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Collection: Sustainababy: Born to be Green

Let It Snow…Baby Clothes

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Editor’s note January 2017: A snowstorm hit Portland last week, leaving almost a foot of snow in the city. Six days since the snowfall, ice lingers on streets, and schools were closed for the 9th snow day of the year. Some are calling this the biggest snow since 1980. We’re bringing back this popular post on … Read more

What Demons Lurk in Our Halloween Stuff?

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Well, I’d like to be able to simply say “Happy Halloween!” and leave it at that. I love Halloween. Candy and costumes—it’s an unbeatable combination.

But I do get a sick feeling in my stomach (and not only because I ate too much of that candy) when I think of all the Halloween stuff destined for the landfill. (I can count about 20 big, plastic spiders hanging around my neighborhood right now.)

And the amount of Halloween stuff is no joke. After all, according to the National Retail Federation, Halloween is a $6.2 billion industry. And as Mother Jones’s Jaeah Lee puts it, “even in the midst of a troubling economy, Americans will spend an average of $72.31 on Halloween this year, the highest amount recorded in the last nine years.” What!? How much can that fake spider-web stuff cost?

But plastic swords that take centuries to degrade is only one scary aspect of this holiday. Mother Jones has a good run down of all that lurks in our Halloween trappings, including slave-labor candy, union-busting costumes, and lead-laden fake bling:

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Fatherhood Confronts Climate Change

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Editor’s note: This post, by Sightline blogger Anna Fahey originally appeared in YES! Magazine.

“Everyone who finally ‘gets it’ about climate change has an ‘Oh, shit’ moment,” Mark Hertsgaard observes in Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, “an instant when the pieces fall into place, the full implications of the science at last become clear, and you are left staring in horror at the monstrous situation humanity has created for itself.” I’ve had countless such moments. And for a climate policy nerd like me, Hertsgaard’s basic storyline is familiar—the climate impacts and the hopeful solutions. Arrogantly perhaps, I thought my eyes were as wide open as they could get. But two aspects of this book made it surprisingly cathartic for me.

First, Hertsgaard is writing as a father. As visions of the next 50 years come into focus and predicted events unfold, we’re reminded how old his little girl will be. Rising sea levels, drought, flooding, mass migrations, deadly heat waves, vulnerable food and water supplies—she’s 15, 30, 45. I hadn’t expected a wake-up call, but mapping impacts to my own one-year-old’s lifetime in the book’s margins, I allowed myself to acknowledge for the first time that climate change will define her life.

The second eye-opener is Hertsgaard’s focus on adaptation, a topic long forbidden in environmental circles as a signal of surrender. But coping efforts must now move forward as rapidly as mitigation to “manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable,” as Hertsgaard puts it. Particularly intriguing to me is the idea that tackling adaptation may prove to be a badly needed stepping stone—an engagement strategy—for those dragging their feet on mitigation.

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Ban BPA: It’s Eco-nomical

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When Wal-Mart “went green” a while back, motivated to improve both its bottom line and its reputation, it wielded enormous power over manufacturers and suppliers to do likewise. As the New York Times put it:

By virtue of its herculean size, Wal-Mart eventually dragged much of corporate America along with it, leading mighty suppliers like General Electric and Procter & Gamble to transform their own business practices.

No matter how much we love to dis the big fellas of corporate America, the fact is, when they do something good, the impact can be sweeping. That’s why it’s so encouraging to learn that Cincinnati-based Kroger announced last week that “in addition to making sure there is no BPA in the baby products it sells, the store is ridding the chemical from its store brand canned foods and purchasing BPA-free paper for its store receipts.”

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Baby’s First Flame Retardants

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Baby feet by Idaho Editor at MorgueFileAmong the warning labels and safety instructions plastered all over your extensively-researched, top-dollar, highest-safety-rated, Consumer Reports-approved car seat, there is no sticker that says, “Beware! Chemicals in this seat may give your baby cancer someday.” But maybe there should be!

A study released today in Environmental Science & Technology reveals that multiple chemicals that “pose significant health risks” are still to be found—sometimes in frightening amounts—in all kinds of “must-have” infant and baby supplies, including nursing pillows (I used one of those), car seats (you drive your tiny infant home in one and get bigger and bigger ones as she grows), and highchairs (every baby’s got one).

“Infants are exposed to multiple retardants,” the study’s authors conclude. And they estimated that infants’ exposure to one particular chemical—TDCPP—likely exceeds the Consumer Product Safety Commission‘s acceptable daily intake levels.

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Trading One Sippy-Cup Toxic for Another

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Sippy Cups Flickr.com Slice of Chic Creative CommonsYou’d think that humans would be smart enough to stop poisoning ourselves—or at least our babies. But, no.

Turns out that all the BPA-free products—the ones I’ve sought out to protect my dear little girl’s reproductive system and to ward off cancer and neurological problems—may have given me a false sense of security.

The power of concerned parents to get manufacturers—and sometimes governments (Maine just approved a ban on BPA in reusable food and beverage containers that will go into effect next year; Oregon is considering banning it in sippy cups and baby bottles)—to remove certain toxics from kids’ products can be a double-edged sword. The problem is that when we all got on the BPA-free bandwagon, BPA began to be replaced by other toxics—some of them known to be linked to health hazards and others totally unknown and untested!

Basically, we’re swapping one endocrine-system disrupting, cancer causing bisphenol for another. Dominique Browning, a blogger at Moms CleanAirForce and author of “Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas and Found Happiness,” wrote about it in a New York Times op-ed this week:

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My Substance Abuse Problem: Sugar

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Hi. My name is Anna and I’m a sugar addict. (“Hi, Anna…”)

Buddha MorgueFile courtesy EmmiPBut I’m giving it up. Really! Since my toddler started mimicking my every move, I decided that instilling in her the best possible food habits meant kicking my own worst ones. For the past two months, I’ve had a zero-sugar policy on all weekdays. (Next step: no-sugar weekends). I’ve been clean for, um, let’s see, about 43 hours and 22 minutes.

I’m only partially joking. Addiction is serious; I don’t mean to make light of life-saving recovery programs. But sugar, even more than caffeine, is a substance I use and abuse. I self-medicate with sugar—for fatigue, stress, mood, pain.

Yep, I have a problem. But, I’m clearly not alone.

Americans are sugar junkies. According to the USDA, in 2000, Americans consumed an average 152 pounds of caloric sweeteners. “That amounted to more than two-fifths of a pound—or 52 teaspoonfuls—of added sugars per person per day.”

Since I’m waging my own private war on sugar these days, and as a fairly new mom looking for answers about nutrition for my kid, recent buzz about sugar being not only bad, but downright toxic caught my attention.

We know sugar is making us fat and diabetic and that it’s bad for our teeth, but is it also contributing to other chronic ailments like cancer, heart disease, and high blood pressure?

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BPA Ban Debated in Oregon

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Sippy cup_SliceOfChic_FlickrOregon is looking to ban BPA from baby bottles, sippy cups, baby formula cans, and reusable sports water bottles. Washington did a similar ban last year—minus a ban on formula cans. And Oregon is proposing an interesting add-on to its proposed rules: requiring manufacturers to label cans as containing BPA.

Then shoppers get to decide if they want a can of peaches lined with a known endocrine disruptor for their toddler’s lunch, or if they will opt instead for a non-BPA can, or maybe frozen or fresh peaches.

The Oregon Environmental Council is drumming up support for the legislation—numbered HB 3258—on this BPA-Free Oregon Facebook page.

Transparency in ingredients and packaging is a great tool for moving us toward safer consumer goods, and one that manufacturers are hard pressed to argue against. If they stand behind the safety of their products and the chemicals they’re using, they’ve got nothing to hide. If BPA and my other favorite family of hormone disruptors, phthalates, are so fantastic and necessary, the chemical industry and manufacturers should tell me they’re in their products—and specifically which chemicals—heads held high.

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