Water | Swimming Pools
Sassis Organic Clothing
Casual clothing made from organic cotton (even the label and thread are organic cotton). For women, children, and maternity. Simple basic designs in various solid colors, including tops, skirts, dresses, pants and shorts. Sizes XS to XL. Woman owned and operated, and manufacture in the USA.
Where can I buy nontoxic checks?
Question from Mary
I would like to order checks that are odorless, or at least, nontoxic. Suggestions please.
Debra’s Answer
I’ve listed the major suppliers of checks made from recycled paper using soy-based inks on the Checks page of Debra’s List.
Soy-based ink is much less toxic that standard ink made from petroleum.
Readers, what are your favorite places to buy checks?
Outdoor Dining Set
Question from Stacey
Hi Debra,
I just bought an outdoor dining set, but am now having second thoughts if I want my children eating/sitting on it. The table is “resin wood with white paint finish,” and the chairs are “steel/iron tube with white powdercoat finish” and made in China.
When I asked a customer service rep at Crate and Barrel what the table was made of, one person said it was polypropylene. I do know the canopy is made of polypropylene with brass grommets. Would you recommend this set or cancel because it is too toxic?
There are other sets made of cheaper materials. One dining set (table and chairs) is made of “rustproof aluminum with a powdercoat finish.” Another set is made of “extruded polysterene with UV antioxidant protection,” and other set is made of “resin wicker.” Would you recommend/use any of these sets?
Of course my favorite is the teak dining set which is much more expensive, but at least it is safe for my children ( I do wonder about the Teak protective oil they recommend to preserve the color)…
If you would only recommend the natural wood to dine on, then I would find a way to get the teak. I trust your recommendations and am grateful for all your great research!
Thanks so much!
Debra’s Answer
If it were my backyard, I’d get the natural wood and be careful about the “teak oil.” Looking for a recommendation about this, I found one article that said it doesn’t have the strength to hold up to the harsh outdoor environment. It is also known to attract fungus and mold. This article actually had no recommendations for teak protection.
I had an unfinished solid wood table in my backyard for about twenty-five years before it fell apart, but that’s what wood does. It biodegrades.
Now, if you are not going to do solid wood, your “resin wood with white paint finish” is probably fine. And the steel/iron tube with white powdercoat finish is definitely fine. Polypropylene is made from petroleum, but not particularly toxic.
“Rustproof aluminum with a powdercoat finish” would also be fine.
I’d stay away from the “extruded polystyrene with UV antioxidant protection,” and “resin wicker…” well, we don’t know really what that is.
Cast iron and glass is a good choice for outdoors. It’s long-lasting and not toxic.
Living With Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS)
Today my guest is biochemist Richard H. Conrad PhD. From his home in Hawaii, Richard does consulting by phone for individuals, architects, builders, and corporations on the subject of reducing chemical and EMF exposures in homes and workplaces. He aim is to both keep healthy people healthy and help people with multiple chemical sensitivities and electromagnetic hypersensitivities. Today we’ll be talking about the nature of electromagnetic hypersensitivities, how to prevent them, and how to live with them if you have them. Richard was raised in New Jersey, and won a couple of national science awards while in high school.After graduating from Brandeis University, he obtained a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University in 1968. Richard spent some time in the Biochemistry Department at Cornell University and was an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. One of his many interests led him to spend a number of years experimenting with different ways of disinfecting his swimming pool and hot tub. During this time he developed and patented ozone generation equipment for purifying water (where he met my father, who was also working in this field). In addition to his consulting, Richard’s website has many papers and links related to MCS and EHS. www.conradbiologic.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Living with Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Richard H. Conrad, PhD
Date of Broadcast: July 14, 2014
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 Monday, July 14th, 2014. I am here in Clearwater, Florida. The sun is shining, no thunderstorms. And we are going to be talking today about electromagnetic hypersensitivity. That’s EHS for short.
My guest today is biochemist, Richard H. Conrad, PhD. He is someone who has multiple chemical sensitivities and electromagnetic hypersensitivity. But he is also a scientist and he has a lot of information. He thinks about things about how to figure out what the solution is and he has a lot of background experience in science.
I’m looking for all of his credentials here. He graduated from Brandeis University. Then he obtained a PhD in Biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University. Then he spent some time in the Biochemistry Department at Cornell University and was an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.
One of his many interests led him to spend a number of years, experimenting with different ways of disinfecting his swimming pool and hot tub using ozone. And there, he met my father or he met me. So we have known each other for quite some years and have had many, many conversations on these subjects.
So welcome to the show, Richard.
RICHARD CONRAD: Thanks, Debra. Good morning.
DEBRA: Good morning.
RICHARD CONRAD: It’s morning here.
DEBRA: It’s just past morning here. You are off in Hawaii. Richard is in Hawaii. So what time is it there?
RICHARD CONRAD: A little after 6 a.m.
DEBRA: Yeah. So we met. How long have we known each other?
RICHARD CONRAD: Twenty-five or twenty years?
DEBRA: Twenty, something like that, yeah.
RICHARD CONRAD: And the fact that you mentioned the ozone generation, I had gotten into electronic design rather heavily and did a lot of electronics. I am a real techie that enjoy electronics.
I was designing high voltage, high frequency, switching power supplies for generating ozone. These are tremendous emitters of EMF (which I didn’t think about at the time). And they didn’t bother me at all. I was standing next to them, operating them, experimenting with them.
It was until years later that I got EMF sensitivities from the devices.
DEBRA: Well, tell us your story of how you became chemically sensitive and electrically sensitive.
RICHARD CONRAD: Well, in chemical sensitivities, people can be either disposed genetically or things happen as they grow up that affect their immune and endocrine system that makes them more susceptible.
But in particular, I had some mold problems in my home that I didn’t know about. The carpet under the bed I was sleeping on was soaking wet for months with water that have leaked in from the shower. And then, the other factor probably was formaldehyde from a particle board camper, a brand new one that I was living enclosed up in the winter.
It happened rather quickly all at once at one point. Suddenly, colognes and perfumes began to bother me.
But I was doing my electronic experiments for maybe five years after that with no problem and working with switching power supplies. And a friend of mind told me about her electrical sensitivities. It was the first time I had heard of it. I thought it sounded crazy to me. I didn’t believe it because I worked with the stuff, and it didn’t bother me. And she wasn’t a scientist.
And she was maybe, I thought, a little bit susceptible to believing these things and making it up. And then I forgot about it.
A few years later, I bought some new equipment, a projector to use as a computer monitor, a video projector. And I was amazed at the gorgeous image. I was using it for DVDs and large screen computer monitor for doing CAD design work.
After about two hours on it, my skin began to burn. It was strange. It felt like a sunburn. And I was wondering what that was.
I didn’t know what it was related to.
And then the next day, I was using it and my skin started to burn after about an hour. And the next day, my skin started to burn about 20 minutes. And then the next time I used it, my skin burned in five minutes. Eventually, my skin was burning within one minute when I turned it on. There’s no doubt about the correlation.
They say that correlation isn’t always causation. But repeated correlation, when there’s no other thing that’s changing in your life, it’s common sense to realize what is causing the problem. This is the projector for me.
And then after that, I began to have reaction to various other things like my mini keyboard. Playing music, my wrists would hurt. In fact, I think some of carpal tunnel syndrome is not just the overuse of the muscles and the joints in the hands and wrists. Using them in an electromagnetic field really potentiates the carpal tunnel even more.
DEBRA: That makes sense.
RICHARD CONRAD: And then there are a number of other exposures I got inadvertently and I didn’t know it was happening until later. And then I realized it correlated with the electrical device.
The normal symptoms—well, there are no normal symptoms, but typical symptoms of electrical sensitivity (because I have talked to hundreds of people and did a survey on smart meter effect) are ringing in the ears, an unusual ringing of the ears, different kinds of tinnitus (it’s usually called tinnitus, I think) which can have different kinds of characteristic sounds like buzzing of bees or a cadence or rushing water.
It’s a sound that’s generated inside your head. But in the nervous system, it doesn’t go away. Or it goes away slowly, but can happen very quickly after an exposure and that takes days or weeks to go away if at all, if it goes away at all.
And heart arrhythmia, which people have never had before, can be due to exposure to equipment. One type of equipment that people are exposed to that they don’t realize has a lot of EMF is when they get an ultrasound that also produces a lot of EMF.
Unusual headaches, unusual insomnia, burning skin, agitation, fatigue, numbness, these are effects on the immune and the nervous system, which pervade the whole body.
So you could get any kind of system, which reflects problems in the nervous system that varies from person to person. But there are these typical range of symptoms that are usually the tinnitus, heart arrhythmias, burning skin, agitation, insomnia, headaches, severe headaches.
DEBRA: So it basically affects the nervous system and the immune system?
RICHARD CONRAD: It appears to. Yes. Unfortunately, the research in humans is very, very sparse. The only research in humans has been showing—there are few experiments that do show that people’s heart rate and heart rate variability changes with exposures in double blind experiments.
Also there are changes to the EEG and changes in sleep patterns in humans that have been proven and in fact were accepted by the people who don’t want to accept these things such as the telecommunications companies and the WHO.
They have to admit that these effects exist and the FCC.
But they claim, “Oh, they are not significant.” Well, if the EEG, changes in the EEG are not significant and changes in sleep patterns are not significant, that means thinking and your mood and your ability to figure out problems where your emotional happiness are not significant. So they are looking slam bang side effects.
But if the FDA was in charge of regulating EMFs and they did it in such a way that they regulate, even though sometimes poorly, drugs, if there’s a host of side effects in people, they start looking at them and keeping track of them and will draw drug if there’s a problem. And in fact, before drug is allowed to be on the market, they will go at the side effects and testing.
In the EMF world and the telecommunications, cellphone, the computers, all the different Wi-Fi devices and the smart meters, there has been no testing on humans. None, no matter what they say, there is not any testing on humans.
And when they get report after report after report of the side effects, they say that’s the first time they have heard of it. Each time, that’s what they say.
DEBRA: I’m sure it isn’t.
RICHARD CONRAD: And then they reject it.
DEBRA: We need to go to break.
RICHARD CONRAD: Okay.
DEBRA: We need to go to break. And we will talk more about this when we come back. You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I am Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is biochemist Richard H. Conrad. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I am Debra Lynn Dadd. Today, we are talking about living with electromagnetic hypersensitivity and my guest is biochemist Richard H. Conrad, PhD.
He’s got a lot of papers and links related to MCS and electro-hypersensitivity on his website, which is ConradBiologic.com.
And he also does consulting. So if you have a question for him about how you can reduce toxic chemical exposures and EHS, electromagnetic exposures in your home, then he is a good person to call. Again his website is ConradBiologic.com.
So Richard, you talked to a lot of people. I know you have talked to just probably hundreds of people over the years who have electrical sensitivity. What are some stories you have heard from them?
RICHARD CONRAD: In a way, similar to mine. They didn’t believe in it beforehand. They haven’t had heard of it beforehand in many cases. And when it first happened to them, they didn’t know what was happening and didn’t relate it to electronic equipment until correlations began to become obvious.
And most of them were people that were addicted to their electronic equipment and wanted or had for their occupation to continue using it and can no longer use the equipment or at least only sparingly. And most people were using Wi-Fi, cellphones, computers and then they get electrical sensitivity and they stop using Wi-Fi completely. They can’t use cellphones anymore. And they use computers, but maybe only for 10 or 20 minutes before they get symptoms.
I got one story of a fellow that just called me a week ago from Jamaica, a young 21 year old guy, very bright, who has won a number of awards in software design for mobile applications. And he is just starting his career. He has about 15 or 20 programming software programming languages under his belt. And he was invited to be a part of a startup company and he really had high hopes of his work. He has a girlfriend. I am sure he wants to get married.
Then what happened was one day, he was working many hours on his computer and fell asleep in front of it and in front of the 4G wireless modem, about 4 ft away from him. When he woke up, his life changed forever.
He had numbness in his body, a great deal of fatigue. He’s a guy that normally has great energy and he ended up in the bed and didn’t know what to do and didn’t know it was affecting him until he began to make correlations.
And he bought an EMF meter and realized how much EMF radiation was in his environment. And he figured out what the sources were and cleaned it up and practiced avoiding it, which is basically one of the few things we can do to lessen electrical sensitivity and lessen the probability of getting it.
Now, he built a little shack at the beach so he could escape all technology for a few days at a time. And he still can’t use anything and he still has the numbness in his arms and legs, fingers, feet. But at least he is not as ill. But he can’t pursue his occupation. He’s all trained and ready to go as a programmer and he is in limbo right now.
DEBRA: I want to ask you a question about something you just said. You said that he goes to the beach so that he can escape all technology. What I am about to ask you is something that I wondered about for a long time because you are much more of an EMF expert than I am.
I know that they are just sending all these frequencies all around the world. You can hardly walk down the street without running into one of them. And so, I have this idea that there really isn’t a place that you can go in the world where you would receive no exposure to EMFs anymore. It’s like toxic chemicals, there is no place you can go where there are zero toxic chemicals.
Is that true? Or maybe when he goes away from the center of the city, it would probably be the worst place where there is so much electromagnetics going on that maybe if you went to the beach or out in the mountains, you wouldn’t have so much immediate exposure, but there would still be that background exposure?
RICHARD CONRAD: Yes. People can generally tolerate, although possibly it was subliminal symptoms like agitation and attention deficit in everyone, short term effects that they don’t realize and possibly long term cancer effects from low levels, but no overt symptoms.
But once it gets over a certain level, it’s like a straw that broke the camel’s back and for certain people, it throws them into extreme sensitivity. And if they get out of the strong exposures, at least they have a chance to recover somewhat.
There are huge differences in the levels in different areas. You’re right, the radar is the low frequency transmissions to penetrate the earth and go through the ionosphere and penetrate the oceans to communicate with submarines, all the satellites beaming down microwaves.
You can escape it all, but the very, very strongest, by thousands of times stronger is what people have in their very own homes and what they are using against their heads, putting microwave transmitter next to their heads, the cellphone and smart meters on the sides of houses, which are causing symptoms way above what you’d expect from the levels of the intensity that’s actually there. It is probably due to the of pulses of the microwave.
If people get away from the major sources, then after a while, they can tolerate the lower sources at least without overt short term effects. In fact, being under salt water, salt water absorbs most of the microwaves. But being at the beach, by that, I meant just being away from civilization and cellphone towers and other people’s cellphones.
It is a great help to do that, just like if you eat organic food, you still might be getting some plasticizers from some processing in the factory or packaging and trace amounts of things. But it’s still a great help in spite of breathing chemicals in the air. At least, most of what you are taking in is better.
DEBRA: By doing that, you are reducing the overall load. Even if it isn’t down to zero, it is less than a million. We need to go to break again.
RICHARD CONRAD: And one thing people should always be doing…
DEBRA: Wait. We do need to go to break or the commercial will just come cut you off midsentence. So just hold that thought and we will be right back. You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I am Debra Lynn Dadd and I am talking with biochemist, Richard Conrad. His website is ConradBiologic.com. We’ll be right back to hear what he’s got to say.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is biochemist, Richard H. Conrad, PhD.
He’s talking to us from his home in Hawaii where he does consulting by phone with individuals, architects, builders and corporations about reducing EMF exposures in homes and workplaces. And his website is ConradBiologic.com.
And Richard, what did you want to say before I so rudely cut you off? Do you remember?
RICHARD CONRAD: I wanted to mention…
DEBRA: It was something about reducing. We were talking about reducing.
RICHARD CONRAD: Yeah, there’s so much to say in such a short time. For everyone, it is important to reduce their exposures. And we are getting a lot of unnecessary exposure from Wi-Fi that’s on all the time, computers that are left on all night. Everything should be shut off when not used, especially while sleeping so the body can recover.
And people should not use Wi-Fi. It would be much better use internet cable so they don’t have these transmitters, intentional EMF radiators.
DEBRA: I have a question about that. I don’t use Wi-Fi in my home. Usually, I use my desktop, but when I turn my laptop on, it asks me if I want to connect to this Wi-Fi because it is picking up my neighbor’s Wi-Fi.
RICHARD CONRAD: Yes. In some cases, in apartment buildings, there might be hundreds of Wi-Fi at very high levels that someone is exposed to. It won’t help too much to turn off their own. But in most cases, in individual homes, it does.
When you are in an internet café and using your laptop, the Wi-Fi signal from the modem in the internet café is strong enough to be worrisome. But much worse is the Wi-Fi next to the source that’s so close to you, your computer, which is communicating with it.
So using Wi-Fi with a laptop, you are getting a huge dose compared to what’s coming from the node 10 or 20 or 30 ft away.
So just doing it for someone that’s not sensitive and hopefully not predisposed to getting more sensitive, it is okay to do it for a few minutes at a time. But it is not something I would recommend.
DEBRA: I totally agree. I wanted to say that in terms of just being exposed to less, I had an EMF inspection some years ago and they came in with all their gas meters and stuff. And they found that the highest levels of EMF in my home were right where I was working every day. I was just sitting right in the hottest spot in my house.
And one of them was I had a generator under my desk because we have a lot of thunderstorms here in Florida, so sometimes the electricity goes off. So I got this backup generator that will keep my computer on even if the power went off.
And that was the number one source. And it was sitting right under my desk. I would put my feet on it.
RICHARD CONRAD: To keep your feet warm, huh? Is it a backup, a batter backup, an APS system?
DEBRA: It is a battery backup, yeah.
RICHARD CONRAD: Yeah. That has a switching power supply that’s running all the time. That’s why it is so strong.
DEBRA: Yeah. So I just got rid of that just completely. I took it out of the house entirely and I no longer have a battery backup. But I haven’t needed it. I mean I haven’t had any problem not having it.
And the second hottest place was right next to my desk where my phone was. It was my cordless phone, not my cellphone, but my cordless phone.
RICHARD CONRAD: They are really bad.
DEBRA: Yeah, they’re really, really bad.
RICHARD CONRAD: They […] whether or not you are using them.
DEBRA: Right. So I immediately took out those two things. I got a corded phone. I’ve been using a corded phone since.
And it’s just these things where there’s so much new technology. And I think that people just think that it’s more convenient or it is the coolest thing or whatever when in fact, if we would just do something like getting the wireless phones out of our house. I mean I know that there’s a whole list of other things that can be done even if somebody just removes the wireless phone.
On other shows, we’ve already talked about cellphones. And I have a cellphone, but it is way on the other side of the room in my purse. And I tell my people, “Here’s my cell number, but don’t call me on it because I don’t ever answer it.”
And the only time I have it is so that I make sure that if I need to be reached in an emergency when I am travelling. I use it when I go out of the house. I have it if I need to make a phone call and things like that.
But I am not walking around with my cellphone in my pocket all day long like some people or having it next to their ear all day long like some people.
RICHARD CONRAD: They, in fact, transmit less, but they transmit even in receive mode when you are not talking on them as long as they are on.
And even worse are the smart phones because they are more like a computer, which is communicating with the internet.
And there is much more data going back and forth all the time on those. There’s a lot more emissions from those.
DEBRA: So there are…
RICHARD CONRAD: I wanted to mention…
DEBRA: Yeah, go ahead.
RICHARD CONRAD: There are two things I want to mention, a lot of things.
DEBRA: I know. There’s a lot to talk about. How about if you talk about why the FCC and the EPA don’t protect us from harmful EMFs?
RICHARD CONRAD: Because the FDA standards are designed to protect us from heating as if we were meat in a microwave oven.
And they are not recognizing the effects of very low levels of EMF, which there are tens of thousands of research papers showing these effects in cells and in animals. And most animal experiments are relevant to humans. Not all, but this is what’s used in the drug industry. So why not in the telecommunications industry to be worried about thousands of animal experiments that show problems with breakage of chromosomes, leakage of the blood brain barrier, which allows synergy between chemicals and EMF because the blood brain barrier protects the brain from chemicals that happen to get in your body? If that breaks down, you got even worse effects of these chemicals.
The very low currents can double the rate of cancer growth. Whether or not they induce it, we’re not sure, but it certainly greatly increases cancer growth. Low electrical currents are normally used in the body for healing and changing cells from one kind of cell to another differentiation and de-differentiation to induce healing. By the same token, if they are applied wrongly or artificially, they can induce cancer cell growth. This is known.
But the FCC wants to set the standards so that everything is heavily influenced by the Department of Defense, in the military. They want to be able to use the radars and all their equipment, their electronic equipment without restriction.
And the FDA looks to the EPA. They say, “We don’t know anything about health. The EPA controls the health.” And the EPA drops the ball because they are told to by the government. And the EPA has stopped all research on EMF and doesn’t talk about it anymore.
So it’s all without any controls at all, no feedback at all. And systems without feedback eventually self-destruct and that’s what is starting to happen. It’s denial.
DEBRA: Yeah, I understand. We need to go to break again. There are so many breaks. But you are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I am Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is biochemist, Richard Conrad. He’s talking to us from his home in Hawaii. His website is ConradBiologic.com. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I am Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is biochemist, Richard Conrad.
He’s at ConradBiologic.com and not only does he do consulting, he has many papers and links related to what we are talking about today. There‘s lots of information. If you have a particular problem with your own health in this regard or want some help reducing EMF exposures in your home or workplace, give him a call.
Richard, this is the last segment of the show. I know it goes by so quickly. Let’s talk about what your general recommendations are as a consultant and what kind of precautions people can take. Let’s talk about the positives of what we can do.
RICHARD CONRAD: One of the first things to look at is something that’s easy to correct aside from getting rid of all the wireless and microwaves and all the sources in your home and the technology that people are using, minimizing the exposure. The actual EMFs, the magnetic field, the low frequency from the house wiring, most houses have mistakes in the wiring that creates unnecessary high EMF exposures that have all kinds of proven effects on people.
This can be corrected by discovering these by having a Gauss meter and going around the house in the areas that people normally spend time and an electrician that knows what he’s doing or a consultant. Using an electrician or directing the electrician can often solve most of these problems in just an hour or two by correcting improperly connected neutrals where you have neutrals improperly connected to each other where they joined two circuits together that shouldn’t be connected.
Shortcuts that the electricians normally take in inappropriate grounds, by lowering the background EMF in the home, people are not as predisposed to getting reactions from the other higher frequency devices. So that’s the first step.
I don’t believe that any of [dependence] or protective devices work most of that. It’s nonsense, those little labels that people say you can stick on the cellphone. It’s absolute hype.
There are a few active devices that generate human resonance that people plug in to work. Some of them might work for some people and they might hurt others.
The one thing to know about the microwave systems out there, Wi-Fi, smart meters is that all of these us pulse microwaves.
And the pulsing is done at frequencies that the human brain uses in the typical EEG frequencies. And this is what makes them so much worse.
The microwave, for instance the cellphone is a very efficient delivery system of inappropriate but biological frequencies into the brain because they pick the frequency of the cellphones and the Wi-Fi are right at the same frequencies as a microwave oven where tissue absorbs and heats if you have enough.
But even if you don’t have enough energy, the absorption causes low level effects and can carry this pulsing because the microwave is pulsing to the low frequency. It delivers the pulses at lower frequencies into the brain that wouldn’t ordinarily get into the brain as easily.
And the wavelengths are not just easily absorbed by tissue as we know when we heat a steak in a microwave oven. But they are the same wavelength as the size of the brain, which makes the head a good antenna for them for receiving them.
So this is all inadvertent, but it’s dumb, it’s blind. And people, once they are told—when I say people, the telecommunications companies, when it’s pointed out to them, they don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to make or accept that they have been doing things that hurt people.
And then rather than protect people and design, redesign their systems in such a way to cause less damage, which they can very easily do by different kinds of frequencies and different kinds of modulation schemes. They just stick their head in the sand and refuse to budge.
DEBRA: Maybe they are just looking at it and saying, “I don’t want to shut down my company entirely.” Maybe they don’t understand…
RICHARD CONRAD: Oh, they understand what they are doing. They understand what they are doing and they don’t care.
It’s just like the people who are making […], once it was discovered what it was doing, they still try to cover it up—the cigarettes, the same; silicone implants, the same. They know what they are doing. They are no longer humans. They are corporate robots. And their function is to generate money for their company.
But if they had any foresight, they’d realize that here’s an opportunity to get a leg up over the other companies and develop new products that are safer, which they are going to have to do eventually and be ahead of the game. But they stay behind and they are hurting a lot of people. It’s real.
DEBRA: I agree with you that a lot of people are being hurt by this. I mean I am on a lot of mailing list and I get a lot of information about this, about how people are being hurt by electromagnetic hypersensitivity. And I do think that companies should do the right thing and that somebody should be the first to have safer products and then everybody will follow after that.
You and I have been in this field for a long time. And remember 25 years ago, there were a lot of toxic products and not very many safer alternatives. But when people like me—I’ll give myself credit—when people like me started saying, “Okay, buy these. Here’s the little handful of safe products. Buy these because they are safer.” Now there are just so many more products than there used to be.
RICHARD CONRAD: It happened, but much more slowly because in the case of chemicals, it was the chemical companies and the insurance companies that were stopping it. Now, it is the military and the government. So it’s even harder.
DEBRA: Yeah.
RICHARD CONRAD: It will just come out eventually and I think it will be public pressure that eventually will make a change although as we can see with smart meters affecting so many people without them realizing what’s affecting them first and they don’t even know they have the smart meter and they get any strange symptoms.
Then they correlate it finally and have the smart meter removed and they do a lot better or they leave home and they are doing better and they come back and they make their own correlations and they see that it’s real.
DEBRA: Yeah.
RICHARD CONRAD: The electric companies are resistant to even thinking about it or dealing with it.
One other thing I wanted to mention quickly if we can go back to it, if we have time is just the plug-in filters that are being sold to plug into your wall just supposedly reducing EMF and dirty power. It rarely worked and that’s because most of the dirty power from certain power supplies and other sources is what’s called common mode noise.
And these filters and the devices, the meters they sell to measure dirty power only measure differential noise, which is a small part of it. And they only correct differential noise at a certain frequency. So they shouldn’t be relying on these plug-in filters.
They call them filters. They are not really. They are just capacitors. They should not be relied on to protect people in their homes at all.
DEBRA: Okay, good. That’s good to know. So what are some specific solutions besides avoiding obviously that people can do to use their computers more safely?
RICHARD CONRAD: First, the general thing is that what makes people more susceptible and more sensitive is stress and inflammation. And unfortunately, electrical sensitivities, electrical exposures make people more stressed and more inflammation in their system.
But if you can reduce stress from other sources and inflammation from other sources, people who are electrically sensitive are much more sensitive on days that they eat food that they are allergic to for example.
Sometimes problems, especially the insomnia due to the electrical fields interfering with melatonin and melatonin levels and its beneficial effects, some people are benefited by taking extra melatonin before they go to sleep at night.
I have an article on my website on partial solutions for EMF sensitivities and one of them is Inositol taken at night. It can help some people lower their inflammation and responsiveness to electrical fields.
But for computers and to be able to be online, it’s a very difficult problem. The best thing I can suggest is it is just a matter of picking devices. Some devices that work cause a lot more problems for people than others. And one just has to try different devices and see.
In general, everything has a switching power supply. All of the wall warts that we use, all the power adapters and chargers are switching power supplies. Stay as far away from them as possible.
It’s best to use a laptop on batteries and not plugged into the wall at all when you are using it. And the charges should be used only when you are not at home and at some distance from you if you have to use it while you are on the laptop.
Using an extra keyboard and mouse can be a help. The old roller ball mouse has less EMF than the modern optical mice.
Certain keyboards are a lot worse for people than others. It’s a mess.
DEBRA: I’m going to interrupt you there because we only have 30 seconds left.
RICHARD CONRAD: And I have a lot of solutions, partial solutions for that. And the real solutions are very expensive, for instance, building a shield box for a projector, which can be used at a distance, projecting onto real projections…
DEBRA: Richard, Richard, Richard, I have to interrupt you because we only got 10 seconds before the music comes on and it’s the end of the show. So thank you very much.
You can find more about Richard at ConradBiologic.com. You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I am Debra Lynn Dadd.
Be well.
Earth Creations Clothing
Clothing for everyone in the family, made from a “hemp/organic cotton blend has wonderful durability and gets softer every time you wash it,” with eco-friendly dyes.”We strive to create high-quality, eco-friendly clothing in a sustainable manner, and make something beautiful that you’ll love to wear day after day.” Most garments are made in the USA in a sweatshop-free environment.” Large selection, lots of colors and styles to choose from. This company started out making t-shirts dyed with natural clay. One day after a storm, one of the founders went for a bike ride and ended up covered with red clay mud. When, after years of washing, it was found that the color could not be removed, clay-dyeing was born. And it still continues today.
Recommended Caulks?
Question from di
Has anyone tried any of the other Eco-Bond caulks besides the multi-purpose version? I have MCS and need a non-toxic version.
I’m needing to do caulking again and prefer to not need to paint it in some areas.
If not, what brand do you use? The elmer’s glue brand caulk? or Aquarium caulk?
Thanks.
di
Debra’s Answer
Readers? What is your experience?
Bed Sheets
Question from Nancy Carew
Hi – I am in despair trying to find bed sheets I can tolerate. I have one set we are using that is just about threadbare and patched in several places (it is an old cotton set I have had for years).
I have ordered Garnet Hill percale sheets, Janice’s organic sateen sheets, 2 other types of organic sheets, and flannel sheets from Portugal and have reacted to all of them. I have soaked in both vinegar and baking soda and washed endlessly.
Do you have any suggestions of what other types of sheets might work for me? (I also took a very old set of white sheets from my father’s linen closet but I can’t seem to get a perfume odor out of those.)
I would appreciate any suggestions you may have. Thanks so much.
Debra’s Answer
Readers, any suggestions? I can only evaluate products by their ingredients, not by individual intolerances. Any brands you like?
How Safe is a “Poron Footbed”?
Question from Stacey
Hi Debra,
I found some UGG Australia leather shoes that I like, however, they are also made with a “PORON/EVA footbed.” Do you think this PORON is safe in shoes, or would you not recommend shoes with this cushioning?
Thank you!
Debra’s Answer
Poron is a brand name for a urethane material made from petroleum. No MSDS is required because “this material does not release and will not result in exposure to a hazardous chemical under normal conditions of use.”
EVA is ethylene vinyl acetate, which is made from ethylene and vinyl acetate. But it is not very toxic. The MSDS says that it may cause irritation if it comes in contact with the skin, but inhalation is not a probable route of exposure and it is “not considered hazardous.” It’s basically a polyethylene. Like a sandwich bag.
Even though both these materials are made from petroleum, their toxicity is relatively low.
How To Dress Without Toxics and Still Have Style
Today my guest is Greta Eagan, eco ambassador, writer, stylist, conscious living expert, and author of Wear No Evil: How to Change the World with Your Wardrobe. We’re going to be talking about toxics in textiles and how to have “style + sustainability without sacrifice.” Shortly after graduating from the London College of Fashion, Greta founded fashionmegreen.com, a sustainable fashion awareness project- now a popular blog. Both the author and her blog have become leading sources for information on sustainable style, green beauty, and eco-chic decor. Greta has contributed to publications in print and online, including Glamour, Lucky and the Huffington Post, and has collaborated with brands such as Kate Spade, Eileen Fisher, The Outnet, Refinery29, and many more. She has made TV appearances for eco-fashion and beauty segments, hosted Aspen Fashion Week for Outdoor Television, and been both a panel and keynote speaker at conferences around the world including SXSW Eco. www.fashionmegreen.com | www.gretaeagan.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How To Dress Without Toxics and Still Have Style
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: GRETA EAGAN
Date of Broadcast: February 13, 2015
DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. Today is Thursday, July 10th, 2014. We’re going to be talking about – I just heard a noise, goodness.
Anyway, we’re going to be talking about clothing today. We’re going to be talking about how to choose toxic-free clothing but also how to still look stylish when you’re wearing toxic-free and otherwise green clothing because there’s more to green clothing than just being toxic. Then we’re going to talk a little bit about that too. But mostly of course, on this show, we’re interested in our toxic exposures and how to remove them.
We’re going to talk a lot about fashion today too. I’m smiling to myself because I know earlier in my life, I used to be quite a fashionable aware person and always had to wear the latest thing, et cetera. Until I started thinking about what those clothes are made of and wanting to only wear natural fibers.
Now, I live in Florida. I used to live in the San Francisco Bay area, but now I live in Florida. And fashion goes out the window here because it’s so hot. And you’re just sweating all day long if you’re out and if you’re not in an air-conditioned building.
And so when I moved here, I totally changed everything I wore to things that were – everything had to be made out of cotton or linen because that’s the most comfortable thing to wear in the heat. And it also needed to just get thrown in the washing machine because I would literally have to change my clothes two or three times a day if was not in an air-conditioned environment. You just perspire and perspire and perspire.
Now, I spend a lot of time indoors in the air conditioning, but still my basic wardrobe is cotton tank tops and cotton Capri pants. I just have those two items in every color I can get them in. I just mix and match them in any possible way. And that’s about how other people dress here too. But we’re going to talk about all kinds of fashion style and toxic-free, how we can wear clothing that’s toxic-free.
My guest is Greta Eagan. She is the author of Wear No Evil: How to Change the World with Your Wardrobe. Shortly after graduating from the London College of Fashion, she founded FashionMeGreen.com. It’s a sustainable fashion awareness project that’s now a popular blog.
She and her blog have become leading sources for information on sustainable style, green beauty and eco-sheet décor. She’s contributed to publications in print and online including Glamour Magazine, Lucky and Huffington Post. She has collaborated with brands such as Kate Spade, Aileen Fisher, the Outnet, Refinery29 and many more.
Welcome to the show, Greta.
GRETA EAGAN: Hi. Thanks for having me.
DEBRA: Thanks for being on the show. So tell us – I just gave a little introduction, but tell us your story of how you went from being just a regular fashion-oriented person to being concerned about these issues.
GRETA EAGAN: Yeah. I always like to say that I was a fashionista before an environmentalist. That’s the truth.
Originally when I went to the London College of Fashion, I went to study Fashion Promotion and Marketing. I already had this innate passion and love of fashion, which I think a lot of people who are in the fashion industry have and what drives them to be in the industry itself.
And as I learned more – I mean it was literally through one of my first courses, which was the History of Fashion, I learned more about the democratization of fashion and the industrialization and how the Industrial Revolution really had an impact on fashion production and mass fashion production.
What we had originally was more limited resources and in the sense of what we had available. And you found that families would repair pieces of clothing and pass them down. They’d make them last as long as they could.
Then with the spinning jenny and different technologies that came out of the Industrial Revolution, obviously now we’ve just proliferated that more and more we really can produce fashion so much more quickly. It’s bred this thing that we’re all aware of now called fast fashion or even what people are calling throw-away fashion.
That was at the height when I was studying in London. Fast fashion model was really coming into full steam. People were buying top and wearing it for a night out and not even bothering to wash it. They were done with it because it was such a cheap piece of fashion that it didn’t really warrant a wash and another wear. They were satisfied with the one-wear.
That was just really, really disturbing to me. And I had a real moral conflict. I had to sit myself down and have an honest thought. If I wanted to participate in the fashion industry, could I do it and still have my conscience and my morals upheld.
That’s what really led me down to the path of finding this alternative way of participating in fashion and what was pretty much termed corporate social responsibility for fashion. And then it led me down the rabbit hole of what we now call Eco Fashion, which is a more conscious production, new space and discarding of the clothing that we use and put next to our bodies.
DEBRA: So do you consider Eco Fashion to still be fashion in the sense that – if you were to ask me what is the definition of fashion, I would say that it – as you say the industry, the fashion industry, I think of it as being an industry.
But like any other industry, the idea is to get people to continue to buy the product whether they need it or not. So there’s always new fashion that comes in, something being in fashion or out of fashion. If you are – like I used to be, you had to be wearing the right thing at the right time that the fashion industry was telling you to wear.
I went through a period of time when I started being aware of toxics where I said, “Okay. So clothes don’t have to be about fashion. They should be about keeping my body warm and looking nice.”
So for me, part of the question about what I wear is “Is it appropriate?” Like I was saying in the introduction, I dress suitably for Florida. And here, we need to have clothes that we can throw in the washing machine as many times a day as we need to. I’m not concerned about what fashion is anymore because I’m dressing for my place.
And so how does eco fashion – does eco fashion as a movement include things like buying fewer clothing and considering things like timeless designs and those things, as well as what the materials are?
GRETA EAGAN: You brought up a couple of really good points. One is the definition of fashion.
Miuccia Prada, who’s the founder of Prada and a very visionary designer, tends to lead the way in the fashion industry a lot of what she puts out other designers follow. And she does perpetuate these new styles that you were saying that you changed.
She said that in a society that we’re in today, a global society where everything is moving so quickly, fashion and clothing are actually communication. It’s a visual language that we communicate to other people. What we wear is a reflection of how we feel, maybe how we feel comfortable in what we’re wearing or like you were saying, for dressing for the environment.
I think that the goal is to get to a place where you’re not really dressing for everyone else. Like you were saying, if you weren’t really wearing the right thing at the right time, maybe you felt differently.
If you’re living in New York and you’re working in the fashion industry, there certainly is the certain amount of pressure to wear certain fashionable pieces. But I think the goal as I’ve gotten older – and I’ve been working in the fashion industry for a number of years now – is to find the pieces that actually communicate to you just really intrinsically how you feel as your self-expression. I think that’s something that we get overtime.
And then from there, there might be an experimental phase where you’re trying different things out. When people move through that phase, I actually really suggest to my clients a lot of the time.
If you want to try a new trend – and fashion is cyclical. If you want to try a new trend, go to a consignment store. You can usually find some things that if that trend has been out for a little while, there’s something that you can buy or it’s likely something that’s come back around that’s already been out in the world at some point or another.
And you can then try that trend out. If you like it, you know what to invest and you know it works for your body. You know that the color way works for your skin tone, whatever it is. And then you can start to make investments into pieces that last longer that are higher quality and make up a wardrobe that really reflects who you are and the environment that you’re in.
DEBRA: Great. We need to go to break, but we’ll talk more about all these things when we come back. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Greta Eagan, author of Wear No Evil. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Greta Eagan, author of Wear No Evil. We’re talking about everything having to do with clothing and fashion and how it affects our health and the environment.
Greta, you have so much information in your book. I think that this is a good workbook for somebody who is making a transition from having what is the common wardrobe that we have in the world today and wanting to take a look at the things that have health and environmental effects that you have processed, that you’ve outlined of how to go about doing that, which I think is a good one. It’s pretty much the process that I went through when I was making these changes myself.
You have something called the Integrity Index that you put together. And I’d like us to talk about some of those points that you have there.
First, I’d like to say, one of the – I want to talk about viewpoint for a minute because I think that everybody needs to have their own viewpoint about what is most important to them. I think that you said that in your book too. And I know that your book is written from an environment and ethical viewpoint.
I noticed one thing that I just wanted to mention. When I’m looking at your integrity index, the first thing that I would say for people to look is different than the first thing that you say. Neither one is wrong or right. It’s just a different viewpoint.
The first thing that I would say to people is to look for fabric finishes permanent press or no iron because that is made with the formaldehyde dressing. You’re just going to be breathing formaldehyde all day long if you wear a permanent press shirt.
The first thing that you talked about is to look at the dyes. So would you tell us about the impact of dyes? Even though, from my viewpoint because I’m looking at health effects first – from my viewpoint, I’m not so concerned about dyes.
But tell us about the environmental effects of dyes and why you put that first.
GRETA EAGAN: Yeah. Just to give an overview, like you said, a lot of people – it’s music to my ears to hear that this comes off as a work for people making a transition because there are a lot of people who are making changes and being very conscious in their purchases for food or even the transportation they take or even the cleaning products they bring into their home. But when you look at the fashion industry, a lot of people don’t know that it’s actually the second most polluting industry worldwide behind petroleum.
So the effects of the fashion industry are huge. And actually, the dye process, that cumulative effect of being such a polluting industry, about 20% to 25% of that comes from the dyeing process. That does actually tie in to what you are talking about with these different systems and treatments that they apply to fabrics and fibers to get them to be wrinkle-free or that sort of thing.
The same applies to retaining a color and the vibrant feel of that color. If you have a piece of clothing that’s hot orange, that’s not necessarily a natural color that exists and that would be sped fast wash after wash, unless there were some chemicals involved.
The EPA has actually identified some of those chemicals that are being used for fluorinated compounds or what they call PCS. And those PCS have actually been identified by the EPA as carcinogenic.
So it’s a really hard and murky place where there isn’t a lot of clean and clear information about what are these chemicals that we’re using and that we’re being exposed to. But the reality is that there are a lot of chemicals from the dyes that are used to the fixed things that we were talking about for certain properties of your fabrics, but also even the synthetic fabrics that are being produced.
So if it’s a polyester or a rayon or a viscose, all of those are synthetic materials that are made either from something like a petroleum or from a plant-based fiber that’s been chemically treated to become a fiber. And those are quite toxic, and they have been shown to off gas carbon and nitrogen and sulfur dioxide.
Like you said, you’re exposed to that, not only if it’s next to your skin and maybe some people are sensitive enough to have a rash where they can see that they’re sensitive to those chemicals. But we’re inhaling them. There are ones close to us, and we’re breathing them in.
DEBRA: Now to me, not having as much inside information as you have, as a consumer, all I can do is I can look at a dye and say, “I’m pretty sure that that’s a synthetic dye because it’s color fest,” or “I’m pretty sure it’s a natural dye because this was made in India. If I put it in the washer, everything is going to – and it’s red – everything is going to turn pink because the solvent will come out in the wash.”
So how can a consumer make a decision to have a more eco-friendly dye? How would they even know?
GRETA EAGAN: So there are three levels. There are the normal dyes that are quite toxic. They are what we first developed and started using when we started mass-producing fashion.
And then we started to look at it and say, “This feels really wasteful. Wow, we’re turning rivers of different colors, like you’re already alluded to something made in China that they’ve talked about.” You can always tell what season it is, the fashion season. The water coming out of the factories and running into the different streams and rivers actually changes that color of what they’re using.
So we started to pay more attention to the impact of that. So people, different companies and brands have actually gone towards using what they call low impact dyes. So you have normal dyes and then you have low impact dyes. And then you have natural dyes.
Natural dyes come from natural sources. They’re not synthetic, so they might come from minerals or vegetables. They’re the more – or even mud – the traditional ways that we would have dyed clothing back in the days when we didn’t have these chemicals cocktails.
But the good news about the low impact dyes – and they’re actually one of the more eco-friendly options that we have. They’re just the smarter dye. They use less water. They aren’t using those fixings and mordants that make the color stay.
So they’re smarter and more evolved to dye. They’re not as pure as natural dyes, but the unfortunate thing is that a natural dye actually still uses some of those mordants and quite a lot of water. So it’s a bit of a trade of and you have to decide what’s important to you.
DEBRA: Good. We need to take another break. We’ll be right back to talk more about fashion and clothing with Greta Eagan, author of Wear No Evil. Her websites are FashionMeGreen.com and gretaeagan.com. So you can go there and find out more. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Greta Eagan. She is the author of Wear No Evil. She also has a blog called Fashion Me Green at FashionMeGreen.com.
She knows a lot about styles and clothing and has this wonderful book as a transition, a guide to how you can transition from the clothes you’re wearing now into things that are better for your health and the environment.
So another major thing that I want to talk about, Greta is the transition in looking at fabrics. I think that fabrics is a place where anybody can start – they can look on the label and see what fabric the garment is made from and then choose better fabrics.
So let’s talk about that for a bit. And then there’s so much more out of your book that I want to get to.
GRETA EAGAN: I know it can be overwhelming at times, but that’s why I wrote a book.
DEBRA: Right. Obviously, we can’t get to everything. But I want to get to the major points here.
So the way I look at it is that the worst fabrics are synthetics. And so we should be able to recognize what the synthetic fabrics are and avoid them. Then the next step is to just go to a natural fiber like cotton, linen, silk or wool. And then the next step is to go organic.
I think you would agree with those three steps.
GRETA EAGAN: Yes, I do. Absolutely.
DEBRA: Let me just jump to organic. Let’s talk about that because I think that for me, the biggest problem is just not being able to find organic clothes in the stores and that you can order things online. There are a lot of resources actually to order things online.
But I can’t try them on. And there’s also sometimes that – I think that things are changing, but for a long time, there wasn’t must style in those clothes that you could order online or that were colored or things like that.
So I remember wanting organic clothes. So I ordered unbleached and un-dyed sweat clothes. That was what I wanted to wear everyday.
Where are we now about organic and having organic becoming more mainstream?
GRETA EAGAN: We are in a good place, I’m happy to say. And eco fashion as a category, where maybe it’s this more conscious clothing, has a bad rep to live down. It used to be very beige and frumpy and like you said, not necessarily the style that you wanted to be wearing.
I was really true for a while. Part of the reason why that happened is that we had people, who were environmentalists or maybe more environmentally conscious, making the clothing rather than designers making the clothing.
The good news is that there’s been a huge shift. Even all the way down to the level of where these designers are coming out of their design schools. Sustainability and broader education about the impact of the fashion industry is part of the curriculum. So that’s where we’re headed, which is great.
And the immediate effect of where we are right now, we have bigger brands who are taking on the responsibility of offering different lines, maybe their little capsule collections that are made specifically from organic fibers.
A good example of this is H&M actually, which is a more affordable fashion brand, retailer. And they actually, for the past two years, have been the number one buyer of organic cotton. And they have made a pledge that by 2020, they will be producing all of their garments that will be using organic cotton. That’s huge.
When you see big retailers like that – I know Walmart also has their organic cotton for more work-out clothes that they’ve been doing. When you see big retailers like these getting on the game, they really move the needle because the supply and demand is so big that it really does incentivize these different farms and farmers who are producing cotton conventionally to switch to organic cotton because the need is there and the supply and demand is there.
So that’s the good news. I would also say that there are lots of brands. As I mentioned, designers who are now getting started in producing their lines – that’s part of their DNA. They don’t want to produce a fashion label or a collection without using more sustainable fabric.
We have some different brands. There’s a new one called Be Good Clothing. I think their website is just BeGoodClothing.com. And they’re essentially taking the Everlane model, which is to make this timeless basic T-shirts and button-downs and staples for your wardrobe. And they’re making them with organic cotton and more sustainable fibers.
They’re able to offer that in a more affordable price because there is no middle man. They’re selling direct to consumer.
And you mentioned that the problem with ordering online is that you don’t get to try it on. The good news is a lot of these brands now have amazing shipping policies where you can order a couple of sizes and send things back. And they don’t charge you shipping. So you can try and figure it out…
DEBRA: That’s very good. Yeah. That is very good. I look and I go, “This is going to fit meme. How is it going to look?” And I don’t want to be paid double shipping for something that I don’t want.
So I’m trying to figure out just quickly how I can – I’m 100% behind organic fabrics for clothing. Yet, I think in all the different areas of my life, the clothing is the area where I’m most behind.
For me, if I’m wearing my little tank tops and my little Capri pants, I’m not having a big toxic exposure myself. But I know that there’s a big environmental effect for these little clothings. But I’m not being affected by it directly.
So it makes it more difficult I think for people who are more health-oriented and environmentally oriented, even though I know that there’s a big environmental effect of me wearing these cotton clothes. It’s harder to spend that extra money or go through the extra effort when I can just go buy a T-shirt, a tank top for $8 as I’m walking down the mall that’s on sale.
So I think that it’s – let’s go ahead and talk about your book because you do have a very good process here. So you have something – after the integrity index, you talked about the Diamond Diagram and your Wear No Evil System.
You talked about going through your closet. That’s exactly what I did. I went to my closet and I put everything that was a natural fiber – this was 35 years ago. I put everything that was a natural fiber in one pile and everything that was a synthetic fiber in another pile, and I had no clothes left to wear.
And at that time, in 1978, we were in the midst of leisure seats and polyester. It was very difficult to find anything, like a T-shirt and jeans to wear, that was not synthetic. But that’s not the case now. That’s not the case now.
So tell us about your process that you described on the book after the break. Oh my god. Here we are…
GRETA EAGAN: Okay, sure.
DEBRA: Okay. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my we’re talking today with Greta Eagan, author of Wear No Evil. And we’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Great Eagan, author of Wear No Evil. Her website is FashionMeGreen.com and GretaEagan.com.
Okay, Greta. So tell us about making these decisions about your diamond – how you make decisions about choosing products.
GRETA EAGAN: Sure. And just to follow up from what we were saying right before we went to break, I just want to say that I know that it can be challenging to make the commitment to buy a certain way, in your case, maybe organic.
But I just want to remind everyone that every time we buy something, we bought with our dollars. And we tell those manufacturers and retailers and brands that that’s what we want. So it adds up, and it does have an impact.
DEBRA: I totally agree.
GRETA EAGAN: So it’s worth the effort.
DEBRA: Yes, it is. It really is. My point was in the past when I’ve attempted to do that, I couldn’t find anything that I wanted to wear that I could wear. Part of it had to do with size and part of it had to do just with – sometimes I need to wear things other than T-shirts.
GRETA EAGAN: Right. That’s part of what I actually outlined in my book. You’ve mentioned already that there are these kinds of pieces to this Wear No Evil System.
The first being the integrity index, which I outlined 16 different ways that you can look at a piece of fashion and decide on its eco credentials, as I call them. And it might be ethical or it might be that it’s non-toxic or sustainable or socially linked. There are all these different ways of participating.
And what we do is you get an overview of all those different ways than what you’ve already alluded to. Some of them are more important to you that might be different, that are important to me. That’s where we are. There’s no right or wrong way of doing it, but it’s about the individual. So in that exposure to these different eco credentials, you, as a consumer and an individual, get to decide what’s important to you.
What I do is I take those four or five top eco factors that we’ve looked at. And you then put them into play in the diamond diagram, which is a flexible model, a way for you to navigate through life and navigate through shopping, to still uphold your values while you are getting these pieces of clothing that you need for your wardrobe.
And one of those would be style. We really cannot sacrifice on the style because it doesn’t make for a sustainable piece of fashion. If it’s not stylish, if you don’t want to wear it, if it doesn’t uphold your sense of identity, then it’s probably not going to get worn. It will just sit in the back of your closet.
DEBRA: That is so, so, so true. I was actually a co-founder of a corporation that was making sustainable products. We were trying to figure out what actually is green. We looked around. It does fit in various ways.
What we discovered was that you can’t sell a green product unless number one, it appeals to the consumer. And so it has to be something that they want to use or they’re not going to buy it. It applies right here just as you said. The first thing that someone’s going to look for is “Do I feel beautiful when I wear this?” or “Do I feel handsome?” or “Does it express my self-expression?” So it’s not just about whether it’s non-toxic or not, although that’s my number one thing.
They can be the perfect pieces of clothing for me. I will not buy it if it’s toxic. But at the same time, I won’t buy something non-toxic if it’s not right for me to wear. So you’re absolutely right.
GRETA EAGAN: What you were saying, that’s part of the Wear No Evil System. If you’re going to subscribe to the Wear No Evil movement and be part of this more conscious consumption, it’s not enough to buy something just because it’s pretty.
You have to have the style factor and then at least one other factor. That’s where the Diamond Diagram comes into play and helps people navigate the spaces. At the very least, it has to have style and then one other factor. And in your case, it might be that it’s organic or that it uses a low-impact dye.
If it uses two of those or it uses both of those and it’s stylish, then you’re operating on a whole different level of conscious consumption. And you keep operating on that level as we were talking about before. It really sends a message about what the consumer wants.
I do think that as the population is becoming more educated. These things are becoming more important and also becoming more transparent on the side of the brand.
DEBRA: I just want to throw this and there’s so much we can talk about on this subject. I want to say that in my life for the past 35 years, I really have been committed to natural fibers. I will not wear a synthetic fiber and I will not wear something that has a permanent pressed finish. That’s my line.
I will wear natural fibers that are not organic, but my preference would be – anytime I have the option to do this. I take it. My preference would be to have everything organic, everything low-impact dye. The only reason that doesn’t happen for me is accessibility and affordability.
But I want to just make an example of how far I will go in another option for people. Once I needed to wear an evening gown to an event and I could not find anything down that wasn’t synthetic. I just couldn’t find one at all.
So I made my own. I made just cotton – I took cotton material. It’s just plain color. I just made it a strapless sheet dress. And then I took 100% cotton’s cream material for curtains.
And I made just a thing that went on top, a flowing – what’s it called when you just…
GRETA EAGAN: Like a shawl or a wrap?
DEBRA: Yeah, but all the way down the whole length of the dress. So it was just very beautiful. It was 100% cotton. It cost less than $100 for me to buy this fabric. And I had the most beautiful evening gown. I bought a beautiful necklace to go with it. It was very fashionable. I thought I was the most fashionable person there.
So just because you don’t – I just want to tell people that just because you don’t find something off the rack, it doesn’t mean that you can’t make something that reflects your integrity and your style.
GRETA EAGAN: And there are – I would also say where we are right now in the industry and in this kind of movement towards more conscious living. There are a lot of resources that are coming up. So I’ll just name a few and there are more listed in my book.
I’m always on my website where I’m talking about brands continuously because they keep coming. If you want to shop, you can shop and you can filter by these different eco credentials that are important to you. You can shop at Modavanti.com. You can shop at Zadie.com or ShopEthica.com. There are number of these online eco boutiques that are popping up.
Also take a look in your local area because I know, especially in New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles, there are different eco boutiques and more stores that are popping up that are really subscribing to this conscious consumption.
DEBRA: Yes, excellent. We have about three minutes left. So what would you like to say that you haven’t said yet?
GRETA EAGAN: Oh gosh. It’s a journey, but I really commend anyone who takes this on. I did it based out of my research. Once, I dedicated my dissertation to sustainability in fashion. When I came out, I just knew too much and I couldn’t go back.
For a little while there, I really struggled. You said when you sorted your clothing and then all of a sudden, you had nothing to wear but your birthday suit. And I can really relate to that.
I really struggled for a little while and I felt like I lost my sense of style and my sense of self because I was really trying to fit within these confines of 100% sustainable, 100% environmentally friendly or ethical.
I think the truth is just we have to meet the industry where it’s at. It’s great to support brands that are doing these things, producing the products in the ways that we want them to. But I also think it’s important for us to know that nothing is 100% right now. That’s okay. Some is better than none.
DEBRA: It’s a very important thing to recognize that the whole industry is in transition, the whole world is in transition, each of us are in transition. Everything that we can do that’s a step in the right direction is worth doing.
GRETA EAGAN: Exactly.
DEBRA: We can get very idealistic about things needing to be 100%. I know that there are some people who need to have clothing that is just the purest of the pure. That clothing needs to be available in order for people who need that to have that.
I also know that any step that we take is worth taking. Taking each step than – I’ve been watching this for 35 years now. So I can see as we take steps as consumers.
When I started, there was no organic cotton and anything. There was hardly any cotton or anything. As people started buying cotton, then there are organic cottons started to be grown.
And then as people started making things out of organic cotton, then now we have things that are more stylish out of organic cotton. And we just need to keep moving things forward. Just keep moving forward.
GRETA EAGAN: It’s true. Just one other thing, we’ve talked a lot about organic cotton which is a great fiber and fabric. It’s a little thirsty. So there are some other fibers that I’ve just loved to mention.
DEBRA: Please.
GRETA EAGAN: There’s peace silk, which doesn’t actually harm the insects. So it’s peace as in world peace, peace silk that you can look for. Like you mentioned, there’s linen. There’s chute.
There’s hemp now, but we weren’t able to produce right in this country. We’re seeing some movement there. It’s a really great fiber that doesn’t take a lot of water.
DEBRA: I have to interrupt you only because if I don’t, the end of the show is going to come on and interrupt you anyways. So thank you so much, Greta.
GRETA EAGAN: Yeah. Thank you so much. Good luck.
DEBRA: Thank you. You too. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
Toxics and Trees
My guest today is Shannon Smith, Communications and User Voice at Ecosia.org, a search engine that helps the environment by planting trees as you search the web. We’ll be talking about how trees create clean air and our our the air pollution we create harms trees. Ecosia is a search engine that plants trees when users search the web. The social business has already raised over $1.5 million for rainforest protection since its founding in December 2009. By donating 80% of its ad income to a tree planting program in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, Ecosia aims to have the highest positive impact on the environment per dollar. The Berlin-based start-up neutralises all CO2 emissions related to its search as well as publishing donation receipts online – its promise to the two million monthly Ecosia users, who are proving that small changes can have a big impact. Former journalist and writer Shannon Smith has liaised between users, partners and team members since 2010 to build Ecosia into a movement for sustainable change. She is a Texas native. www.ecosia.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Toxics and Trees
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Shannon Smith
Date of Broadcast: July 09, 2014
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 Wednesday, July 9th 2014 and we are having a thunderstorm here in usually sunny Clearwater, Florida. But that’s just typically our summer weather pattern, and so it is very nice to have our thunderstorms cool down the weather here. It’s great. It’s just the way nature works, and it’s wonderful.
Today, we are actually going to be talking about nature. We’re going to be talking about the environment and toxic chemicals. Usually, we talk about health and home and toxic exposures. But today, we are going to talk about trees and toxics.
My guest is Shannon Smith. She’s a Communications and User Voice at Ecosia.org. And what Ecosia does is it’s a search engine that helps the environment by planting trees as you search the web.
So, all of the CO2 that they produce relating to all the searches that we do is offset by planting trees.
And so today, we are going to be talking about trees and how our actions such as searching on the web and other things affect air pollution, what trees do to help us with air pollution and how air pollution damages trees. So we are going to be looking at the bigger picture today, outside the four walls of our homes to see how our actions produce toxic chemicals that affect the environment.
Hi Shannon.
SHANNON SMITH: Hi Debra. Thanks for having me on.
DEBRA: Thank you. Shannon is speaking to us all the way from Berlin where Ecosia is based. And Shannon, why don’t we start by telling us a little bit about Ecosia?
SHANNON SMITH: Sure. I think […] Ecosia, just like you described, is a search engine that basically plants trees. It’s just like Google or Yahoo or any of those guys, except that we take 80% of our advertising revenue that we earned from the search engine and we donate that to a program we’re partnering with. It’s the Nature Conservancy Plant a Billion Trees Project.
And they have several different programs—one is concentrated in a tropical rainforest, one of them is in Brazil called the Atlantic Forest. And that is the portion of forest on the eastern coast of Brazil. It also runs into some of the most heavily populated areas in Brazil. So it’s one of the parts of the rainforest that’s most […] deforestation.
DEBRA: Good. And how did you get interested in working in this field?
SHANNON SMITH: I have always been interested in sustainability issues and simplifying things and going back to nature. We talk about toxicity and things like that—and sickness and also consumption.
It’s just different things that all lead back to what feels like the same issue—and that is that there’s an overtaxing of the resources we have in the world. This desire to produce things cheaply causes us to produce goods using methods that are destructive whether that’s by producing a product that is toxic based on what it has been made of or what it has been made with or how it has been made, the resources that we use to make it.
So I feel like all of these things connect very closely and sustainability is a concept in terms of using the resources we have from the earth basically and a way that future generations can also still have those resources and benefits from them. That seems to be the only real way forward.
And in a way, when you look at the growing population of the world and the way we are all using resources, I think it just makes sense to take a look at what we are doing, what we are producing, how we are producing it and to do it in a way where we can all survive or the next few generations can survive hopefully. And I think it would solve a lot of the problems we’re experiencing […] which are many.
That was where my interest originated. And then I found Ecosia to be a perfect fit in terms of a movement and an effort that proves that small changes can make a big difference.
DEBRA: One of the things about this is that it’s something that each one of us can do without much effort at all—and I’m speaking to my listeners now. The only way that I see anything different on my screen, I sign up. And it’s free and it’s easy. It takes about a minute to switch over.
And the thing is it has a very nice little banner at the top that’s teal blue and a nice little logo. And so, the only thing that I see different than using any other search engine is that it’s got a little counter at the top that tells me how many trees have been planted to offset my use.
So I don’t have to do anything, except to go about searching the internet just the way I usually would.
The search results come from Yahoo and Bing and also there’s a little tab at the top that you can search the Google if you want. There is a tab for images and apps and videos. So it’s just as easy as any other search engine, except that as you use it, it plants trees. Is that about it?
SHANNON SMITH: Exactly. It’s perfectly described. Yes.
DEBRA: Thank you. I don’t see any reason why anybody shouldn’t just sign up with you and get tree planted as they search the web. And as we go through the show today, you will give a lot more information about why it is important to plant trees and how that benefits us with toxics in our world.
SHANNON SMITH: Definitely. Yeah, that’s one of the things that I am most excited about. We realized that people were really interested in the search engine when it was first founded back at the end of 2009. And that is that it is something easier. It’s a place for people to meet and come together to contribute to something to make it better.
And it is also something important if you think of the numbers when you can realize that my collective contribution with the community of likeminded people have the potential to truly make a positive difference in reducing toxicity in the world and reducing carbon emissions and different things like that, these things that are all threatening the wellbeing of the people and the planet itself throughout the world.
DEBRA: You covered this briefly when you were talking earlier. But I wanted to just say so that our listeners understand where you get the money to plant these trees if you […] And so, you explained this the other day, but explain how your advertising works.
SHANNON SMITH: Sure. This is interesting because I think a lot of people aren’t quite clear on how search engines in general earn their money. There actually are only, I guess, two or maybe three major search engines with their search indexes in the world. I mean there’s a few definitely, the Yandex in Russia and different things like that.
But definitely in the US, we’ve got Google and Yahoo, which has actually come together with Bing in the last couple of years. I think they should have seen search engine index. Search engines, everybody is seeing that they display ads on the side of search results or above them, the sponsored links. And every time a person searches in the search engine and click on an ad, that’s where the certain number of cents.
Sometimes you even have affiliate links wrapped up in the search results and if a purchase is made through one of those affiliate links, often times you will have 3% to 5% of the purchase price going to the search engine displaying the links or to the company that’s distributing the affiliate links throughout the web.
So, there are a lot of people profiting from these ads that we are bombarded with every day on the web and sometimes subtly and sometimes not so subtly. So it is a huge industry. The life blood of the web is this model, this advertising model.
So what we have done is it’s what makes the world go around. Everybody is a part of this. But what we have decided to do is pick up money that we’d normally get from the Yahoo ads that are displayed on the site.
And we have promised users to donate 80% of all of that ad revenue to a tree planting program. We have chosen Nature Conservancy’s Plan a Billion Trees Program in the Atlantic Forest in Brazil like we said. But exactly all that money comes from the revenue we earned from the ads that are displayed on the site.
DEBRA: Right. So that revenue comes by user clicking through probably pay per click or something like that. And so when you are using this, the more click, the more money they get, the more trees they can plant.
We need to go to break. But we will be right back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
My guest today is Shannon Smith from—how do you say it? Ecosia?
SHANNON SMITH: Ecosia.
DEBRA: Ecosia. And we’ll be talking more about toxics and trees. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Shannon Smith. She’s the Communications and User Voice—what does that mean, Communications and User Voice?
SHANNON SMITH: Sure.
DEBRA: What do you do?
SHANNON SMITH: I’ve worked, for the time when I’m at the Ecosia, on the connection between the users we have, which is something like two million monthly unique users now, the connection between those users and what we do to create a symbiosis so that we are always going in the right direction and making sure that everybody is in the same page and that everything that is happening is being communicated clearly back and forth.
And it is a huge part of what we do because we are completely just like any business. We consider ourselves a social business. But like any business, we would be relying on our customers. And we rely on the people who believe in Ecosia to support us.
And based on that principle, we owe this group a sense of transparency and making sure that our impact is actually having an impact and that we see that information back to users.
So the idea is that users keep us in check and we keep users informed. And that’s how this entire project grows and how we actually have an impact and change something altogether in the end.
DEBRA: Yes. Does the word Ecosia have a meaning? How did it come together as a word?
SHANNON SMITH: That’s funny. A lot of people have asked the Founder, Christian, about that. It was just a play on words. Christian actually had a couple other charitable search engines, so to speak, before Ecosia.
One of them is called Forestle. Some people still remember it. It’s since been redirected into Ecosia, but that actually worked with Google for some time with Google search results. But it was cut off after about a week or so when users grew quite rapidly from the beginning.
And so Christian was quickly scrambling to find another partner to work with. So Yahoo and Bing were the only options in Germany. And then a partnership started from there.
But he was basically just looking for a name for another search engine for his next search engine that would become a little bit more international, this idea of eco or something that sticks in people’s minds so that it is at least recognizable for the values it embodies. I think Eco-Utopia is where the idea generated. But there’s no other real significance to the name.
DEBRA: Because sometimes people have a story behind how their coined term came to be.
SHANNON SMITH: Sure.
DEBRA: But I think it does communicate. I understand the eco aspect of it immediately. Yes. So let’s talk about trees.
The thing that is most amazing to me about trees is that trees help us breathe. Without trees, we would not be able to breathe because what happens is that as we, humans and other mammals, breathe in, we need to have oxygen. And when we breathe out, we breathe out carbon dioxide.
And trees are exactly the opposite. Trees love carbon dioxide. In fact, they eat carbon dioxide for dinner. It’s their favorite thing. And they take this carbon dioxide and they release oxygen. So their function of what they take in and what they give out is exactly the opposite to ours.
And I love that picture, seeing this picture in my mind of I am breathing out something that a tree loves and a tree is breathing out something that I need in order to survive.
SHANNON SMITH: Exactly.
DEBRA: Go ahead.
SHANNON SMITH: Trees are these incredible things that are incredibly complementary to the natural way that we live. And it is so neat to have a partner in the natural world like that that cleans up your mess and you clean its mess up, this perfect exchange, something like a vital exchange.
DEBRA: It is a perfect exchange. Yeah. It is like this in and out. I can just see in front of me a tree. In my mind, I can see a tree and me standing in front of a tree. And as I breathe out, I am just going,
“Here tree, have all this carbon dioxide.” And the tree is just delighting in giving me oxygen.
And I think that most people don’t understand where our oxygen comes from, that it comes from trees, it comes from forest. And when we don’t have forest anymore, we don’t have oxygen and that’s just the way it is.
And so we talk about toxic chemicals being destructive, but there are also things that we need on the positive side that if we don’t have them, we are not going to do well either. And so trees are just so important, so important. And I just wanted to say that I love trees and that we need to make sure that we take care of them.
SHANNON SMITH: Absolutely
DEBRA: So I have some facts here that I have gathered about trees and pollution. Do you want me to give those or do you have some things that you would like to say about trees and pollution?
SHANNON SMITH: Yeah, sure. You’ve said a lot. I mean trees are just outside. We see them, but we might not really realize what they do. Just some interesting things that have come up lately that have come to our attention, especially throughout working on this program is the fact that air pollution is killing more people than AIDS and malaria, combined in the world, as well as causing cancer and different things like that.
I think air pollution is also in the same category as tobacco smoke, UV radiation, plutonium and things like that. And it is really quite neat that trees, once you plant, have the ability to clean things up a little bit. And there are things and lifestyle changes that we could definitely make.
The change will come slowly and things we can do to protect ourselves to the world in different ways in different parts of the world. It is simple as planting trees. And there are a couple of examples of really neat experiments that have been done to see where a row of 30 birch trees have protected houses. It cut the pollutants in the air by 50% in just two weeks or something like that.
DEBRA: Wow.
SHANNON SMITH: So there’s a whole array of possibilities in terms of trees you plant in your backyard.
And then it’s a whole other slew of benefits when you talk about reforesting the rainforest, exactly.
DEBRA: Yeah. We need to go to break again but we will be right back. You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Shannon Smith from Ecosia. We’re going to talk more about trees when we come back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You are listening to Toxic Free talk Radio. I am Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Shannon Smith from Ecosia. That’s a search engine that plants trees to offset the energy use when you are searching.
When you sign up with them, they have a little counter that’s on the banner at the top of the page. And that tells you how many trees have been planted on your behalf. And they have already planted 36 trees for me and I just have only been using it for a week or so.
So it really shows how much energy gets used. It is already 36 trees worth of offset. Shannon, are you there?
SHANNON SMITH: Yeah. It’s great. Yeah.
DEBRA: It’s a fun thing to do, but it also really raises awareness. It’s not like you are just out there saying we are going to plant some trees. You see exactly the number of trees that are being planted for you. So I am happy to plant those 36 trees.
SHANNON SMITH: You know what is so great? We are so happy that you have. Thanks. Yes. And it is great, the number up there. It’s neat too. Like you said, it raises awareness, but it’s also a collaborative thing as well. The number of trees we helped plant with people searching at this very moment. So it’s what happens when you come together and then trees get planted.
And it’s a neat thing as well to program. That’s been going on for quite some time and there’s a lot of information on the Plant a Billion Trees website about exactly how that’s going and the successes they’ve had with the trees that have been planted in this particular region of Brazil. Yeah, that’s positive impact on the entire world’s climate and that sort of thing.
DEBRA: Yeah. So if you are interested in signing up, go to Ecosia.org. So that’s Ecosia.org.
I just wanted to say a few things about the relationship between trees and toxic pollution and what happens. And so trees will absorb. They help trap and hold particle pollutant, things like dusts and ash and pollen and smoke that can damage the human lungs.
But they also absorb CO2 as we all know and other dangerous gasses. And as we said earlier, in exchange, trees then provide the atmosphere with the oxygen for us to breathe.
Now, actually one acre of trees will produce enough oxygen for 18 people every day. An acre of trees isn’t actually that much. It would be interesting. Do you happen to know how many trees are needed to supply the oxygen for one person?
SHANNON SMITH: That’s a good question. If it’s 18 per acre, do you know the offset for car is quite interesting? It’s like an acre of trees.
It also depends on the kind of trees—that’s an interesting thing—a young tree or an old tree or a tropical tree or a temperate climate tree. But I think an acre of trees can offset the emission of 2.7cars for a year. It’s like the trees and the cars on the road for the duration of that year or something like that.
DEBRA: Wow, that’s interesting.
SHANNON SMITH: It’s a good idea of what would be needed to counteract, for instance, our driving habits, so yeah.
DEBRA: Right. So trees remove gasses by absorbing them through their pores in their leaf surface. But here’s the thing. Trees are performing this big job of removing particles and gasses from the air that we are producing. I find this so interesting.
Just think about if you were a tree and you were absorbing all those particles and gasses into your body, it the same thing for a tree as it is for us. When we are exposed to toxic chemicals, it damages our cells, it damages our body in various ways.
In the same way, trees being exposed to our pollution are being damaged and the air pollutants that enter trees damage their leaves, which collect the sunlight. And so it damages the process of photosynthesis, which makes food for them and it just weakens the trees, making them susceptible to other health problems, such as insects and diseases.
So we really need to be looking at the fact that trees are being affected by these toxic exposures as much as we are, as living bodies. They are being exposed and they are being harmed.
SHANNON SMITH: I think it is ally interesting too because it points back to that symbiosis thing we are talking about and how all these things are connected. It’s like one part of this environment whether people in the other side of the world or trees, which we just think are there sometimes and don’t pay much attention.
They are suffering and essentially. In the end, we are suffering too. So there’s always a cost to that. It’s not just the direct effects in our body, but it’s the effects on the things around us that we are also dependent on. This is very much true of trees absolutely.
DEBRA: Very much so. Also living here in Florida, it’s hot for six months. It’s hot. I am very happy to have the thunderstorm clouds today. But I am always looking for trees because underneath the tree is a lower temperature where we can feel a lot more comfortable and it is a lot easier for us to live in that way.
Yeah, I am just thinking. Oh, I know what I want to say. Oh no, I forgot it again. That’s the way it is.
Okay, here it is.
Okay, so we were talking earlier how when we breathe out, we create the carbon dioxide. But we also need to be thinking about how when we use things like search engines or computers or anything that requires energy, every single second, we are producing pollution that is harming trees.
SHANNON SMITH: Absolutely.
DEBRA: And so it is like our exhale, it’s our toxic exhale. I had never thought of it like that before.
SHANNON SMITH: Absolutely. And people talk about carbon footprints and no matter whether you are onboard with climate change or not in terms of it being an issue, it is still the absolute truth that the things we do have an effect on other things.
And just like you say, in the same way that we breathe out, we breathe in, we take up resources. Every time we purchase something or use something, it has an effect, exactly.
DEBRA: Yeah. We have to take another break, but we will come back. You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Shannon Smith from Ecosia and they are a search engine that plants trees to offset your energies when you search the web. It is a good thing to do. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I am Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Shannon Smith from Ecosia. That’s Ecosia.org. You can go there and sign up for their search engine services and they will plant trees for you as you search the web to offset your use and production of pollutants from the burning of fossil fuels for energy.
I have a list of some of the major air pollutants and their primary sources. And these are things that trees absorb and collect and take out of the air, but also cause damage to trees. So again, on the one hand, they are doing this tremendous service for us by leaning up air pollution. But the story doesn’t stop there because we need to recognize that they are doing that at the expense of their own health.
So here are some things. And some of these I hadn’t thought about before. So burning of oil, coal and natural gas for energy. Here’s another one, hydrogen fluoride and silicon tetrafluoride. Well, the first one was carbon dioxide. This one is hydrogen fluoride and silicon tetrafluoride. That comes from steel manufacturing. So when we are using stainless steel pans and things like that, that’s creating air pollution.
Ozone, which probably everyone asserts of, is a chemical reaction of sunlight on automobile exhaust gasses. Driving your car is producing pollutants that are harmful to trees.
Let’s see, burning fossil fuels. Okay, here’s another one, chlorofluorocarbons. They come from air conditioners, refrigerators and industrial foam.
So all these things, it is not just driving our cars, not just burning fossil fuels for energy, but every single product that we use and is made. All of them require the burning of energy and some of them have chemicals in them like chlorofluorocarbons that are also pollutants in their own right. So we need to be thinking about the energy use of everything because every time a product is made, every time we drive our car—I know these are sobering facts, but they are facts—it’s like having a toxic exhale out into the environment.
SHANNON SMITH: Yeah. That is exactly right, Debra. Even just the awareness is important. Lifestyle changes can be difficult to make. So the first step is the understanding how all of that works, just like you described basically. Everything we do and use has some connection to these things.
And when we recognize that, then we can either start to make changes and start to do things to try and offset what we are doing. But that awareness is so important.
We’ve been talking about how trees are incredible weapons against the harmful effects of all of these pollutants. Of course, they can only take so much too. So it’s […] expect.
DEBRA: It can only take so much. And I think that it all comes down to—we hear things like terms like carbon offsets in the news. And carbon offsets, I mean it is really important. But the thing is you can only trade around carbon offsets so much that we always need to be looking at it. If there’s something harmful, we need to be looking at reducing at the source.
I’m going to relate this back to the human body because I think that it all works in the same way. In a human body, if we are exposed to too much toxic chemicals, what happens is that our organ systems start breaking down, that our bodies get overloaded and then we start getting sick and eventually we die. I know we are going to die anyway, but die sooner and die less comfortably from being disabled by these toxic chemicals.
But the thing is it is happening out in the environment too. It is happening to trees. It is happening to birds. It’s happening to all parts of the environment. And so we really, really, really need to be reducing our pollution at the source, not only for ourselves, but for the entire system of life on the planet.
SHANNON SMITH: Exactly.
DEBRA: Yeah. So in the meantime, one of the things what we can do is plant trees. But if we still produce so much toxic chemicals that the trees get overwhelmed and we don’t have forests because we have killed the trees, then we are really going to have a problem. And so I think it is best to do whatever we can right now before we destroy the entire planet to reduce our toxic chemical use.
SHANNON SMITH: Exactly. Someone had the brilliant visual of the frog and hot water or the cold water that’s heated up. The fog doesn’t know anything is wrong as it heated, but slowly of course. It jumps out quickly. The water is boiling and that’s a problem immediately.
But do we want to be sitting in that cold water that’s heating up, heating up, heating up, waiting for disaster to strike with our health or with the environment around us that we are so dependent on?
And I think you make such a great point about toxicity in general and these products that are produced in a way that we don’t want to have anything to deal with. Why don’t we take the catalyst out? You encourage people stop buying them and they stop getting produced.
And that’s one way with the power of consumption or consumers’ choice that you can really also make a difference. And just that awareness of how that works, how it affects us and how it affects environment is great.
DEBRA: It does. I do want to say that I am not suggesting that people stop buying things altogether or not have the things that we need in order for us to survive individually.
SHANNON SMITH: Sure.
DEBRA: I think what needs to happen is there needs to be a big shift from doing things in the toxic way to doing things in a more sustainable way. And certainly what you are doing with Ecosia is a step in that direction.
And it certainly happens step by step. I’ve been doing this for 35 years and there are still things that I am learning every day. There’s still always more information, more awareness to have and another step that one can take. But we just keep taking them step by step and step and then pretty soon there’s a big change in the world. I think there are already is. Don’t you see that we are moving in that direction?
SHANNON SMITH: Absolutely, absolutely. I think there are all kinds of sustainable products I think you mentioned being produced and people are demanding them, especially here in Germany where we are based.
And I know it’s happening in the States as well and it is incredible and people are doing really incredible things. And you see that in our users too all over the world. These people know what’s going on and they are willing to make small steps.
That’s the point. It’s not about guilt. It’s not about telling ourselves how terrible we are. It’s really about looking at what we can do trying to understand what we can understand and taking these small steps as a group, which I think will really add up pretty quickly.
DEBRA: It does. Shannon, it has been a pleasure talking with you. We only have about two minutes, three minutes left. So are there any final things that you’d like to say that we haven’t covered?
SHANNON SMITH: Yeah. Thank you for having us on first of all. I think a lot of people don’t know about Ecosia and that’s one of the things we hope. It’s that people like the concept and like the service.
We will start talking about it because I think it comes from people, from everybody who is choosing to use a search engine and the awareness it creates about our relationship to each other and to the environment and things like that.
Yeah, it’s just wonderful what users have been able to do so far. We are grateful and excited and grateful that people like you showed interest about it. So that’s fantastic. And it’s great what you are bringing to light on the show.
DEBRA: Thank you.
SHANNON SMITH: The things that you do with toxicity and sustainability, I think that’s the only true way forward. So it’s exciting.
DEBRA: I think so too. I mean we have to recognize that what we do affects the world that we live in and that everything that we put out comes back to us and that that’s just part of the way of life and that we have the control and the ability to make choices right in our hands.
Every time we buy a product, we have a choice. As I have said, I’ve been doing this for 35 years. I think this year is year number 35.
SHANNON SMITH: Congratulations.
DEBRA: Thank you.
SHANNON SMITH: […]
DEBRA: It’s actually been a pleasure for me to do this work. It continues to be a pleasure because I am not focused on the toxic chemicals even though I need to know what they are and what the problems are. I don’t focus on the toxic chemicals. I focus on what are the solutions and just being able to see the world.
I just look at the world, looking for the nontoxic products, the sustainable products, the better ideas. And I am always looking for them. And then I am always just weeding out to see what I can find.
That’s what we do on the show. I invite people to be guests who are supplying the solutions like you.
Thank you so much again, Shannon.
Again, that’s Ecosia. It is at Ecosia.org. So you can go there. You can also go to Toxic Free Talk Radio.com to find out more about the show and about our upcoming guests and the past guests because all of these shows are recorded and archived. And we have wonderful shows, wonderful guests. So go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.ocm. Take a look and take a listen. Be well.