The man who started this campaign—Andy Igrejas, National Campaign Director for Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families—joins me to discuss their “Mind the Store” campaign. We’ll talk about the campaign, the results so far, why each of us as citizens and consumers need to be involved in changing what’s on the shelf in stores, and what we can do. As consumers we have power. Stores sell what we want to buy. We need to let them know we don’t want toxics. mindthestore.saferchemicals.org
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Petition Asking Top 10 Retailers to Stop Selling Products That Contain the “Hazardous 100” Chemicals
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Andy Igrejas
Date of Broadcast: April 25, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. Even though there’s toxic chemicals all around, we can still be healthy, happy, productive and make the world a better place.
This is Thursday, April 25th 2013. And I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. Today, we’re going to talk about the Mind the Store Campaign that’s being done by Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. And they’re asking the top 10 retailers to remove from their shelves products, all products, that contain one or more of a list of a hundred hazardous chemicals.
My guest today will be Andy Igrejas. He’s the national campaign director for Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. And he’s running this campaign.
But before I introduce Andy, I want to tell you something that happened to me yesterday. I want to talk to you about choice—which has everything to do with what we’re talking about today and everything to do with toxic chemicals.
Yesterday, I received in the mail a letter telling me that I was part of a class action suit for a product that I had purchased during a certain time period which was found to be defective. And since I was one of the people who had purchased it, and my name was on a list of having purchased it, that I was now one of the people that was part of the class action suit.
And what was disturbing to me was that they didn’t write to me and say that there’s a class action suit, “Do you want to be part of it?” They wrote to me and said, “There’s a class action suit, and you’ve been named. And if you want to opt out of it, you can.” I read it, and I found that there was no financial compensation, that what I would get is this product again. And there was $830,000 of legal fees. And I wondered, “Well, if I’m somebody who would benefit from this, am I responsible for my portion of the $830,000 of legal fees?” I got about that far, and I decided I didn’t want to have any part of this. And so, I filled out that form.
Now, what it took for me to opt out of something that I never agreed to be part of in the first place was that I had to fill up the form, I had to copy it front and back—and I felt like I needed to make a two-sided copy so the second page where all the signature was would not get lost—and then, I had to address three envelopes, send it to three different attorney’s offices, all to say no to something that I didn’t agree to in the first place.
Now, this is also a tactic that’s used often where they say in some advertising, “Well, here, try this free for 30 days. We won’t charge your card until day 31, but you have to opt out.” And of course, if you forget to opt out, then your card gets charged, et cetera, et cetera.
So, what I would like to see is I would like to see that we all have a choice to opt in instead of being required to opt out. And it’s the same thing with toxics.
We live in a world where the default is to be exposed to toxic chemicals, yet there’s no form that I can fill out that says, “I’m opting out of this toxic world. I want to live in the clean, safe, healthy world.”
And what we need to do is be creating that world. We can create it within our home to a very large degree enough that we can restore our health. But there’s other things that we need to do for us to be opting in to a safe world. We need to be creating that world because, at the moment, it doesn’t exist.
So, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to have Andy on today so that we can talk about something that we all can do to make a difference to get retailers to pay more attention to the kinds of products that are being sold in mass market stores.
Andy, welcome to Toxic Free Talk Radio!
Andy Igrejas: Well, thank you very much for having me here. I appreciate it.
DEBRA: Thanks for being here. Let me just tell my audience something about you. You’re the national campaign director for Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. And prior to that, you headed the Environmental Health Program at the National Environmental Trust for seven years. And you’ve helped chemical policy reform on the national agenda through work on the Kids Safe Chemical Act. And you’ve also worked on Chemical Security Right to Know Food Safety California initiatives and a list of a whole lot of things that are way too long. But I think everybody gets the idea that you have a lot of background and you’ve done a lot on the level of legislation and organizations to be working on that other retail and regulatory part (where I’ve been working for the past 30 years on helping consumers navigate the non-toxics from the toxic stuff when they’re making consumer product choices).
It’s become really clear to me recently that I think it’s just a new level of awareness on my part of the necessity of changing regulations and getting retailers to do a different thing. So that’s why I’m having you here today, because I want all my listeners to understand the importance of this as well.
But first, tell us how you personally became interested in working in this field.
Andy Igrejas: Well, that’s interesting. I haven’t been asked that in a while. I’ve always been interested in these issues and maybe it does get back to that agenda. I grew up in a very industrial neighborhood [unclear 06:24]. I really grew up right underneath Exit 148 […]
DEBRA: Mm-hmmm…
Andy Igrejas: There are a bunch of factories there. There was a tube plant, […], packaging plant, a pharmaceutical plant all humming with people. All of them has since closed. They’ve just gone to other things because you can make the same stuff more cheaply in developing countries unfortunately and not abide by the rules and regulations and pay people peanuts. I grew up there. And so I’ve always had an interest in the human health impacts of environmental issues.
I started a club in my high school to work to publicize the dangers of the incinerators that was planned for the nearby city of Newark. And when I dug into that as far back as high school, we found that, well, what makes the incinerator ash toxic. And it’s that there are toxic chemicals used in the packaging basically the products that people send to the incinerator. You release some of these chemicals when you burn them. And in other cases, you actually create compounds called combustion byproducts.
And that started for me my interest in “Gee, isn’t there”—part of the problem is what are these chemicals in the first place, what are things made of in the first place. And at different times, at different points in my career, I’ve worked on trying to move the concern from just the air and the water up to a more fundamental level of what do we make things from and how can we switch those things from being toxic things to being safer and healthier things.
DEBRA: Yes, that’s been my interest too from not as young an age as you. But when I was in my early 20’s, I became very ill from exposure to toxic chemicals in ordinary consumer products in my home. And my first question was: “Well, what are these chemicals? I have never had any attention on them at all.” And suddenly, I was wanting to know “Well, what’s in the toothpaste? What’s in the hair spray? What’s in the perfume? And how come they’re toxic? And how come they’re making me sick? And where can I find a product that doesn’t have this in it?”
And those questions where—I mean I couldn’t just go down to Wal-Mart, for example, and buy the non-toxic perfume. And this is what we’re dealing with in the world today—as I’ve said earlier in the show, choices. How do we have those choices? How do we know those choices?
So, now you’re with Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. Tell me about that organization.
Andy Igrejas: Sure! Well, we organized this a few years ago because we felt that there was a need to have a campaign from all the different groups who worked on this from different angles. Together, we were really trying to put chemical reform on the national agenda. And it required big, national environment groups working closely with the community-based groups, working closely with health organizations that don’t have an environmental focus, that are just focused on individual diseases like autism and breast cancer and other things and working with health professionals.
So that’s what Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families is. It’s a coalition that came together to advocate for reforming the federal system so that it addresses these issues.
DEBRA: And we need to take a commercial break. I need to stop you because we need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio with Debra Lynn Dadd.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re here with Andy Igrejas. Did I say that right?
Andy Igrejas: Igrejas is fine.
DEBRA: Igrejas. He’s a national campaign director for Safer Chemical, Healthy Families. And we’re talking about their Mind the Store campaign.
I interrupted you as we went to the commercial break. Was there more you wanted to say about your coalition, Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families?
Andy Igrejas: No, that’s fine. Just that this coalition is environmental and health groups. Health professionals and businesses came together and demand comprehensive overhaul for chemical policies so that we are ensuring that the products that end up on the shelves and that we take into our homes contain chemicals that have really been assessed for their safety and they’re being used safely and using the latest scientific recommendations that have been proposed the American Academy of Pediatrics, […]
There’s legislation to do that, the Safe Chemicals Act. And we’re fighting hard for that.
But at the same time, the chemical industry has really mastered the art of promoting gridlock in Washington, powerful companies. Exxon Mobile, a lot of people think of it as an oil company only, but it’s also one of the top two chemical producers in the country. Dow Chemical Dupont, they’ve really banded to block the reform.
And so, in the meantime, we created this Mind the Store campaign—people can see it at MindtheStore.org. sort of our world’s colliding, you and me—to try and take the power that consumers can have to make better decisions about the chemicals in there that are in the products we’re buying and to increase the power of that by focusing on the retailers.
It’s very hard for the average person to keep track of so many chemicals. But the retailers can! And so we’re asking let’s ask them to take a bigger bite out of this problem and promote broader health and safety goals than just BPA In baby bottles or phthalates in nail polish.
DEBRA: Consumers, I just want to underscore what you’ve just said about the power of consumers. Consumers have so much power. We don’t even know how much power we have. What stores wants to sell, what ends up on the shelf is what you are buying. And so whatever it is that we say that we want via our dollars, how we spend our dollars is what is going to end up on the shelf.
If we were to all say that we were not going to buy any toxic chemicals for a week, say—well, I don’t ever buy them. But if we could get enough people together so that Wal-Mart or Target or any of these stores were to have no sales of toxic chemicals for a week, that would make a big impression on them. And they would say—
I mean, we already see Wal-Mart is already having some less toxic products. Target is having less toxic products. In fact, if you go to MindtheStore.org, one of the things that they have is a list of the top 10 retailers in it. They tell you what these retailers have already done or haven’t done.
And so, over a 30 year period, I see that there has been a change. I see that there’s more and more non-toxic products as when there were 30 years ago, more choices for us. It’s not a shortage of products. It’s a shortage of awareness and commitment and of course having the opposition of the chemical companies that don’t want to give up their chemical production.
But we have the upper hand, we really do. And so if we can’t get the legislation pass because of what the chemicals are doing, we can’t get things changed in the stores by the choices that we make.
So, go on about your campaign.
Andy Igrejas: No, that’s exactly right. And I think it’s hard. The awareness of this issue for your activism and people like you around the country has increased, and it really has changed the marketplace. And in some places, it’s changed it fairly decisively. The markets for certain products, certain chemicals, have dried up fairly quickly.
The chemical industry fears that because you can buy off congressmen basically, but you can’t buy off everybody.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
Andy Igrejas: That costs too much money. And people, when it comes to sticking up for their own health, people don’t see these trade-offs between—most people don’t believe, and they’re right enough to believe it, that not having toxic chemicals means that we won’t have products, that things will grind to a halt.
At the same time, it’s hard to just use your individual purchasing power because a lot of the toxic chemical that are in things that they don’t associate with chemicals. It’s not just the cleaners and the perfumes. It’s the flame retardants that are in the polyurethane foam in your coach.
I’ve been working on these issues for a while. And I have to admit, when the flame retardant thing really started breaking, I realized, “Hey, I have one of these pillows. I’ve been sleeping on this thing that I thought was cool and modern Swedish foam pillow that fits my neck.” And it had this weird smell I remember when I got it. I was like, “Man, I’ve been working on this for a while. And I was bringing a flame retardant-laden pillow after doing this stuff during the day.”
So, we created this campaign to say—I also think people will look after their own families. But I think most people, good people, get the bigger picture and recognize that we need to take care of each other. And it shouldn’t just be “Well, I can afford it, I can go to the healthy products in aisle five. But some other poor slob can get the cheapest thing in aisle two.”
I think we recognize it, especially for some of the most dangerous chemicals we’ve known about for a long time. Nobody really should be exposed to them. And we should be driving it out of the marketplace.
DEBRA: I agree, we should.
Andy Igrejas: So, this is an attempt to do that. It’s to give you some tools by focusing on your retailers—and you can do it by email, you can do it when you go into the store and ask them what are they doing about this bigger list, this list of the Hazardous 100 we’re calling it. Ask the retailers.
I appreciate what you said about the website. We try to give them credit. Many of them have taken steps to address these things. But they’ve sort of done it after things have been in the press for a while, et cetera. And this says, “Well, what if we address a bigger group of chemicals and all the retailers do it at the same time? They could really make a very big difference.”
And they do care about what their customers are asking them to do.
So, we hope that it’s a way for people to not just look out for yourself by not buying this or that, but also to take a bigger action, help by focusing on the retailers that will protect broader groups of people from more chemicals.
DEBRA: Very good. So when we come back from the break, I’m going to ask you some questions about this list of the Hazardous 100 chemicals and how—well, I’ll wait and ask you the question when we come back.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m here with Andy Igrejas from Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. And we’re talking about the Mind the Store campaign in which they’re asking the top 10 retailers to remove products from their shelves that contain some of a list of 100+ hazardous chemicals.
So Andy, let’s talk about these 100+ hazardous chemicals. Here’s my question. I’ve been looking at products for more than 30 years as you have. And the biggest problem that I have is disclosure. I can look at a label. And if they give me the names of the chemicals, I can look up those chemicals.
I used to look them up in a chemical dictionary and toxicology books. But now, you can just look them up online. You could type in “formaldehyde” and “BPA” and find out what the health effects are.
And yet, because of regulations, and because of trade secrets, and all kinds of other reasons, there can be toxic chemicals in products that are never going on the label. You can find them out in ways by looking at trade journals and things like that (which I’ve been doing all this time). But there are so many differences between formulas and materials that are used. And the labels are not accurate.
So, if I were a retailer, I could say, “Okay, I’m totally in agreement with you with your Mind the Store program. Let’s just get rid of the Hazardous 100 chemicals. How am I going to do that?”
Andy Igrejas: They have some experience with this already. So, Wal-Mart, when it first started getting involved in this issue, and I’ve talked with them—some directly, and then their colleagues have dealt with that more. And then there are some things they talk about freely and others I think that they’re proprietary about. They’re motivated partly to get in front of consumer preferences so they didn’t have another thing like they had with those BPA baby bottles where the market evaporated for it, and they had already bought next year’s baby bottles. They also had, from my understanding, some environmental compliance issues where, believe it or not, they were—and this makes sense as a bunch of your listeners do. They would get rid of some inventory as solid wastes. And some of it turned out to actually classify as toxic waste because of chemicals in it. And it made them think, “My God! How does this work? Who’s minding the store?” And they realized that they had to.
So, in terms of how they would do this, they’ve shown that, especially with the market power they have, but I think also for the other people on this list, they can actually say to their suppliers, “Hey, we need to know if you’re using any of these chemicals.”
And it’s a bulletin they can send out to all their suppliers, “Do any of the products that we buy from you have this list of chemicals? We need to know. And if they do, we’re going to ask you to stop using them by this date or we won’t want to sell your product.”
And they have done that kind of thing. A couple of years, it became publicized. They sent a note to their suppliers about a number of different flame retardant chemicals. And it leaked to the press. But it was basically issued in December and said, “By June, we don’t want any product that contains these chemicals in it.”
DEBRA: I love that that’s been happening at Wal-Mart. I know people who work at Wal-Mart, so I know that that’s been happening. Kudos to Wal-Mart for doing that.
But on the consumer end, when I walk into my Wal-Mart store—which is not that often, but I do occasionally go to Wal-Mart.
And if I do, I’m looking to see where are the non-toxic products and how would I know that?
And as a consumer…
Andy Igrejas: You wouldn’t.
DEBRA: I mean there’s no label on it that says “Wal-Mart has determined that these chemicals are not in here.”
I’m trying to see the connection between how we can—like you have a coalition of different organizations and interest groups and bringing them altogether around legislation. This is so interesting to me that you’re doing this because I really see that, in order for this really to change, there needs to be a cooperation between consumers, retailers, manufacturers and regulations.
Andy Igrejas: That’s right.
DEBRA: …and that there needs to be communication, that there needs to be a decision that we’re all going to come out of this together in a way that makes economic sense.
I’m certainly not trying to make Dupont go bankrupt. What I would love is for Dupont to start making non-toxic products. I would like everybody to see that if we’re going to be healthy, and if we’re going to have a planet that’s not destroyed, then this is the direction that we need to go—to have there be disclosure on labels, to have there be—
I don’t really want there to be a central organization that verifies. But if Wal-Mart has a program—and I see that they do—where they’re saying to manufacturers, “We don’t want products that have X, Y and Z chemicals on them,” then somewhere, you should be able to go to their website or something, and there should be a list or a shelf-talker or a sticker or something that says, “This is part of Wal-Mart’s Mind the Store program” or whatever they’re going to call it. “You can go online and find out we have verified that it doesn’t have this and this and this in it.
Now, it might not end up being perfect because one thing that I see is that I have my own list of hazardous thousand or more chemicals that I don’t want to see because I’m always assessing products and choosing ones that don’t have the chemicals I want to avoid.
So, I can see that a product might say, “Well, it doesn’t contain formaldehyde. But what else does it contain?”
So there’s many different levels. I’m just really interested in what if Target comes to you and says, “Okay, let’s take out all these chemicals” or some smaller retailer than Wal-Mart, what do you see is the process that they’re going to follow?
Andy Igrejas: That is a good question. And I think it’s a more sophisticated question. It makes sense for Toxic Free Talk Radio that you’ll be ahead on the curve on this. I think you’ve put your finger on a number of things.
I think one of them is consumers have a certain amount of power, but one of our themes for this campaign is with great market power comes great responsibility. People who buy huge quantities of things in bulk has market power. So it is the case with any one of this retailers. In their world, they really have the ability to get answers to the questions that they want if the penalty is that they won’t sell something.
What we would like to do is have each of them respond that they would like to work with us on how to implement this in ways that are achievable for them and are meaningful for the people that sell to them.
So, we’re hoping to have a meaningful process where we can work this through with them.
DEBRA: Good! After the break, let’s continue this […] because I’d like to hear if anybody has responded; and if so, what did they say?
But we’re going to take a break first. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. You’re here with Debra Lynn Dadd. And I’m talking with Andy Igrejas from Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families about their Mind the Store campaign.
And before we go on with the interview, I just want to make sure that you know how to get more information about the campaign. You go MindtheStore.org. And if you want more information about Toxic Free Talk Radio, go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And from there, you can also go to links for other parts of my website including Debra’s List that have more than 500 websites where you can buy non-toxic products (even though they’re not on the shelf at Wal-Mart). I have a huge Q&A with thousands of questions and even more thousands of answers. And you can call me for a consultation if you want. There’s lots of information on my website about how you can find, choose and purchase and toxic-free products.
So, Andy, in this last segment, tell us what the response has been from the retailers. Anybody responded?
Hello, Andy?
Andy Igrejas: Oh, I’m sorry. I apologize, I hit the mute by mistake.
None of the retailers have responded officially yet except to say that they have the request and that they’re considering it. In our letter to them, we gave until June 1st. And we recognize that it’s a big request. It’s a leap from doing this for a handful of chemicals to doing it for over a hundred. And we wouldn’t want to get a negative response because it seems like we were asking them to do something impossible and let them absorb some of the materials and other things that we’ve provided that do show or suggest how to do this.
So, June 1st is when we’ll find out what people’s official responses are. And I’m hoping that they’ll be positive responses and that that’ll be the beginning of a process with us to develop a policy internally to identify where they have these chemicals in their supply chains and to move away from them.
But you raised a point before. You asked them what the response was. I just wanted to come back to it. It was the idea that, even if you get something that doesn’t just have formaldehyde, what does it have. On the website, you’ll see there’s a bullet called Resources for Retailers . It’s very much about this phenomenon. We don’t just want to move from known bad to unknowns. You want to move from known bad things to known good things.
DEBRA: Let me interrupt you for a second. Hold on, wait. I’m looking at your page right now at MindtheStore.org, and I don’t see that Resources for Retailers.
Andy Igrejas: It’s over on the right. There’s a list of The Top 10 Retailers, The Hazardous 100. Then it that it says Resources for Retailers.
DEBRA: Oh, mine says “Why Mind the Store?” I don’t have “Resources for Retailers”. I have The Top 10 Retailers, The Hazardous 100+, And Why Mind the Store?. I have A Letter to Retailers.
Andy Igrejas: Oh, I’m sorry. If you click on any one of those, that becomes a choice for you. It’s not on the home page.
DEBRA: Oh, I see. So, listeners, what you need to do is click on any one of those three buttons. It’ll take you to another page.
And then, there’s a menu on the right that has The Top 10 Retailers, Hazardous 100+, Why Mind the Store Resources for Retailers, Methodology and Partners.
And so, there’s a lot more information inside once you click on something than there is on the home page.
Okay, thank you, Andy. Go ahead.
Andy Igrejas: Well, part of the reason we know this works is the most advanced experienced in this country anyway with this kind of thing has been with the healthcare sector, in particular, Kaiser Permanente and the Western States version of the Catholic HMO’s. They used to be called Catholic Healthcare West. Now it’s called [unclear 32:08].
And they, as part of their mission to reduce harm to their patients—first, do no harm—they put policies together to try and at first just identify the chemicals of concern that people were exposed to through medical devices like IV tubing and IV bags.
But they [unclear 32:30] to include the building materials in the facilities—the sheets, the fabrics, and now they’re even getting on to the food that they serve.
They sent these specifications that, basically, “We have all these purchasing power as Kaiser and as Catholic Healthcare West in this market. And we don’t want things that have these chemicals of concern.”
But also, when you don’t bring those things, you also want to make sure that what you’re replacing it with doesn’t have any of these characteristics.
And so, they set those specifications. And they specified what the standards were for what they substitute it with. And it was interesting. it had this ripple effect. It’s changed the marketplace and increased the market for safer building materials, flooring, carpeting, medical devices.
And so, in the Resources thing, you’ll see that there’s something from a group called the Business NGO Working Group (or Biz NGO for short). It’s a guide for how to implement this kind of policy. And it mostly comes from that healthcare experience.
And so, we’re trying to take something that has worked and some techniques that have worked, just some very practical things, and have the retailers use them in a broader way and apply them to a broader set of chemicals.
DEBRA: This is very good news. I really want our listeners to understand that, behind the scenes, there’s a whole lot going on to make the world a less toxic place to live. And what we mostly see in the mainstream media is sensational stories about BPA and phthalates and fire retardants and all those kinds of things because the mainstream media is pretty sensational.
But there really has been progress if you know where to look. We have things like Kaiser Permanente like Andy just described. And we have more non-toxic products to choose from. And there really is a trend.
Wouldn’t you say there’s a trend in the right direction?
Andy Igrejas: I do feel and believe there is a trend. It’s hard to measure if it is keeping up with the problem. In other words…
DEBRA: I understand what you’re saying.
Andy Igrejas: But I think there is a trend. I think part of this little letter that I wrote on this book that I called Why Mind the Store? is that I think we need to accelerate the trend. The thing you just described, which is a real difficult thing for activists when you’re being ethical. We want to educate the public about these threats, but kind of like you mentioned, it’s just another story about how there’s something bad in something. And it seem like you can’t do anything about it and the world is coming to an end. That’s very much not what we want.
We want to educate people so they’re aware of the problem and they can take meaningful action to help improve things.
I think a lot of these improvements hopefully do have to happen through policy changes because only the government can force the testing of those chemicals as a condition for them depending on the market.
But in the meantime, we have seen that these marketplace initiatives can really make a big difference. But they need to be more than just the chemical of the month. It can’t just be “Well, BPA is in the news. So okay, we’ll deal with BPA.”
So, that’s what we’d like to think. We’re making it easier for the retailers to basically go, “Oh, okay. Here’s this combined fire power of a lot of the non-profit community. They’re saying ‘focus on this group of chemicals’. They’re giving us credit for what we’ve already done. And we’re giving consumers a hook to also say, “Well, here’s a way to use the [unclear 36:20] as a consumer and focus on something bigger than the chemical of the month.”
And so, we’re hopeful that we can accelerate that trend you’ve described. We have a trend, but I think the trend, it needs to be accelerated to really match the scale of what is worth doubling back to that the scientists, the doctors keep telling us more and more that we’ve been they think understating the role that chemicals play in the chronic illness and the health problems that we have in this country.
DEBRA: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely! A few years ago when Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families first started, you published a really excellent report about how toxic chemicals are contributing to various health problems and the cost of how toxic chemicals are contributing to the cost of healthcare which I have been linking and linking and linking and linking to ever since.
Andy Igrejas: Thank you.
DEBRA: It’s so important for people to understand that. I think that—not to get off the subject—a lot of people still don’t even understand that there’s a problem.
But we only just have a couple of minutes left. So I want to encourage people to go to your website, MindtheStore.org. I encourage you to go on and look at the website for Safety Chemicals, Healthy Families is doing overall.
And as we finish up—we have a minute left I think, about a minute left—just tell us quickly what consumers can do in our every day lives. What can we do to help this?
Andy Igrejas: I think the basic thing is that we know make a difference for reducing your own chemical exposure are things you probably go over a lot in this show. There’s avoiding processed food because the packaging is a big source of chemical exposure; eating more whole foods (organic ones if you can get them easily and afford them).
There’s a certain big ticket things like the flame retardants. So, buying mattresses and furniture that don’t have these flame retardants in them, avoiding the chemical-intensive cleaners and cosmetics, those are things you can do to protect yourself.
There’s a bunch of resources. It sounds like you have the best catalog of anyone.
DEBRA: I think I do.
Andy Igrejas: But I think in the meantime…
DEBRA: [unclear 38:36] in the marketplace, in terms of the marketplace, helping retailers understand. You can go to MindtheStore.org. And right there, you can send a letter to the retailers. You can put in your first name, your last name, your email and your zip code. Just click the green arrow and send your letter.
Andy, thank you so much for being with us today. I’ve learned a lot about what you’re doing. I have more appreciation of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families as an organization. And I’ll talk to everybody tomorrow.
Tomorrow, we’re going to just have open phones. So I want to hear from all of you. I want you to call me and tell me what you’re concerned about, what your questions are.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Toxic Free Talk Radio.
