My guest is chemist Martin Wolf, Director of Product Sustainability and Authenticity for Seventh Generation, a manufacturer and distributor of ecological household and personal care products. We’ll be talking about what Seventh Generation is doing to eliminate toxic chemicals in every phase of manufacture, and how they are helping make the world less toxic by working to improve toxics regulations. Martin brings more than 40 years of experience in industrial and environmental chemistry to his work, including the occurrence of hazardous chemicals in the environment, conducting life cycle studies of industrial processes, and designing more sustainable household cleaning products. At Seventh Generation, Martin has developed frameworks for environmental product design, helped educate his co-workers, customers, and consumers about the environmental impacts of consumer products and the industries that produce them, helped develop standards for voluntary disclosure, and brought change to the cleaning products industry through more sustainable product designs. In 2010, Martin received a 2010 EPA Region 1 Environmental Merit Award for his work. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/seventh-generation

 

 

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Seventh Generation is Eliminating Toxics Throughout Their Supply Chain

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Martin Wolf

Date of Broadcast: September 9, 2013

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 we do need to talk about this because there are toxic chemicals all over the place—in the food we eat, in the air we breathe, and all kinds of consumer products, and even in our own bodies, where it’s been accumulating probably since birth for most of us who are alive today. I know, I fall in that category.

But there are things that we can do to remove toxic chemicals from our home, to remove toxic chemicals from our body, and even to create a toxic-free world by changing regulations, and getting everybody on the bandwagon to have a healthy and safe environment.

Today is Monday, September 9, 2013, and I’m here in Clearwater, Florida, and the sun is shining for a change. This is the time of the year when it rains almost every day, and I heard on the news that there is actually a hurricane forming out in the Atlantic, near the equator, but I don’t think we need to worry about that.

What we’re going to talk about today is about toxic chemicals throughout the supply chain—when manufacturers make a consumer product. It’s like when we make a salad, for example, because when you make a salad, you’re taking raw materials, not something you bought in a package, although today, a lot of salad ingredients come in packages.

But let’s say you went to the farmers market, or out into your backyard, and you got some lettuce, and tomatoes, and cucumbers, and onions, and you’re going to make a salad. And so you’re bringing these materials that already exist, these raw materials, you’re putting them together in a bowl, and then you’re calling them a salad.

Now, unless you’re like me and make your own salad dressing, maybe you are opening a bottle of salad dressing. And so then you put in your salad a product that already exists which is made of other products, of other ingredients.

And so what you might see on the label, if you were labeling this salad as a consumer product is lettuce, tomatoes, onions and salad dressing. But what’s in that salad dressing is a whole bunch of other stuff. It’s a product onto itself.

And most consumer products, when you look on the label, and you see sodium lauryl sulfate, and all these different chemical names, which you might not recognize, each one of those, just like salad dressing, it’s a product. It’s an ingredient, it’s a product that has its whole set of manufacturing. It was manufactured someplace else, and it has its whole list of ingredients, and we never see that.

All we see on the label is the final products that are mixed together like when you mix together a salad.

So today, what we’re doing to do is we’re going to is we’re going to take a look down what’s called the supply chain. And my guest today is Martin Wolf. He’s the director of product sustainability and authenticity of Seventh Generation, who is a manufacturing distributor of ecological household and personal products.

Martin is a chemist. This is the first time we’ve had a chemist on the show. And he has more than 40 years’ experience in industrial and environmental chemistry. He knows a thing or two about chemistry, toxic chemicals and supply chains.

So welcome to the show, Martin.

MARTIN WOLF: Thank you very much, Debra. And thank you for having me on the show.

DEBRA: You’re welcome. It’s my pleasure. I was just thinking before the show that, together, we have 70 years of experience between us.

MARTIN WOLF: I know. Our careers have actually developed together. I don’t know if you remember back when you published a few of your original books in the 1990s. I was a consultant to the Good Housekeeping Institute, and we worked together on some of these very same issues.

DEBRA: I do remember that. I do. And it’s interesting to me how people now, at this point in my career, I’m meeting a lot of people that I met early on, over again, that we’re all coming back together. And I think that that’s great because there’s so much experience, and there’s so much understanding, and so much knowledge that all of us have, who have been doing it for so long.

So tell us—I want you to tell our audience about your personal background, how you got interested in doing what you do as a chemist, instead of making toxic chemicals that you’re working to have a better environment. And also, tell us about the

Seventh Generation as a company, what’s their history.

MARTIN WOLF: Sure, I’d be glad to.

As implied by our discussion so far, this has been a journey. I didn’t start out in my career as a chemist thinking much about the connections between chemicals and human health. I was more focused on the work at hand that I’ve started my career at a manufacturer of agricultural chemicals—herbicides and pesticides, studying their fate in the environment.

And I was very impressed by the research that that company did.

About seven years into that job, I left and I joined a company that manufactures instrumentation to detect carcinogens in the environment.

In addition to being a chemist, I also studied electrical engineering. So instrumentation was of great interest to me because it combined my two fields.

And we started installing these pieces of equipment throughout the world. It was a wonderful job. I got to travel to Denmark, and Russia, and other countries, and installed this equipment. And we started discovering carcinogens in a variety of household and food products—everything from bacon to beer, and worked with food producers on eliminating the problems in some instances, in some instances, finding that the problems were more intractable.

But that started me thinking about the connection between the chemicals that are in so many of the things that we have in our daily lives, and carcinogens, and the increasing prevalence of cancer in our society.

So I started my own laboratory, looking at chemicals in the environment. And we were, what was called an EPA contract laboratory. We investigated soil and water samples. And my understanding of how careless companies could be about the chemicals they were using started to grow. And when I sold that laboratory and started consulting, I started working with individuals, such as yourself, and Jeffrey Hollinger, who founded, or was one of the co-founders of Seventh Generation, and started looking—

DEBRA: [inaudible 07:25]

MARTIN WOLF: Yes. He’s still very active and wonderfully. And started seeing through Jeffrey that businesses could work in a different way, not only by making products that were safer than conventional products, or contained fewer substances of concern, but also how a company could be organized to be socially responsible, and itself a socially responsible community.

And those are among the objectives of Seventh Generation, not only to make products that are safer for the environment and for the consumers that use them, but also be an example of how businesses can be proponents of social equity, and work up and down their supply chain, to see social equity brought to the fore.

So it’s been an exciting journey and a lot of fun, and it’s also been a process of evolution. When I first started working with Jeffrey, I could see how chemicals could affect the environment. When it came to human health, I was a little reticent to draw that connection. It was only over time and I saw exactly which chemicals are being used, where they were being used, and how they were being used, that I started to think that indeed, there could be a connection between the products we use, and our personal health.

DEBRA: I want to interrupt you here. I have a question, and we’re coming up on the break. So I’m sure you’re not going to be able to answer it prior to the break, but when we come back, you just said a very interesting thing to me, and that was that as a chemist, you could see how chemicals were affecting the environment. It was more difficult for you to see how they were affecting human health.

And I’d like you to speak more to that when we come back after the break because there are so many chemists, making so many chemicals, and now, you’re working on the side of chemical safety.

But I’d like to know more about what a chemist might be thinking from your experience.

So we’re going to take a break now. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Martin Wolf. He’s the director of product sustainability and authenticity for Seventh Generation. And we’ll be right back. Don’t go away.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Martin Wolf, director of product sustainability and authenticity of Seventh Generation. And before the break, I asked him, he had made a statement that it was difficult for him as a chemist to see the connection between human health and toxic chemicals, but he could see it between toxic chemicals and the environment.

So would you tell us more about that?

MARTIN WOLF: Sure, I’d be glad to. The connection between chemicals and the environment came to me very early in my career because of my work on the fate of pesticides in the environment. As I mentioned, my first job was with an agricultural chemical company.

However, there was this general belief that according to toxicology, and I quote, “The dose makes the poison.” And companies were always careful not to use such large quantities of material that they would be toxic to the individuals using them.

And it was only over time that the realization came to me that the dose makes the poison may be true for acute toxins, things that will kill you or harm you right away, but it was less true for chronic toxins, like carcinogens and mutagens, where really, it wasn’t clear what the lowest dose could be that would cause harm.

And companies would use these chronic toxicants in their products believing the levels were low enough to be safe. And frankly, they might be right, but I think there’s evidence that they’re not right, that somehow that lower limit that we are striving for is really not well known.

And with current science, I’m not sure it can be known. We just don’t have the means to do massive animal studies at very low doses. Most animal studies are done at very high doses because you need a very large number of animals if you’re going to use low doses, and that gets to be very expensive. And also, the relationship between animal studies and actual human experience is not clear.

DEBRA: I think the difficulty is that individual human bodies, well, as well as individual creatures in the environment, would have the same situation. But individual human bodies have very different tolerances for chemicals.

This is where I think it’s difficult to find what is that dose that’s safe.

So for me, if something—my rule of thumb has always been, if there’s a question about it, like the carcinogen, if it’s been established that they’ve got a high dose that causes cancer, then I don’t know what the safe dose is. And so I just decide to apply the precautionary principle and eliminate it entirely if I can.

MARTIN WOLF: In Seventh Generation, as a company, and I personally agree with that approach, we work very hard not to intentionally use any carcinogenic or chronically toxic substances in our products. And when we learn of their presence through inadvertent contamination in the supply chain, we work very hard to get them out as quickly as we can.

DEBRA: I want to ask you—I want us to talk about the supply chain. But first, would you tell us what green chemistry is? I’m sure a lot of people hear that term, but what does that mean?

MARTIN WOLF: Well, it is a term that is subject to interpretation. There is a book that was published almost 10 years now, by

Paul Anastas and John Warner called “The Principles of Green Chemistry.”

And among the principles are to use the least hazardous substances possible to be, what they call, atom-deficient, i.e., to work with chemistries that don’t use a lot of resources to make the desired products, to look at the chemistry of nature, and try to mimic her efficiency and her elegance and her relevant safety rather than using the small molecules that I’ll call the hammer approach to chemistry—by brute force, you succeed in what you’re doing rather than using nature’s more subtle techniques.

So they have 12 principles that get to those ideas—lower, hazard and more efficiency, and mimicking nature. But I also like to think with chemistry, it goes beyond that into renewable resources, the use of natural substances rather than petroleum-derived substances. And I think we are seeing a revolution in the first of industrial chemistry in that regard.

DEBRA: I was thinking about this the other day. I tend to try to create categories of things that I can understand a category of something, and then I put products into these categories. And to me, green chemistry, the word chemistry implies to me petrochemicals. And yet, and I think you’re correct me and say all things are chemistry, that the substances in our bodies are chemistry.

And so chemistry isn’t just what goes on in a factory, correct?

MARTIN WOLF: Absolutely. We are walking chemical factories. All life is…

DEBRA: So when you talk about green chemistry, I still think of green chemistry being industrial. And then I think of a solution being beyond green chemistry.

For example, a green chemistry product might be a product made out of a known toxic plastic right polyethylene. But beyond green chemistry would be to make it out of organic cotton. And because that cotton is grown by nature, it’s out in the field, it has nothing to do with the factory until we start processing it into a product.

I just wanted to bring this up because I think that people don’t always really understand terminology. And so we hear things like green chemistry and it’s like, “What does that mean?”

MARTIN WOLF: In fact, the wall between synthetic chemistry or petroleum chemistry and bio chemistry is falling. They’re becoming more and more interchangeable as we develop ways of taking substances found in nature and converting them to molecules that we can then manipulate.

How can I say this? On both sides of the wall between petrochemicals and biochemicals, there are substances that are toxic.

DEBRA: I agree.

MARTIN WOLF: You don’t touch poison ivy. And on both sides, there are chemicals that are relevantly safe. And I agree with you. My bias is that there are more such chemicals on the natural side of the wall than the synthetic side.

We have to go beyond just the simple division into biologically-derived and petro-derived.

DEBRA: And we need to take a break, so I need to interrupt you right there. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Martin Wolf, director of product sustainability and authenticity for Seventh Generation. And we’ll be back talking more about chemicals and manufacturing.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Martin Wolf, director of product sustainability and authenticity for Seventh Generation. And they make a lot of household and personal care products, and are paying particular attention to getting all toxic chemicals out of their supply chain.

So Martin, explain what a supply chain is. I think I explained it a little bit in the beginning, but from your viewpoint, as somebody who is working in the supply chain, tell us what you do.

MARTIN WOLF: Your example of a salad and salad dressing is a great one. Our supply chain is the string of companies and events that leads to the production of a product.

So, we need to buy materials called surfactants that help with cleaning, and enzymes that help with cleaning, and other substances that make a product. We buy those from a company, one of our suppliers, but they also are buying raw materials from another company.

So, to make a surfactant, they might have to buy coconut oil, and they might have to buy ethanol, and they might have to buy other substances and combine them to make the surfactant. The coconut oil has to come from a plantation where the coconuts are grown.

And we take the chemical that’s produced, but it’s important for us to know all the steps in making that chemical, so we can determine where there might be the introduction of hazardous substances that we wouldn’t want to see in our product.

And as you might expect from this description, it’s a very elaborate process, and it’s not always clear what’s happening at a country that could be thousands of miles away. And of course, there are some disheartening examples.

Recently, there’s been the example of melanin in children’s formula produced in China because a supply chain supplier wanted to make it look like they had more of certain proteins in their milk than there really were, or lead and other heavy metals, and lipstick and children’s toys, phthalates and other things that shouldn’t be in consumer products.

DEBRA: And they often aren’t on the label because they’re down the supply chain.

MARTIN WOLF: That’s correct.

DEBRA: And so that’s why you don’t see them. And so we look at the labels, and think, “Well, this product only has what I see on the label.” But even an example that I often give is apple sauce. Apple sauce is just apples and water, and maybe some sugar sometimes, depending on the brand. But even if all you have is apples and water, that’s all it says on the label.

But apples contain pesticides, and water pollutants, and all these things that you don’t see.

And I think that it’s interesting that in our culture today that if you are selling a toxic apple sauce, all it says on the label is apples and water. Yet if you’re selling organic apple sauce, it has to be very carefully labeled and regulated in order for them to be able to say organic.

I think it should be the other way around. I think the label should say apples and pesticides.

MARTIN WOLF: I think you’re exactly right. But I’ll point out that in food products, in cosmetic products, you actually have an advantage because they list some ingredients, whereas in cleaning products, there’s no legal requirement to list the ingredients on the label at all, so there could be almost anything in that bottle. Unfortunately, sometimes, that’s exactly what’s there—almost anything.

So Seventh Generation has a policy of listing all ingredients on its products even if it’s not required by law, and in our cosmetic products, our personal care products for example, we go beyond the law, and also list every component in the fragrances we use because, one, we’re proud of what we do, which is to use only essential oils and plant extracts. And two, we want our consumers to know that we are using only plant extracts, that there are no phthalates or other substances to extend the fragrance or synthetic substances that smell like particular fragrance or smell like nothing that people seem to like in their air fresheners and some of their home care products.

We think it’s important that companies list ingredients, and we think it’s important that consumers read them.

But to your point, even if you list what you’re putting in the substance, there might be upstream contamination of that.

So for example, in 2010, I think it was both Proctor & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson agreed to reduce the occurrence of 1,4-dioxane, which is a probable human carcinogen in their products to 10 ppm after having much higher levels discovered in their products.

It’s not something they had intentionally, it’s not something they have to put on their labels, but it’s something that was there.

DEBRA: Doesn’t it get created like when two chemicals can come together and make a third chemical?

MARTIN WOLF: That’s exactly what happens. When the substances known as surfactants are being made, if you don’t have good process control, or even, unavoidably, in the making of some surfactants, you get 1, 4-dioxane as a byproduct.

So Seventh Generation, which I admit, at one time, used some of those surfactants, just stopped using them because we knew our consumers wouldn’t want any 1,4-dioxane in their products, and we wouldn’t want there to be any.

DEBRA: And that’s the responsible thing to do. I think that part of it is that I see a business is like an individual except that there are more people. It’s an entity. An individual is an entity, and a business is an entity. It just has more people in it.

But the issues are the same, in terms of what are your standards going to be, and what are you going to do to make a safe business, or a safe—in your case, it’s a safe workplace. But individuals, we’re saying, what can we do to make a safe home?

And what I’m hearing from you is you’re taking so much care, so much more than I typically see in a business, to know what’s going into your products.

Many years ago, 23 years ago, in fact, about the same time you and I were both looking at the sustainability of products, and I was working with some people to be manufacturing some sustainable products.

And we were looking at life cycle, and we were looking at supply chain and all these things.

I had your job in that company, where it was my job to find out what was in these ingredients that we were now going to call green products. And I was looking into chain and—I have to take a break now, but I’ll come back.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, we’re talking with Martin Wolf, director product sustainability and authenticity for Seventh Generation. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest is chemist, Martin Wolf, who is the director of product sustainability and authenticity for Seventh Generation. And you probably see Seventh Generation products in all the stores that you go to, but if you don’t, you can just go to SeventhGeneration.com, and take a look.

So Martin, do you think that we’re actually in exciting times now, and I think back to 1990, that things were very different then, and that we were all saying, “Well, how do we make these products?” And that today, there’s so much more innovation in products.

MARTIN WOLF: This is a very exciting time. We see change happening in the industry. And I just do want to say that if Seventh Generation alone made products that we consider to be safer for people and the environment, we wouldn’t have a tremendous impact because we are not a big part of the cleaning product market and personal care market. We’re growing but we’re still pretty small.

So we see part of our role as getting the industry to change, and we’re very active in industry associations and also working with advocacy groups like the Breast Cancer Fund, and Women’s Voices for the Earth.

And we’ve also been really successful. We’ve made phosphate-free products that are better for the environment, and got the industry, or a part of the group that got the industry to eliminate phosphates in all auto dish products in 2010.

We’re strong advocates for ingredient communication. And the industry introduced a voluntary standard in 2010. And we were part in developing that standard. And we have had, as one of our policies, not to use any chronically toxic materials in our products. And we’re struggling and working hard to see the industry change.

And just this week, Proctor & Gamble announced they were going to stop using triclosan and diethyl phthalate in their personal care products in 2014.

So we’re seeing change happening, and it is very exciting to see.

DEBRA: It’s almost like there’s so much awareness and so much happening. It’s almost hard to keep up with it because I do see that there’s awareness on every level. But in order for us to make a big change as a society, away from toxic chemicals, we need to have regulations be in place. We need to have manufacturers be educated. We need to have consumers be educated.

Everybody along the line needs to all be in agreement that this is the direction that we’re going. And I see that happening.

But some parts are slimmer than others to catch on, get on the program.

But I see companies like yours and others that are saying, “Okay, this is what our company is going to be about.” And I see consumers deciding that that’s what it is that they want for themselves and their families.

This is so different than it was when you and I first started.

MARTIN WOLF: Absolutely. We’re seeing the so-called green segment of these categories grow much, much faster than the conventional segments, which means consumers are making that change.

And we’re also seeing the science develop, things that allowed companies to say, “Well, it really doesn’t matter or you can’t prove that it matters.”

Those excuses are starting to fray at the edges, let’s say, as more and more research is directed toward this. And some of the things you and I advocated for 20 years ago are becoming wise rather fringed things to be doing.

DEBRA: Yes, I’m seeing that. I’m seeing it. I want to get back to your supply chain. Are you now, or are there any plans to make some of that information available to consumers? I know that you’re putting ingredients on the label, but do you have a pictorial info, whatever it’s called, info picture, or something like that, that would show the layers of where, what you’re looking at, and what kinds of things that are down the line.

MARTIN WOLF: It’s funny you should ask that because that is one of my goals for this year, to get at least one of our products on our website as an infographic to show where it comes from, and where the different components are made, much like

Patagonia does with its footprint chronicle online.

DEBRA: I haven’t seen that. I’ll go take a look. That’s what I want to see as a consumer. I’d love to see an infographic that has the products at the top, and then lines coming down. At the bottom of the page, I’ve got a coconut tree, so I can see what’s going on. All these things led up through this process to become this product.

You can just see it all at once.

MARTIN WOLF: And it’s amazingly complex, but it’s certainly doable. And as I say, we’re working on it. We’ve talked to our supply chain partners, and they’re cooperating with us, which is also a change. They see the value of making this information public. We’re very excited to be working on that.

DEBRA: Well, I can hardly wait. And I hope when you have it ready that the first person you would come to is me. I want to be on the radio together.

MARTIN WOLF: Excellent. I will make sure since I now have your e-mail address to send you a notice.

DEBRA: Good. Well, we’re coming to the end of our time now today. Is there anything that you’d like to say that we haven’t covered? We still have about four minutes.

MARTIN WOLF: There were three things that I was thinking about that I felt were important to say. And they are to the listeners of your program. And the first is to be mindful of what you buy because we are constantly barraged with ideas and what’s important to our family, and we really need to filter that information and think about what’s truly important to our family, and what is going to be best for their health and safety.

I also want to remind them that change is in their hands, and they should advocate for change. A very big issue facing us is updating the Toxic Substances Control Act, and a new law called the Chemical Safety Improvement Act.

And we should let out congressmen and senators know that this is important to us, so that regulations that strengthen our chemical supply chain are in place. And by strengthen it, I mean, make it safer for us as end users.

And I just want to point out that this is about our family’s health, and that’s really what’s at stake, and why wouldn’t we act to protect their health. It’s so important.

DEBRA: I’d like to answer that question because I haven’t said this yet on the show. I think the reason why people don’t act more, and I’m not picking out any individuals in saying this, but I think it has to do with love. And I think that it’s because when you really love something that you want to take care of them. That’s just the feeling that goes along with it.

And so if you love your family, you want what’s best for your family. If you love yourself, you want to have what’s best for yourself. If you love the planet, you want to have what’s best for the planet.

You want things to survive.

And I think that if people aren’t feeling that, then—we live in a culture where that’s not valued. People say that they want to be loved or whatever, but I think that real love comes from inside. And it’s within every one of us, and that part of it is to do the things that help us sustain all life.

I think that it’s a part of love, and the more we love, the more we’ll take the right actions.

MARTIN WOLF: I hope, well, in fact, that is true. I see it in myself and in my family. I have a daughter who is now a grown young woman. And I think about the things that I fed her in my ignorance because as I said, this has been a journey. And If I had known then what I know now, I would definitely have done things differently.

I think it’s important not only to show that love, but also to show the knowledge and wisdom to execute on that.

DEBRA: Well, it does take knowledge and wisdom because you could love and want to care for something, and not know what to do. And so knowledge and wisdom is the other part of it. And the more information that we can have about our consumer products […], the better off we’re going to be about that.

MARTIN WOLF: I absolutely agree with that. And let me just say, this has been a real pleasure. The time has gone amazingly quickly. There’s so much more to discuss and talk about, but I’m glad we had at least this first time together.

DEBRA: I’m glad too. And I really appreciate your being here, Martin. And you certainly can come back again because I know that you have so much knowledge and wisdom to share with us. And I want to do this again, so we’ll schedule you again.

Thank you for being here.

MARTIN WOLF: It was definitely my pleasure. Thank you.

DEBRA: Good. Mine too. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you can find out more about this show at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and I just had my 100th show last Friday, so there’s a hundred interviews you could be listening to all with people of the caliber of the guest that you just listened to, people who are making products, who are developing new ways of doing things, authors who are writing about this subject, people who are working for new regulations.

I’m just working to get everybody in the field that I possibly can to show you all the different directions, all the things that people are doing, all the voices, so that we can really understand what to do. So come back tomorrow.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.