning toxic to cells. So in this case, cells in the mouth, cells that the denture is in contact with. And it can cause irritation, sensitization and a number of other things. And there are a lot of other chemicals that have been found to leech from dentures as well.
By the way, all of this information can be found in our free report on denture toxicity, which is on our website at DentureDetox.com. We’re really excited to share this information with the public because everybody should know. This should be common knowledge.
DEBRA: This should be common knowledge. Right before the show, I just downloaded it, so I’ll have my own copy. I would recommend everybody else do that too.
MELISSA MESKU: So we can look at what some of the chemicals are that are –
DEBRA: Tell us some of the chemicals, yeah.
MELISSA MESKU: – known to leech from dentures, sure.
Some of the substances that have been shown to leech from the conventional acrylic resin dentures include formaldehyde and hydrophenol, methacrylic acid, benzilic acid and phthlates. Phthlates are really a big deal and you start to hear more about phthlates right now. And what we’re finding out is that pthalates are not just in the dentures, but they’re actually able to come out of the dentures too.
That’s really serious.
Now, we do want to say that, yes, these things are coming out in small amounts, but some of the substances, even at very small, small concentrations, are known to cause problems. They’re known to be toxic to cells even at small concentrations.
DEBRA: And another thing about that too is that we’re not just being exposed to this small list of chemicals that you’ve just read or other ones you might tell us about. We’re being exposed to all kinds of chemicals all day long and from all kinds of different things.
And so these small amounts of chemicals are combining with other chemicals that we’re being exposed to. And there’s a lot of literature about how chemicals combine with other chemicals can get even more toxic. You’re putting all these substances in your body like making soup. They all mix together. And then you end up with something else at the end. These chemicals are reacting with each other.
Chemists know that if you put chemical A and chemical B together, they might react. We’re being exposed to all those chemicals. We’re being exposed to all those chemicals that the chemists are being exposed to in a chemistry lab without all the lab coats and the ventilation and all those things. It’s all outgassing in our mouths if we’re wearing dentures and breathing regular, ordinary consumer products.
Let’s talk more about this. We need to go to break again, but we’ll be right back and we’ll learn more about dentures and the toxic chemicals and what you can do about it. My guests are Merinne Mesku and Melissa Mesku. Their business is Pure Cure Dental Technology at DentureDetox.com.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Merinne Mesku and Melissa Mesku, co-founders of Pure Cure Dental Technology. And their website is DentureDetox.com.
Just during the break, I was looking through your report. Let me just say that if any of you listening are finding this very interesting and think that it applies to you, just go the website, DentureDetox.com, and download the free report because there is so much detail and information in this report about the toxic chemicals that it’s something that you really need to know.
Great job. Great job, ladies.
MERINNE MESKU: Thank you.
MELISSA MESKU: Thank you. That’s a lot of work.
DEBRA: It was a lot of work. I can totally tell that having spent all these years doing this kind of research myself. I know. I can tell that you did a really great job.
MELISSA MESKU: Thank you. We appreciate it. It’s the product of over a decade of research, heartaches and a lot of figuring out how to convey these things to the non-scientific public.
So we tried to make it friendly and easy to read, but also pretty hard-hitting because it’s the product of a lot of research and a lot of scientific studies.
Some of what you’d find in the free report is a list of the substances that we found to leech from typical dentures. And this is – again, I’ll just say. It’s so hard to find this information. There are essentially no sources that just give you a nice, clean list of what could be in your denture.
So we have done a lot of cross-checking and we cite all of the things that we found so that people continue to do their own research if they’re interested.
As for the chemicals that have been shown to be able to leech from typical dentures, we’ve talked about methyl methacrylate. Merinne mentioned formaldehyde.
Also something just to color the denture to make it pink, we found that sometimes just may contain forms of cadmium, like cadmium sulfide or cadmium selenide. That’s generally not done anymore. However, an old denture could have that.
Our denture is made in – not in the United States, which could even be a denture that you buy in the United States but it could have been made elsewhere.
There’s no testing done on dentures, so there’s no way to know what’s inside, but there have been dentures found to have cadmium, dentures found to have copper.
Also, as Merinne has mentioned, phthlates. Common phthlates are bisphenol A, DDT, pesticides. Now, those things aren’t in dentures, but certain phthlates are found in dentures.
Interestingly, one of them, which is dibutyl phthalate, the National Toxicology Program concluded that phthalate, specifically, may adversely affect human reproduction or development. That substance is actually banned from children’s toys that are imported to the United States.
DEBRA: But they’re still allowed in dentures.
MELISSA MESKU: Yes. The ban is specifically for children’s toys that might be put in the mouth. And so, these dentures that go in the mouth –
DEBRA: And so it’s okay for adults and elderly people to put them in their mouth, but not children. This is something –
MELISSA MESKU: Well, not necessarily that it’s okay. It’s just something that there hasn’t been a lot of backlash about because people don’t know about it.
DEBRA: Well, I think that there are a lot more people who are concerned about children being exposed to toxics than are concerned about adults being exposed to toxics. Not that there aren’t, but this is a very specific thing, dentures. It’s for a very specific population. It’s a very specific product.
There are groups. There are whole organizations about getting children to not have so many toxic exposures, but there’s not a lot of organizations about denture wearers not being exposed.
One of the things that I found in looking across the board, at products, and even labeling is not consistent from product type to product type. And so you can have something like formaldehyde that requires warning label on a piece of particle boarding. Then you cut that piece of particle board and make a table, and the warning label is no longer required.
And this is how erratic our labeling system is in the world today. And so you can have something that’s banned in children’s products and that very same chemical be in another product like dentures.
MERINNE MESKU: Right. [cross-talking 00:31:41] in dentistry, specifically in dentistry.
Now, in California, we have Proposition 65, which states that in every dental office, you have to have a warning sign that says we use products know to the State of California to cause cancer or other reproductive harm.
Now, that’s the case in other states. You don’t have to tell people that. But all they’re saying – in the dental office, tell people before they get a filling, “This contains chemicals that are known to the State of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm.”
And we don’t tell people that when they get dentures either.
Now, most of the time, dentists aren’t even aware of this.
I’ve mentioned that my dad, going through his training program, wasn’t made aware. If the people who are making the dentures aren’t even being told that these chemicals cause problems, then dentists certainly aren’t being told that. And I know that from experience having gone through dental hygiene school.
We were in a clinic. There were tons and tons of dental students at the same school. I worked in tandem with them. They didn’t get any information on this. I didn’t get any information on this. Nobody in the dental field is really even being taught about this.
So we can’t expect to be going to our dentist and saying, “Tell me about this problem” because they don’t even know it exists.
DEBRA: There’s a special field called biologic dentistry. I think that probably some of those dentists. Well, they certainly know a lot about mercury in fillings. I don’t know how much they know about dentures.
MERINNE MESKU: [cross-talking 00:33:14]
MELISSA MESKU: Mercury and fillings seem to be the most popular topic that I’ve noticed that people may be generally aware of that relates to dentures.
That relates to oral care. It is important but there’s also this other thing.
DEBRA: Yes, which I’m so glad that you discovered.
MELISSA MESKU: Definitely. And as you were saying, Debra, with the labeling, how that would correlate to dentures, we have to remember that when you buy a product, it’s in a package. It’s mass-produced.
When you buy a denture, it’s something that’s handcrafted. It’s made by an individual who’s custom-making it to fit your mouth. It is a unique product that has everything to do with the particular materials and expertise that the craftsman is using on your particular denture.
So the quality can vary widely. You’re getting a custom made item from materials that you may not know anything about, and the dentists may not know anything about. The unfortunate fact is that there is no way for a patient or a dentist, in many cases, to ascertain the quality and safety of a particular denture.
DEBRA: We need to go to break, but I want to ask you when we come back – I’ll ask you the question now and then you can answer it when we come back.
So if these are custom-made, then can somebody who needs a denture – I don’t have dentures, but if I needed one, could I be in communication with that person who’s making it to find out what is in my denture? And you can answer that when we come back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Merinne Mesku and Melissa Mesku, sisters and co-founders of Pure Cure Dental Technology. Go to their website, DentureDetox.com, and download the free report that has a lot more information than what we’re going to have time to cover today.
That’s DentureDetox.com. Get their free report.
We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Merinne and Melissa Mesku.
I’ll get both of your names pronounced –
MERINNE MESKU: No worries.
DEBRA: Merinne and Melissa Mesku. I can say it.
I don’t know how old you are. I think you’re probably much younger than I. But there used to be this show on TV called the Mary Tyler Moore Show. There were a lot of reruns (but it’s not being rerun right now). And it had a news broadcaster on. He was always mispronouncing everything. And some days, I feel that way.
Merinne Mesku and Melissa Mesku from Pure Cure Dental Technology, DentureDetox.com. There!
MERINNE MESKU: Woo-hoo!
DEBRA: So tell us about your product now.
MERINNE MESKU: Sure. When people get dentures, they’re concerned about how they look, and how they fit. But when you consider that dentures have the ability to leech residual chemicals, you need to add in a third metrics so the denture needs to look natural and fit right, but it needs to be biocompatible so it’s safe to wear.
So the two things that we found that could be done about it is to remove residual chemicals from the denture, and also to prevent the denture from continuing to leech. And that’s what our product is for.
So originally, we developed a way to detoxify dentures as a laboratory service. We started that in 2010. We had a network of participating dentists and a lot of happy patients. But we also had a lot of people who were interested in getting the product, who needed the service performed on their denture, but they couldn’t afford trips to the dentist that it takes to get the service.
Or they lived in an area where there wasn’t a participating dentist near them.
So we decided to – we researched and we figured out another way of performing denture detoxification that didn’t require the lab but was rather something that people can do at home, and something they can do affordably. So it was within reach of any denture wearer if they’d like to use it.
DEBRA: I think that’s so great.
MERINNE MESKU: When we first came out with this, and we have the lab service, it was wonderful that all these people just found us because they were researching their own denture problems. And then our site pops up, and there’s nobody else talking about these issues.
They found that what we’re saying is resonating with them, describing problems that they were having. And so they’re like, “Okay. I want this done to my denture.”
We’re like, “Sorry. We can’t help you. You’re in a region that’s too far away.” Or, “You’re around the world or whatever, and we can’t get this service to you.”
So we were really keen to come up with something that people could use at home.
DEBRA: So how would somebody know if they were having a problem? What will the problem look like that would then motivate them to be looking for you?
MERINNE MESKU: There are all sorts of – you name it really. A lot of people suffer from what they think might be allergic reactions to their denture. There’s burning mouth syndrome, just sensation of your mouth burning. There’s a lot of reasons that could happen, but one of them is that it could be your mouth reacting to the substances that are leeching from your denture.
There’s denture-related stomatitis.
You could be suffering from inflammation. You could be suffering from irritation. Cheilitis, which is acute inflammation of the lips.
There are all sorts of problems, and a lot of times, people could just get a new denture and then be uncomfortable, or have irritation, or feel like something is wrong.
And a lot of people have described a weird taste in their mouth.
We’ve heard everything. But the research we’ve stuck with – instead of just anecdotal evidence, but we’ve stuck with what scientific studies have shown that a lot of these problems go away when the exposure to the substance stops.
If we can create something that stops those substances from getting in your mouth, then we are actually able to handle this issue instead of having dentures be something that harms people. It can actually improve their quality of life, which is what they’re supposed to be.
DEBRA: In addition to those kinds of symptoms being caused, those chemicals that you’ve listed can easily go through the skin, in your mouth, in the mucus membrane, and then get into your bloodstream pretty quickly.
And so it could be causing all kinds of illnesses that are associated with the [inaudible 00:43:36] chemicals.
So we only have a few minutes left, about six minutes left. So I want to make sure that you have time to describe to us your product. If the box were to arrive at my house, what would I find, and what would I do?
MERINNE MESKU: Sure. So it’s called Pure Care Denture Detox, available at DentureDetox.com. Right now, that’s the only place that you can get it.
You order it and we ship a little box to you. What you get in the mail is seven packets. Each packet contains our patent-pending purifiers. It’s all natural.
Every night you take some warm water, and you put the packet in, and that’s the solution that you soak your denture in overnight.
It does two things. It helps remove the residual substances that exist in the resin denture base. And it renders the denture less able to leech.
DEBRA: How does it do that?
MERINNE MESKU: It’s called a post-polymerization process, something that’s recommended in a lot of studies, but we have seen no evidence of anybody actually practicing this.
Again, the denture is essentially a plastic product, and the process is when it is polymerized from a soft material to a hard material, the material gets reacted so that they don’t react with your body. They’re finished reacting.
What’s residual that doesn’t – and every denture has some degree or residual chemicals. Every denture has them. You don’t know how many. You don’t know exactly what chemicals, but every denture has residual chemicals.
So at post-polymerization process is another process to help remove toxins and allergens from the denture. And hopefully, to make it less able to continue to leech at all, to finish the polymerization process much early.
DEBRA: I’m starting to understand this because in other types of plastic – I know things that leech like other plastics that would leech into the air, outgas is the term for that or leech is the word they use for a plastic leeching from a water bottle into the water. We’re talking about the same thing.
MERINNE MESKU: It’s the same idea.
DEBRA: It’s almost the same idea. So if you had something like a house full of particle board and you wanted to remove all the formaldehyde from it so that it didn’t out gas, then what you would do is you would apply heat. And what that would do is finish the curing process and all those chemicals would come out, and then you would have it there, and it wouldn’t be leeching anymore.
So I can understand it.
MERINNE MESKU: The best thing that can be done. It doesn’t make it non-toxic necessarily but it makes it far less toxic.
DEBRA: Far less, yes.
MERINNE MESKU: The ideal is the materials in the world couldn’t contain these things but in a world of plastics, that’s what we’ve got.
So we do the best we can.
DEBRA: There are so many questions I want to ask you. You couldn’t possibly answer them all in the next three minutes. But the things that I’m thinking are, well – I hope I never need to wear dentures. But if I did, I wouldn’t want to put those plastics in my mouth. I would say what other materials could we use? What did people use before plastics were invented? All these different questions.
And I would assume that probably the ultimate solution for those of us who don’t yet have dentures would be to do everything that we can to preserve our teeth so that we don’t have to put this plastic in our mouth.
But for people who are past that point and have dentures, and need the convenience and comfort of having dentures, being able to look better cosmetically and chew your food and all those things, that if you’re going to use a denture that this is an excellent thing to do.
I would say that – I don’t even know how much it costs, but whatever it costs, it costs less than the health effects that you could have from being exposed to those chemicals.
MERINNE MESKU: Definitely. And even without using our product, our free report has lots of tips of what people can do, people who wear dentures, what they can do to help safeguard their health.
DEBRA: This is great. I’m so glad I found you. Actually, I didn’t find out. One of my readers found you. And when I went through your site, I thought, “This is missing data.”
This is data that is needed about toxics that hasn’t been available before. You’ve have it when it hasn’t been as widely available as it probably needs to be.
So I’m so happy that you are on the show today, and then I can help you spread the word.
MERINNE MESKU: I’m very honored to be on the show. Thank you, Debra.
MELISSA MESKU: Thank you very much.
DEBRA: Thank you. So we only have about a minute left. Any final words?
MERINNE MESKU:We’re just happy we could bring this to the public. This is a lifelong endeavor. It’s something that affected our whole family at our core. And it’s just such an honor to be able to spread what we’ve learned and to actually have a solution that can help make people’s lives better.
And at least it brings peace of mind even if they’re not having any problems with their denture that they’re aware of. Just to bring the peace of mind that they’ve done everything they can to improve their chances, to improve their health, and just to be a part of that is just amazing.
DEBRA: I understand. I feel that way about my work as well. It’s so great.
Well again, thank you so much. And again, we’ve been talking with Merinne Mesku and Melissa Mesku. Pure Cure Dental Technology, and go to DentureDetox.com. Get their free report. Get their kit if that’s something that you think would be helpful to you.
You can also go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to this show again if you want to. You can tell your friends to listen to this show if they wear dentures. All the shows are recorded and by the following Tuesday of most shows, there’s also a transcript.
You can also go and listen to any of the past shows in the archives.
So tell your friends. And you can also leave comments on the shows because each one has its own little blogpost.
So go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, find out more and be well.
Natural Laundry and Sensitive Skin Care From the Days of Yore
My guest today is Kim Mendes, Founder of Yoreganics, a small family business that makes laundry and skin products based on “revisiting simple, like the days of yore, when Mother Nature’s ingredients were used to heal our bodies naturally.” We’ll be talking about Kim’s philosophy and her products and how she, as a mother, decided she had to “take charge to become an advocate for myself and my family.” Her lighthearted blog is filled with humor and poetry. www.yoreganics.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Natural Laundry and Sensitive Skin from the Days of Yore
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Kim Mendes
Date of Broadcast: September 16, 2015
DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.
It is Wednesday, September 16th, 2015. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And I think all of you are all over the world. I know, I look sometimes and see where people are listening. I know that people are listening all over the planet and I think that that’s really wonderful because toxics is a problem all over the planet and I am hoping that you’re all learning things that you can apply in your daily life.
I just want to say that I think I’m sounding happier today. I wonder if you suddenly noticed, “Wow! She sounds really happy today.” I am feeling happier today. I’m feeling more optimistic. The more I do this work, the more optimistic I feel that we’re actually doing something and there are things that we can do and that the problems of toxics can be solved. I was just thinking before I started today how much I really enjoy doing this show and that’s probably why I sound so happy.
Anyway, my guest today decided that she needed to take charge and become an advocate for herself and her family and do something to have the products that she and her family needed. And so we’re going to be talking about her natural laundry and sensitive skincare products that are based on how things were done in days of yore. Her name is Kim Mendes. She’s the founder of Yoreganics. Hi, Kim.
KIM MENDES: Hey. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m fine. I want to say that I think that I feel like I already know you from looking at your website because you have pictures and poetry and I think that your personality really comes across.
KIM MENDES: Oh, thanks.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So tell us your story of how you got interested in doing Yoreganics.
KIM MENDES: Yeah, there were just a lot of different things going on in my life at the time. I was starting college basically, all pain-free living and happy times were going on throughout my life. And once I got to college, which was such a great time, once I started eating a little differently, all of a sudden, things started changing and I didn’t realize the correlation until years later. But cereal and ice cream for breakfast, then a little alcohol sprinkled in there and late night big burritos. My head somehow piled up into toxicity overload.
DEBRA: Yes.
KIM MENDES: Yeah. So I was going through a lot of chronic pain and I wasn’t able to play my last year of tennis in college and all these different things started happening. I was getting X-rays and I was going to physical therapy, all these different labs test trying to figure out what’s wrong with me like arthritic pain and chronic plantar fascitis pain, all these different things.
So I was trying all the different routes. This happened for years. And then, I just decided that I guess I just have to live with it.
And then, I did a surgery on my foot for the pain. And actually, it didn’t end up going away. It ended up being the same.
So long story short, I was on the way home from this one doctor appointment that I thought was going to be my last resort effort and it didn’t work. So I just said, “Okay, I’m either going to suck it up and live with the pain for the rest of my life,” my oldest daughter was only a year and a half at the time, “or I’m going to just figure out a different way.” There has got to be a different path out there.
So after all that, I ended up starting with a chiropractor. I started really researching into alternative methods and that really was a whole different world to me. So shifting my mind and mentality to just more of an open-mind concept, I started doing that and really taking classes from my chiropractor. He would always have open forums and explain about health and toxicity and how they go hand in hand and in our environment, in our food and everything that goes around us.
I also have an interior design business that I started going green with and learning more about that. And one thing led to another and it was kind of like, “Wow! My design clients wanted something that they could depend on” and there were definitely a handful of products out there. But at the same time, my girls were having skin sensitivities.
So all these things in my little web were coming together. Once I switched my diet for myself, I think it was a month and a half later, my pain was gone. I started doing green smoothies. If I was going to do beef, it was grass-fed beef. I had taken out gluten. I was completely shocked on what a difference that made.
DEBRA: It really is amazing about the diet. I have spent in my own life many years transforming my diet and I have tried many different diets. And the first step for me was just to stop eating packaged foods, stop eating processed foods, stop eating ice cream for dinner – I used to eat a whole bag of cookies for dinner or chocolate cake. That was my dinner.
KIM MENDES: I know! And what’s wrong with that if you sprinkle kale on top? It’s not a lot of work.
DEBRA: I know! Yeah. When I was a kid, I used to have this favorite ice cream. It was called Cherry Cherie. It had little bits of cherries and little bits of chocolate chips in it. I would sit there in front of the TV and eat the whole half gallon. And one night, I decided I wanted to eat a whole coconut cream pie. This was really how I ate.
So the first thing that I did was I just decided that I wasn’t going to eat any more packaged food, but I could still eat cookies if I made them.
And then, I just started eliminating things one by one. I stopped eating wheat. I stopped eating white sugar. I still eat dairy, but I also eat all kinds of other things that I never would have thought that I would eat as a child like coconut oil or garbanzo beans. It’s like my diet is so different, but my body feels so different.
KIM MENDES: Yeah!
DEBRA: Until you really start getting all that stuff out, you don’t really see. It’s so interesting. I am so glad that you brought this up because there may be a lot of people who have pain that are listening and they’re looking for an herbal pain relief or something like that. I am not saying you shouldn’t use herbal pain relief, but relieving pain can be as simple as changing your diet (not that changing your diet is always simple).
KIM MENDES: As simple and difficult as changing your diet, right?
DEBRA: Yeah, as simple and difficult, exactly right.
KIM MENDES: Yes.
DEBRA: Yeah, I think that’s right. Typically, I think that food is so important. I just want to ask you typically what you eat now.
KIM MENDES: It’s funny. I think it was six and a half years ago, I started Yoreganic. I was so hardcore and so strict on everything. I started being so judgy on every single thing, which was good and served me well for a while, but then, it kind of got into almost like a freakish modus, “Oh, my gosh! I’m surrounded in toxic everything. I just need to rent a bubble and my family and I can float off into the universe and not be around any of it.”
DEBRA: I totally understand.
KIM MENDES: Yeah. So that became a little obsessive. So since that time, I’ve really cranked it back. I’m more into believing the lifestyle that we’re all doing the best we can. The more knowledge we have, we move forward on what works for us. And you know what, what works for me doesn’t work for everyone else.
But typically, I try to start my day with a green smoothie. So I throw in some greens with either spinach or kale, maybe add half a banana and add some either strawberries or blueberries, whatever fresh and in season or frozen. I add a little water and blend it all up. I can add chia seeds. I really just try to experiment with different things. And some of the days, I may get and I was like, “Wow! That one isn’t so tasty,” but you chug it down.
DEBRA: I’ve had that experience.
KIM MENDES: Yeah. At first, I used to get frustrated. I was like, “Oh, my gosh! How can I ruin this?” And then it is like, “Just do it.”
DEBRA: Just do it and try. Many years ago, I made a dinner for my boyfriend at that time and I remember exactly what it was. It was Shepherd’s pie except instead of using mashed potatoes and meat, I used sweet potatoes for the crust and lentils for the interior. He took one bite and he said, “I don’t want at all to scrooge you from cooking for us and try things new, but this is horrible.”
KIM MENDES: I get it. I get it. I know.
DEBRA: Yeah. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, but you have to try it. You just have to try and find what it is you like.
KIM MENDES: Yeah, and not be discouraged by all that.
DEBRA: Yeah. So we need to go to break. When we come back, we’ll hear more from Kim Mendes, founder of Yoreganics. She’s at Yoreganics.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Kim Mendes. She’s the founder of Yoreganics at Yoreganics.com.
Okay, so Kim, you stopped being in pain because you changed your diet. What led you to start a business making your laundry and sensitive skincare products?
KIM MENDES: Yeah. Basically at the same time that I was finally relieving my pain through dietary ways, I was researching more products for healthier interior design and cleaning is such a large part of that. My youngest daughter was having extremely sensitive skin and she was prone to eczema breakouts. So I really started researching on all of that and realized through research that besides dietary, laundry and body care are two major triggers for eczema, couperose and psoriasis and all that kind of stuff, all kinds of skin things.
And so, I started doing research. My first product was soap nuts, which are actually dried fruit berries from the Himalayan Mountains.
They’re not actually nuts. They’re fruit berries and they’re growing in the Himalayans.
We work with a family in Northern India that harvests them. They take out the seed and then what’s left in the husk of the shell is called saponin. Saponin, when added to water, creates a natural soap. So part of these crazy berries go into a flask or a little cotton bag. You put them in the washing machine (they work in standard and high efficiency machines), you ou let them do their thing and they’re replacing your detergents and fabric softeners and you use them over and over, 5 to 10 times until all the saponins have been used up.
So your clothes are just naturally clean without having that toxic fake smell. And the berries are biodegradable and you just start all over again.
DEBRA: I love soap nuts! I just absolutely love them. I’ve been using them for about five or six years and I’m recommending them. There’s just no point in using anything else. There are some natural soap and detergent cleaning products for laundry, but I just soap nuts. And what I find is that my clothing gets really soft.
KIM MENDES: It is because there’s no detergent residue buildup.
DEBRA: There’s no buildup, no residue at all.
KIM MENDES: Yeah.
DEBRA: And they’re really easy to use once you get the hang of the fact that you’re putting these soap nuts in a bag.
KIM MENDES: Of course.
DEBRA: And then, you have to find the little bag afterwards…
KIM MENDES: Yeah. That’s why I tell my customers too, whatever works best for you. So I find a funky long sock and I put them in there and just knot the end of the sock, so it’s not like, “Where’s Waldo?” at the end of the washing machine. It’s like, “Where are you, little guy?”
DEBRA: Yeah.
KIM MENDES: So pull out the socks, put it inside for the next load and just load again.
DEBRA: That’s a great idea.
KIM MENDES: Yeah. When I launched that, people are like, “What about stains? And what about bleaching and that kind of thing?”, so I worked for the formulator to help me create a stain remover. I created these three products. I get the most compliments on that one. That takes out ink, blood, chocolate, food grease, car grease, a plethora of things, salad dressings, spaghetti sauce, life little mishaps like [inaudible 00:17:26], all that kind of funny stuff.
So that’s my stain remover. It even takes out the greasy satin stains that have already been through washer and dryer.
DEBRA: I need that one. I need that product.
KIM MENDES: Yeah, I know. I can’t wait to send you a package. I’m sorry, the timing was a little off, but I’ll get it to you.
DEBRA: Okay.
KIM MENDES: And then the Brightens and Whitens is a natural bleach alternative. So you can use it as a laundry enhancer or you can use it as pre-soak. So it’s just basically sodium bicarbonate, soda ash. There’s nothing else there. It has to be activated and used in warm to hot water. But that can take out coffee, tea, juice, wine, berries, tomatoes, beets, baby foods. Some of the stain abilities are shared by both of them. So the stain remover is more geared towards really those greasy, greasy things too. And yeah, we’ve done the Brightens and Whitens soap.
For me, I have my soap nuts. And then, I’ll do a couple of tablespoons of the diluted Brightens and Whitens. I just pour it in the liquid bleach dispenser or the detergent dispenser depending on the high efficiency or you can just add it into the water before you add your clothes for a standard machine.
DEBRA: It’s very easy to do.
KIM MENDES: Yeah. So I call that my laundry trio. They work great together. What I find is a lot of people, including myself, it’s like you’re ready to go to the next level sometimes about what you are willing to sacrifice for toxicity and for the earth and for your health and everything, but you still want it to work.
DEBRA: That’s right. I used to work 20 years ago for a business. I was actually a co-founder of this business. It was back in 1990 when there were none of these kinds of products on the market. What we were trying to do was to figure out how we’re going to sell green products.
We did some research and what we found was that people were willing to buy something that was better for the earth or better for the health, they were willing to pay more money for them, but it had to work as well or better as the toxic things.
KIM MENDES: Right.
DEBRA: That really is the thing. If it doesn’t work, there’s just no point.
KIM MENDES: There’s no point.
DEBRA: There’s just no point.
KIM MENDES: Yes.
DEBRA: There’s just not point. And what I found for myself is that a lot of these things that are natural and organic actually work better than the toxic thing and that they’re more comfortable. Organic food tastes better, organic food tastes a lot better. It’s much more comfortable to wear a cotton shirt than a polyester shirt.
So if you just step out of the toxic world – I mean, been so many years for me since I’ve used any of those things. This is just like what’s normal and natural for me now, to live this way and find these products and enjoy using them.
And I’m willing to learn a new skill, how to put those soap nuts in the laundry. Sometimes, you have to learn a new skill in order to make a change, but it’s not like it’s so difficult. It’s just learning something new.
KIM MENDES: Yeah, just keeping your mind open to different possibilities. Yeah, absolutely.
DEBRA: Yeah, that’s good. We need to go to break in about 15 seconds. When we come back, we will talk more with Kim about her non-toxic life and her sensitive skin products. She’s the founder of Yoreganics and it’s at Yoreganics.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio and we’ll be right back.
KIM MENDES: Okay.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Kim Mendes, founder of Yoreganics. Kim, would you tell us the story about Yoreganics? What’s behind Yoreganics?
KIM MENDES: Yeah. Actually, this sounds crazy, but it’s Kim Mendes, like “Wendy’s.”
DEBRA: Oh, okay. Thank you.
KIM MENDES: No problem. Basically, I really love vintage stuff and I was into the concept of [inaudible 00:27:04] and the interior design stuff. I do all that kind of stuff. So I went to this vintage organic trade market and long story short, it wasn’t available.
And then, I just got toying around with different things to call my business and I wrote down ‘yore’ one day not even knowing what it meant. I looked it up on the dictionary, it said, “In the days of yore,” which is my whole concept, going backwards to revisiting simple. And then I just combine it with ‘organic’. So it’s Yoreganic. It messes people up a lot or a little bit sometimes, but yeah, that’s the whole concept of my line. It is just to have less for products for more uses.
Originally, when I started, I was just trying to have all these different scents and all these different things and it just really started to get more complicated and I really wanted it to be so simplistic. A lot of people are always like, “You should have this and you should have this,” which I of course love. I love external feedback. But at the same time, I have to see that to keep it as true to the name and as true to the concept of what I am looking for, I don’t want everything to be so – I’m not trying to be one thing to everyone.
But those who do seek out, especially for skin sensitivities, they’re madly in love with what I do have. It’s not to say that I’ll never offer anything else. [Inaudible 00:28:39]. I do have the body care line, which basically consists of the Yore Wash, which can double for bathing and shaving. That has a soft lavender essential oil in it. It’s great for the face, the whole body, sensitive skin, private parts, itching, redness, irritation, dry cracks, cradle cap, rashes, booboos, bug bites, sunburn, all that, everything.
DEBRA: Yes. Yes.
KIM MENDES: So I had it all for men, women and babies basically. It’s the whole family. I like the fact that that can be in your shower and everyone can use it. It’s not like you need mom’s soap, dad’s soap and babies and kids, all these different scents.
And I also sell it in half gallons, so you can keep the pump you started with, the eight ounce pump and then just for the environment and economically, you buy a half gallon and you just fill it up.
DEBRA: I want to mention that this wash is a foaming wash. And if you’ve never used foaming soap, I just love this. I don’t know why they didn’t invent it sooner because instead of having a lot of soap coming out when you squirt, it’s all puffed up into a foam. You just get a smaller amount, so it lasts longer. But it also goes just smoothly in your skin. I love it.
There’s something else I want to say about the half gallon. I don’t remember what it was, but go head.
KIM MENDES: Yeah. I was going to say I do have actually two [inaudible 00:30:17]. I have a foaming wash and then I have a Yore Wash.
The Yore Wash is for bathing or shaving the whole body. And then, the foaming wash can also be used for that, but it’s not as thick and moisturizing.
DEBRA: Oh, I see.
KIM MENDES: Yeah. So my foaming wash can be used as cleaning for your home and for your body. So I use it in the kitchen, I do dishes with it, I can wash the counter with it. Of course, I sprinkle some baking soda and scrub the sinks and toilets and tubs with it. And it can also be used in the shower for full body as well and at the bathroom countertop.
But for those who want extra moisturizing, the Yore Wash is thicker. It has a high content of jojoba oil, which naturally mimics the sebum, the oil of your skin. So people really love that. And I don’t use any chemical emulsifiers, so it will separate. When it sits for a while, it looks like a salad dressing and that just shows that you’re really seeing all the jojoba oil rising to the top. You just give it a little shake and it’s good again.
DEBRA: Yeah. It’s like learning to use soap nuts. You just learn to shake up your bottle and then you don’t have to have those chemicals in it.
The thing I wanted to say was that all these ingredients are organic and the prices are so affordable. I’m looking at personal care products all the time every day on websites and these are very reasonably priced.
KIM MENDES: Yeah, thank you.
DEBRA: So it really makes it simple and accessible and multi-purpose and you’re just doing what Mother Nature does.
KIM MENDES: Yeah. I am just bringing back the stuff. And then our Yore Balm, that and the Yore Wash happened to be the top two selling in that category. But the Yore Balm is certified organic. It goes on super smooth. You can use it with the face, elbows and cracked heels. Gosh! I usually give my eight-hour infomercial on it, but basically, what I ended up saying is use it anywhere you have skin. So people are like, “What about lips?”, I’m like, “Yup!” “What about here?” “Yup!” Anywhere!
And it’s just not skin. I have people that, “Yes, I used it on our chickens today. The one chicken [inaudible 00:32:55] It was all messed up. I put some Yore Balm on there. Oh, great!”
My husband one day said, “My shoes were all messed up. I put it on my shoes to kind of like bust them out.” And I said, “You know what? I used it on the hinge of my door because it kept squeaking going down to the laundry room.” I said, “You know what? I’m going to add one more use. I’d put it [inaudible 00:33:16].”
It’s getting a little excessive. We got in a car accident last year. I’m like, “I wish my Yore Balm would just fix that too.”
DEBRA: These basic simple things do end up having many uses because they just work on everything.
KIM MENDES: Of course.
DEBRA: It sounds like that these are really good things to have around the house for many uses. It’s inexpensive and it has no artificial scent. There’s nothing that would irritate.
Even before I did this work, I know that people in my family had especially rashes on their legs and they would just itch and itch and scratch.
It just gets all irritated and bleeding and everything because you are scratching so much. It turned out that it was just their laundry detergent. When they changed the laundry detergent, they stopped itching.
KIM MENDES: Yeah, it is amazing.
DEBRA: Yeah. I mean there are so many irritants and so much toxic stuff in those laundry detergents. So to have something natural – and really, if anybody has sensitive skin or skin problems, it’s a combination of using these kinds of pure skincare products and no irritants in the laundry and then you will notice amazing improvement.
We need to go to break. But when we come back, we’ll talk more with Kim Mendes of Yoreganics about natural non-toxic living and her products. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Kim Mendes from Yoreganics and that’s Yoreganics.com. Y-O-R-E-R-G-A-N-I-C…
KIM MENDES: No, it’s just “ganic”, just “ganic.”
DEBRA: ‘Ganics’, yeah. There’s no O in the middle.
KIM MENDES: No “O-R.” Yes.
DEBRA: Oh, ‘Yore’, then ‘ganics’?
KIM MENDES: Yes.
DEBRA: Yes. Okay. I’m sure the listeners will get it by the end of the show. So I just want to read something to listeners just because I look at so many websites and it’s worth it to go to Yoreganics even if you don’t want to buy something. Just go to Yoreganics and wonder around because it’s just such a lovely site.
So here’s a page where it says, “Shining a light,” and it has a picture of a lantern. It says, “Into all of the cracks and crevices of life.” And then, she has a little poem. So here’s the poem.
I am like no one, no one is like me
I’m an apron wearing mama on a journey to “just be”
Redesigning my house with thrifty old finds
Writing about the latest crazy thoughts on my mind
Addicted to taking pix of everything under the sun
Then making green smoothies and being silly just for fun
My life is perfectly imperfect, no time to obsess
More love and laughter, a little less stress!
Every page is like this practically. And it just delights to be on your site.
KIM MENDES: Thank you.
DEBRA: It makes me smile.
KIM MENDES: Thanks, Debra.
DEBRA: And I wish every website is like this. I don’t know how many websites you look at, but some of them are just really boring. They don’t even give you the information you want. You can’t even tell from the homepage what they’re selling.
KIM MENDES: Yeah. Well, everything really for me is a work in progress, but the lighter things feel and the more full of laughter, I feel better. So I am all about laughing first and thinking everything else after that. Yes.
DEBRA: Okay. So what else would you like to talk about? We still have about another 10 minutes left for the show.
KIM MENDES: Oh, goodness. Gosh, it’s just like an open forum here.
DEBRA: It is! I mean, is there anything specifically on your mind that you’d like people to know?
KIM MENDES: On a personal level, my family and I have decided to take a little adventure year, away from traditional scoring. We were part of the beautiful [inaudible 00:41:33] community here in Rhode Island. We moved here four years ago from Chicago. So we’re really digging the East Coast. My husband grew up here, so it’s not new to him. He’s happy to be back.
But just in the journey of everything I’ve been doing (and I’m in the middle of writing a book and paired with pictures because I’m a picture-holic), I just wanted to step back into revisiting the simplicity of life in general and why we’re all here. Sometimes the heavy obligations of all those things we have to do every day just get heavy. So I wanted to bring a different angle for my girls and myself and my husband.
He travels every week to work, but we’re doing an adventure here and just some [inaudible 00:42:29] interest with learning and distant traveling and picture-taking and bringing back the vibrancy of life. Not that it was gone altogether, but we’re just spreading our wings and jumping and flying. And that’s what this here is about.
Even though I have no idea what every minute is going to look like, I’m just trusting in myself and loving that safety. It’s all going to be good and it’s all working out. I’m a big fan of the universal law of attraction, which works constantly anyway whether you’re using it on your side or not. And yeah, I’m just really pumped about that.
So I’ll probably do a little more in the blogging world because I’m not really a blogger. I’m a big Instagram person. I’m not really great on Facebook all the time, but Instagram. I’ll start putting more adventures on the blog, so it can be more about your life, the simplicity of the fun in your life.
DEBRA: Yes. Yes. Well, that’s just really so beautiful. I know exactly what you are talking about, about having so many responsibilities and so much of living the modern technical consumer life that we don’t do those simple things anymore.
As soon as you started talking about those, I thought about the book Walden. Have you read that book? Do you know that book?
KIM MENDES: No.
DEBRA: Oh! You must read Walden by Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau.
KIM MENDES: Yeah.
DEBRA: This was back in the late 1800s. He decided that he was going to not live in – well, at that time in Massachusetts, they were starting to be industrial. So his little town was getting a little too industrial for him. So he moved out into the woods, which was, I don’t know, a mile away and lived by the lake, by the pond, Walden Pond. He decided that he wanted to have just a very simple life. So, he grew vegetables and he built his little house and things like this. It’s just a very lovely book. It kind of has the same sentiment of what you were just talking about.
I am so glad that you mentioned this because for me, being toxic free is so much more than just not having toxic chemicals in the product because it really frees you to have the health to enjoy life in any way that you want to do that. And that’s what it’s really about for me. How can I not be sick all the time from the toxic chemical exposures?
So it’s always the motivation for me of what wonderful things do I want to do in my life and be able to have the health in order to do that.
And that’s really the result of living toxic free, not just having a paint that doesn’t have toxic things in it.
KIM MENDES: Yeah, absolutely.
DEBRA: The products are important because that way, you get to do the things that you need in your life. You get to wash your clothes and paint your walls and things. But the end result is not just to have more consumer products, it’s to actually live life.
KIM MENDES: Right. Yeah. Sometimes some of us can forget. I know I do. I mean, that’s my whole concept on everything. It’s like I have this line of products and when I first started out, I thought, “Oh, the pressure of just having this line of organic products just seemed so heavy.” I felt like I had to be so perfect. And then I’m like on this roller coaster back and forth and whatever is going on in this system. I don’t want someone being like, “I caught you being non-perfect.”
But I realized it’s my own work. So by doing my own work internally, appreciating and loving myself as I am and that we’re all individuals and we’re all doing what we can and what we choose, I’m not here to shine a spotlight on someone else in the middle of the night in the corner sneaking a candy bar, yeah, I like to keep it light. I like to keep it full of love and laughter and as much simplicity as we choose for our family.
And we’re still living in today’s world. We now live in the middle of the woods, which is way cool from – I miss the neighborhood living sometimes, but we’re so surrounded by, “Oh, is that a dog outside? No, that’s a deer. That’s a deer right at my kitchen window.”
DEBRA: That’s right. I used to live out in the woods too. I lived out in the woods by myself for two years and I know it’s wonderful.
KIM MENDES: Yeah, it’s really very cool. I’m a very social person [inaudible 00:47:47]. My girls, with this home school, on-school, we’ll still be social. There are so many stereotypes. I even hate the word “home schooling” in my own little head. I’m calling it adventure year because that’s exactly what I’ve got it set up for. It’s just an adventure, life.
DEBRA: Can I come live with you?
KIM MENDES: Yes, please.
DEBRA: I want to be on your adventures.
KIM MENDES: Please! It might be like walking down to the driveway and eight feet of snow to get the mail, but you are welcome. It is adventure, getting the mail.
DEBRA: Yeah. I’m actually going to go on an adventure this weekend I think down to Fort Myers, Florida to the winter home of Thomas Edison because I just watched this [inaudible 00:48:41] on TV about his life. I didn’t realize how many things he actually invented. More than that electric light bulb, he invented motion pictures and all kinds of electrical things. He had over a thousand patents.
But what really came across was that he changed the world. He changed the world. And what I want to do is I want to change the world from being toxic to being toxic free. So I want to go hang out with Thomas Edison this weekend.
KIM MENDES: How cool is that?
DEBRA: Yeah.
KIM MENDES: Have a blast. That’s amazing. I love learning all those things. Sometimes, when you just have to stare five minutes or five hours or whatever it is to just really have the time to dive into something without all the other stuff that’s going on, let yourself to be in that.
DEBRA: Yeah. Yeah.
KIM MENDES: It’s beautiful.
DEBRA: Thank you so much, Kim for being with me today on the show. Again, her website is Yoreganics, simple, affordable, organic products for laundry and skincare.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
KIM MENDES: Thank you. Thank you so much, Debra.
DEBRA: You’re welcome.
Wondering How We Came to Have All These Toxic Chemicals? Here’s the History…
My guest today is Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute. I invited him to be a guest after watching his wonderful video 300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds (1.3 million views). The fact is that while there are toxic substances in the natural world and some poisons have been in use for centuries, the overwhelming presences of toxic chemicals we experience today is the result of widespread use of fossil fuels. But an end is in sight, because we’re running out of fossil fuels. Imagining life after fossil fuels is also imagining a life without most of the toxic chemicals we use today. We’ll be talking about the fossil fuel and toxic chemical connection and where we can go from here. Richard is the author of 12 award-winning books, including six on the subject of fossil fuel depletion. He has written for Nature Journal, Reuters, and Wall Street Journal, and has delivered hundreds of lectures on energy and climate issues to audiences around the world. His current book project, due out early next year, is Our Renewable Future, an exploration of how our economy and our daily lives will change as we phase out fossil fuels and adapt to wind and solar energy. www.postcarbon.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Wondering How We Came to Have All These Toxic Chemicals? Here’s the History..
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Richard Heinberg
Date of Broadcast: September 15, 2015
DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It’s Tuesday, September 15th, 2015. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida and it’s only 82° today instead of 95°, so I know that autumn is on this way.
Today, we’re going to be talking about something that we haven’t ever talked about on the show before and that is where do all these toxic chemicals come from? How come we have a toxic world now a hundred years ago, we didn’t and 200 years ago, we didn’t? What happened that now, we have toxic chemicals in every part of our lives in every consumer products, in the air we breathe, in the water we drink.
Everything has toxic pollution now. Why is that? Where did that come from?
My guest today is Richard Heinberg. He’s a senior fellow at Post Carbon Institute. I invited him to be a guest after I saw a wonderful video that he made called300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds. It’s had 1.3 million views.
If you want to take a look at it and I hope you will, you can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for today’s show. I’ve embedded this video there.
This gives a summary of everything that’s happened in the past 300 years that has taken us from basically living within the resources of the planet to having toxic chemicals all over the place and living beyond our resources.
So I’m going to have Richard tell us about this in a little slower version and we’ll talk about it and find out where the toxic chemicals came from, but also what’s happening that we are getting to the end of fossil fuels and how we’re going to need the transition away from that. I think what’s going to happen is that as we lose our fossil fuels, we’ll also lose the toxic chemicals.
Hi, Richard.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Good morning Debra.
DEBRA: Thank you so much for being here.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Of course, it’s afternoon where you are, yes.
DEBRA: It is afternoon where I am and morning where you are in California.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Yes.
DEBRA: I used to live in California. I lived out in West Marin in Forest Knolls. Do you where that is?
RICHARD HEINBERG: I do. Yeah, I’m a little bit north of there in Santa Rosa.
DEBRA: Yeah. And my father lived in Santa Rosa and I also lived in Inverness by the ocean, so I know your area where you are.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Yeah.
DEBRA: I was born in California. Anyway, tell us how you got interested in the subject of post carbon and fossil fuels and everything that’s happening that is creating our situation now.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Right! I’ve always had a curious mind. By the 1980s, it was clear to me. I mean, a lot of other people have already picked up on this, but it was becoming clear to me that there were a lot of things going wonky in the world all at the same time. Our population was growing rapidly. The environment is being plundered in various ways. We are starting to see species extinctions at much higher rates than normal and so on.
So I was trying to figure out why this is all happening at once. I started applying all the kinds of answers that I could imagine. Was it something to do with politics? Was it something to do with economics? I looked into these areas. And clearly there were things going on that were at least partially responsible for these dramatic changes in human society. I started looking into anthropology and I saw how human societies have evolved from hunting and gathering through horticulture and agriculture up to our modern industrial form of production.
But it wasn’t until 1990s that I realized that the key to understanding the whole thing was energy. Energy is what enables us to do literally everything we do. Without energy, nothing happens.
And if you look through human history, our ability to harness more energy, whether it was in terms of planting food crops or literally harnessing horses and oxen, these things changed the society and enabled the growth of civilizations. But when we get to the industrial revolution and the unleashing of fossil fuels, we see suddenly the harnessing of energy on a scale that simply was impossible previously.
Fossil fuels carry energy that’s in a concentrated form that’s also portable and versatile. We’re able to use it to do all the amazing things that we’ve done in the last 200 years, everything from transportation and cars and planes and trains and ships to the production of electricity, to power all of our communications devices. None of this would have happened without fossil fuels.
So the fossil fuels obviously have given us enormous advantages. They’ve enabled the growth of industrial civilization, but we are also paying an enormous price because we’ve become addicted to energy sources that are inherently limited. I mean these are non-renewable resources that we are extracting as fast as we possibly can and burning them once and for all so future generations will not have access to them. And as we burn them and as we transform into plastics and chemicals, we’re also changing the environment. We’re doing a massive chemistry experiment with the oceans and the atmosphere.
DEBRA: And the humans.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Absolutely and human health and the health of livestock and wildlife and pets and everything else.
DEBRA: I remember when I’ve been studying toxic chemicals in consumer products for more than 30 years and I remember when I first started studying them and understanding that they came from fossil fuels and wanting to know these petrochemicals. Were they just digging them up out of the ground and making them into consumer products?
And one of the things that I learned early on by reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica is that fossil fuels are the reason that we are – I’m not quite sure what the word is when you talk about obtaining them from the earth – extracting fossil fuels is for fuel. They’re being used for fuels. So they’re brightly named fossil fuels.
The reason that they’re being made to make plastics and pharmaceuticals and everything else that they’re being used to make is because when they come out of the ground in their raw state – you probably could explain this better than I do – is that they come out as raw materials and then they separate it out. I think it’s a distillation process or something and at different temperatures, different parts of the oil or coal or whatever turn into different things. So what they do is they take off the fuel, the gasoline or the oil or whatever and then there’s all this stuff left over.
In a way, the making of toxic chemicals that go into consumer products is very responsible recycling project. It’s recycling the waste from the making of fuel. And yes, it’s being recycled into us as poison and therein lies the problem. So it’s not being extracted so that we can have plastic. It’s being extracted for fuel and the waste is being turned into products.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Right. Maybe calling it waste is possibly a little misleading because we are talking about organic chemistry here and the fossil fuels are basically organic molecules. They were produced over hundreds of millions of years in some cases or at least tens of millions of years from ancient plant materials. In case of oil and gas, we’re talking about algae and plankton primarily and with coal, peat and in some cases forests. All of these materials are compressed and chemically changed again with time and pressure into long and short organic molecules, hydrocarbons…
DEBRA: Let me just interrupt you right there because we need to go to break. That’s what the music is about.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Sure. Yes.
DEBRA: You can explain that in more detail when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Richard Heinberg from the Post Carbon Institute and we’re talking about how we got all these toxic chemicals and we’re going to be talking about what’s going to happen when we run out of fossil fuels. He’s with the Post Carbon Institute at PostCarbon.org. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Richard Heinberg from the Post Carbon Institute and they’re at PostCarbon.org. I want to mention again he has got this great video, which is how I found out about him. It’s called 300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and watch that.
Before we go on with your chemistry explanation, I just want to mention that some time ago, I don’t know, a few years ago, I was watching on the History Channel a whole series of really excellent shows called The Men Who Built America”. And I remember it was talking about some of these things that you talk about in the video and especially there was a whole thing about the development of using fossil fuels and then showing how it was a really big environmental problem that they were taking oil and turning it into fuel for something. I don’t remember what it was. It was kerosene or something I think that they were making. And then the rest of it, they showed this scene of the rest of it just being dumped into the environment. I was just looking at all the stuff being dumped into the environment.
Of course it makes sense. Somebody came along, Henry Ford or somebody. Somebody came along who built the engine using this waste product. I know you don’t want me to say it’s a waste product and you’re going to tell us why. But the leftovers from the production of kerosene or whatever that turned into standard oil are like all there in these shows. They’re really, really well done and it really showed me how this whole industrial thing happened.
So you can just look up The Men Who Built America” and you’ll get to the page and all the shows are there on the History Channel. You can just watch them. Okay, go on.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Yeah. Most likely the one that talks about Rockefeller would explain the early history of the oil industry.
As I was saying, oil, natural gas and coal also are hydrocarbons, which means that they are varying linked chains of combinations of hydrogen and carbon atoms. The simplest one is methane, which is the main constituent of natural gas, which is just one of these chains and one of these segments. And then you can add more octane, which is the main ingredient of gasoline. As the name suggests, eight of these kinds of molecules, hydrocarbon molecules linked together to form a larger molecule.
So the organic chemistry is all about splitting up these chains or adding to them to make longer chains or smaller chains. I think of it as a Lego set and by adding and subtracting molecules, it’s possible to make thousands, tens of thousands of different unique substances, molecular substances. That’s what basically all of modern chemistry is about.
DEBRA: Yes.
RICHARD HEINBERG: It got its start in the 19th century when we started using coal tar as a feedstock for organic chemistry. But then with oil and natural gas, it was possible to use even a greater variety or to produce an even greater variety of organic chemicals.
When the raw crude oil is refined in a refinery, depending on the demand of the sheet to produce certain blends of gasoline, diesel and other fuels, what’s left over often is a heavy gooey tar that ends up being used for building roads. Generally, what’s used for organic chemistry is actually more valuable use of fuel than for making gasoline or diesel. So the chemicals industries and plastics industries will buy whatever natural gas or oil refined products are appropriate for their uses and typically they’re willing to pay a higher price than the gas station down the road.
DEBRA: I think that that’s probably today, but I think in the beginning as I saw on TV that it started out being a fuel and then we started having all these other products because there was this leftover material and then now, the products are much more valuable than the fuel.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Yeah. What do we do with all of these amazing materials that we can refine from oil? Kerosene, which initially was used as lamp oil as a replacement for whale oil, is now what we use to fuel jet airplanes. Jet fuel is basically the old kerosene that we used to use in kerosene lamps.
DEBRA: Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting to think about what if we didn’t have fossil fuels? Where will we make all these things out of? I think that we’ve created – I think you used the term – fossil fuel civilization or fossil fuel society and it really is. All the things that we think are so wonderful and marvelous and time-saving and all these things really are based in the thought that we’ve made them from fossil fuels. We’ve created them from these miraculous materials and yet, there is a supply that is going to end and then it’s not going to be there anymore.
I do want to talk about that. We’re coming up on the break. We still have about a minute, but I don’t want to ask you a long question. Well, I’ll ask you a question. You can start.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Sure.
DEBRA: What I want to talk about next is that I’ve watched your video 300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds about five times now, but none of the listeners have seen it. When we come back from the break, what I’d like you to do is just give us the synopsis.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Sure.
DEBRA: And you don’t have to do it in 300 seconds. I’ll give you about eight minutes to talk about how we got from no fossil fuels to our present situation.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Okay.
DEBRA: Okay, good. So you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Richard Heinberg. He is a Senior Fellow at Post Carbon Institute. Their website is PostCarbon.org. And you can go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and watch this video, 300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Richard Heinberg. He’s from Post Carbon Institute at PostCarbon.org. Okay, Richard, tell us the story.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Okay. The story starts in the 19th century when we were using whale oil as a source of illumination. We were using whale oil as lamp oil to light our homes at night and of course whale oil is a renewable resource. Whales reproduce, but we were using at a rate that was causing the decimation of whale populations around the world. So whale oil was getting more scarce and expensive and we needed a replacement.
Meanwhile, there was a different kind of oil, rock oil, seeping out of the ground in various places around the country, including Western Pennsylvania. And this rock oil or petroleum was able to also be used with just a little refining as lamp oils. So somebody got the brilliant idea of drilling a well, like water well to see if they could get more of this petroleum out of the ground.
It worked and it resulted in a huge economic boom in Pennsylvania. People were going out in wild cat and drilling wells over the place.
Some people got rich. Some people of course lost lots of money. That’s been the story with the oil industry ever since of course. It’s a boom and bust industry because it’s based on resource extraction.
But anyway, along came a clever young chap named John D Rockefeller and he figured out how to turn this boom and bust crazy fast-growing industry into a more orderly and organized wealth producing machine, which became known as standard oil and he organized the oil industry very quickly.
Folks started looking for ways to put this oil to use in transportation. Very soon, the automobile was invented. As more and more people wanted automobiles with which to burn gasoline refined from oil, the problem was how to make the automobiles fast enough. So a guy named Henry Ford came up with the idea of an automated assembly line, in other words, a powered assembly line where automobiles could be produced in much higher numbers much more quickly. And powered assembly lines were then adapted to making other consumer products.
So with powered assembly lines, with cheap energy that could also be used to make electricity, which brought energy right into people’s homes so that all they had to do was plug in appliances. Anywhere in your house, you would have access to energy that would replace muscle power, with all of this, suddenly we had an economic boom like it had never been seen before. In the first couple of decades of the 20th century, we’re all about increasing and manufacturing.
Manufacturing could occur at such a rate at this point that it actually led to the Great Depression. The problem was overproduction. We were making so much stuff so fast that people couldn’t absorb it quickly enough. So the solution to the Great Depression and to the overproduction was a couple of things – advertising, talking people into wanting more stuff and the other was consumer credit, helping people go into debt to buy stuff they couldn’t afford. With these two ingredients, we created the consumer society and the consumer economy that was continually growing depending on people going into evermore debt to buy evermore stuff so that they could keep the engines of production going.
And of course, more and more…
DEBRA: If I could just interrupt you for a second.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Yes.
DEBRA: Here, until this point in time, production of everyday household goods was dependent on the need of people and the people made their own things. They would carve things out of wood. They would sew their own clothing. They would grow their own food and they would produce the amount that they needed and it was all driven by need.
And now, at this point when we’re starting to have advertising and debt, it’s not driven by need anymore. It’s driven by the machines, the need to keep those machines going and continuing the profits of those who own the machines. This is not the way nature works. It’s not at all.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Yeah, right. Also, before our economies were mostly localized, we’ve always had trade and even long distance trade, but usually just for luxury goods. The stuff that people really needed is food, furniture and building materials. All of those came from their immediate regions and vicinities.
But with cheap transport fuel with airplanes and trucks and ships and so on, we began to have what came to be known as globalization.
Economists love this. It’s called economic efficiency if you can make something cheaper in China with cheaper labor and cheaper raw materials, then there’s more profit to be made. But of course, what this does is to create economic fluxes where people lose their jobs because they can’t compete with lower wage workers on the other side of the planet and economic disruption so that every generation where the economy is shifting to something different. One generation, it’s computers. The next generation, it’s iPhones. For the next generation after that, who knows what it’s going to be?
DEBRA: Yeah.
RICHARD HEINBERG: So parents and children speak in a different technological language. They don’t even know what they’re talking about. They lose the same cultural reference. They have musical taste and so on. So we’ve created a very fast-paced society that’s dependent on continual growth and of course it’s all based on the ever increasing extraction of non-renewable resources that are depleting in real time.
DEBRA: Yes. You did a very good job because you just said all of that in exactly the right amount of time.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Terrific.
DEBRA: When we come back from the break, we’re going to hear about Richard’s visions for what’s going to happen when the fossil fuels run out. And maybe you’ll tell us when you think that’s going to happen and how we can transition into a less fossil fuel, less toxic world, which is what I’m interested in, how to be less toxic.
RICHARD HEINBERG: I’ll be happy to talk about that.
DEBRA: That’s great. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Richard Heinberg. He’s from the Post Carbon Institute, which is at PostCarbon.org. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Richard Heinberg. He’s from the Post Carbon Institute and they’re at PostCarbon.org. So Richard, tell us what’s going to happen now with running out of fossil fuels.
RICHARD HEINBERG: We’re seeing the problems associated with depletion particularly in the oil markets. We’re starting to see signs also with coal and natural gas, but I think oil is leading the way. Oil is our most important fossil fuel. Virtually all transportation depends on it, global trade. So oil is really important and we have been searching for oil and pumping oil out of the ground for many decades now and we’ve used the low-hanging fruit principle. In other words, we’ve gone after the cheapest best, most accessible oil.
First, we are not about to run out. There are still lots of oil in the earth’s crust, but as time goes on, what are left to find and to pump is lower and lower grade resources. So we have to use more sophisticated technologies. Here in the United States, we’ve adapted hydraulic fracturing or fracking and horizontal drilling in recent years to go after pockets of oil that geologists previously would never have even bothered with because better resources were available. Well, better resources aren’t available anymore, so now we have to use this sophisticated technology. That means the cost of production is rising very rapidly.
Even though the price of oil fluctuates, it’s generally higher than it was a decade or two ago, but the cost of production for the companies themselves are rising faster than prices are. So this is a prescription for problems down the line. Probably before the end of this decade, we will be seeing another oil shock, another dramatic price increase or a big consolidation in the oil industry with lots of companies going bust or being bought up by other companies.
The oil industry really is showing the initial signs that it’s the end of the road. Over the course of the next few decades, this is an industry that will be going away.
DEBRA: I remember when I was 16 and I was first learning how to drive that gas was $0.25 a gallon and my mother would give me a quarter so I could buy a gallon of gas. And now, it’s $2.50 a gallon. I think that a lot of people who may be listening and are alive today weren’t even alive back in the 1980s when we started having the energy crisis. They didn’t experience this, but I did experience this and I think you probably experienced it too.
RICHARD HEINBERG: That’s right.
DEBRA: What happened was I was driving around in my 100 octane Firebird Formula 400 and I couldn’t get gas for it because they started diluting all the gas. And I couldn’t drive my car. This is at a time – for people who weren’t there at the time – that there was gas rationing.
We think that the supplies are going to just always be there, but if you were living then as I was, you were assigned a day at the week when you can buy gas. And the cars would line up. You have to spend an hour or more sitting in line at the gas station in order to get your ration gas. As I said, I couldn’t even get gas for my car because it required a 100 octane fuel and the octane was being diluted down to 85 or something like that. And I had to buy a different car because I couldn’t drive my car. So I have an idea that something like that is going to happen again.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Yeah. The energy shocks of the 1970s were mostly political in nature having to do with politics in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia and so on.
DEBRA: Yeah.
RICHARD HEINBERG: What’s happening now is entirely different. We’re depleting the high grade resources that drove economic growth during the 20th century.
Getting off of oil is going to be an expensive and time-consuming process because the only real substitutes that we have are battery-powered vehicles, electric cars or bile fuels, making substitute fuels out of food crops. Both of these substitutes are problematic in different ways and neither of them is going to be a direct drop-in replacement for jet fuel or for the kinds of fuels that were in global shipping or trucking.
DEBRA: I see my vision. During the break, I was thinking, “Oh, I should refer to the Post Toxic World.” It’s like your Post Carbon. I should be Post Toxic. My Post Toxic vision is that the whole culture is going to be different because we’ll be using renewable materials instead of fossil fuels to make most of what we’re making and it will all go back to being more local, more artisan and those kinds of things.
And of course, there are technological things that people can’t make it home like televisions and cellphones and stuff like that. Those will probably still be around, but it will end up being a lot more local and natural and handmade than it was prior to fossil fuels.
Do you see that’s probably where we’re going? Or do you have a different vision?
RICHARD HEINBERG: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I mean people already are demanding less toxic materials like paints for example.
DEBRA: Yes.
RICHARD HEINBERG: So companies that make paints are looking for ways to reduce volatile organic compounds, VOCs, which are mostly from fossil fuels, organic paints.
The same thing is happening in the chemical industry, the pharmaceutical industry. They’re realizing that the days of fossil fuels are numbered. So they are going to have to start using plant-based materials, corn starch and other materials like that, carbohydrates to substitute for hydrocarbons.
And of course, in many cases, the substitutes aren’t going to be quite as good at least in the early days. In some cases, there will be more expensive. But one way or another, it’s inevitable that we’re going to have to shift the wave from using fossil fuels as the basis not only for our energy consumption, but also the chemicals industries and plastics and materials industries and all the rest.
DEBRA: I actually feel optimistic that the end is in sight. I’ve spent a lot of time, I’ve spent my entire adult life looking for products that weren’t toxic and telling people about them. But it looks like it’s going to run its natural course and that already we’re seeing or I mean I see over a 30 year period that there’s more and more less toxic products and nontoxic products and more organic things and all of that. It’s starting to emerge. It’s like a new phase, a new wave of what’s coming in the future.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Right.
DEBRA: Go ahead.
RICHARD HEINBERG: You see as a vanguard of this. Most of our industries, most of the people are still on the fossil fuel bandwagon.
DEBRA: Yes, they are.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Those of us who have decided to get off of fossil fuels before the party is really over, I think we’re performing an important function within society as a whole. We’re the growing tip of society leading into the inevitable future. It’s going to take experimentations. It’s going to take time and investment to get us to a toxic-free fossil fuel free future.
So we have to get started now. We can’t just wait until all the oils are gone and then try to figure out what to do.
DEBRA: Yeah. I think that somehow I managed to be able to look into the future and see that’s where it’s going. And I did that many years ago when nobody was talking about this. But I’m glad I did. It’s one of those things where something that was a lemon in my life of getting sick by toxic chemicals turned out to be lemonade on a larger scale because people like you and I need to be here being the visionaries and doing this and leading it all forward because that’s how things change. People have visions and then they say, “That’s what we should do. This makes sense,” and they start making it happen in life and society shifts.
I never had thought about the connection until I saw that show on TV, The Men Who Built America” and then I saw your video. It wasn’t even part of what I was doing to see the fossil fuels as a collaborative movement alongside what I’m doing from the health direction.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Right.
DEBRA: But I’m glad to see what you’re doing and I’m glad to know that you’re there and that people are working on this. So I’m looking at my clock here. We’ve got about a minute left.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Yeah.
DEBRA: So any final words you’d like to say?
RICHARD HEINBERG: Getting off of fossil fuels in the early stages is going to require more effort and expense just like finding less toxic foods and paints and products of all kinds. It takes more effort and sometimes they’re more expensive. But in the long run, we are doing a service not only to ourselves, but also to the rest of society by creating demand for products that will ultimately be necessary for everyone, not just for a niche audience, but for everyone.
Sometimes, it feels lonely out there being the only one to be driving an electric car or whatever, but this is really important work.
DEBRA: It is. Thank you. Thank you. I’m so happy to meet you. I’m sure we’ll be talking again.
RICHARD HEINBERG: I hope so.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
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