Toxins in the Home: Pollution from Inside

To bring the point home, the co-authors con­ducted an exper­i­ment on the level of Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 doc­u­men­tary Super Size Me. They con­ducted their own research by ingest­ing and inhal­ing a host of things that are part of every­day lives and pub­lished their find­ings in this unique work.

“What we wanted to do was make it clear to peo­ple that pol­lu­tion isn’t this abstract thing that’s ‘out there,’ and that in fact it’s really in our daily lives, in our homes and in our food,” co-author Bruce Lourie told Organic Connections. “Some of the most dan­ger­ous pol­lu­tants, it turns out, come from com­mon­place items in our homes and workplaces—shampoos and tooth­pastes, car­pets and children’s toys.”

Both Smith and Lourie are career envi­ron­men­tal­ists. Rick Smith is the exec­u­tive direc­tor of Environmental Defence in Toronto, Canada, and Bruce Lourie is an envi­ron­men­tal advi­sor to gov­ern­ments and non-profit orga­ni­za­tions, pres­i­dent of the Ivey Foundation, a pri­vate envi­ron­men­tal char­i­ta­ble foun­da­tion, and a past pres­i­dent of Environmental Defence.

The book also shows us that pol­lu­tants are found in such unlikely places as baby bot­tles, deodor­ants, or a favorite over­stuffed sofa. Market-leading baby bot­tles in North America are made of poly­car­bon­ate plas­tic and leach bisphe­nol A, a known hor­mone dis­rupter, into their con­tents. Mass-market deodorants—along with nearly every other com­mon prod­uct in the bathroom—can con­tain phtha­lates (pro­nounced “tha-lates”), which have been linked to a num­ber of seri­ous repro­duc­tive prob­lems. Phthalates are also a com­mon ingre­di­ent of vinyl children’s toys (hence the title of the book). Sofas and other uphol­stered prod­ucts con­tain bromi­nated flame retar­dants and are coated with stain-repellent chem­i­cals, both of which increase the risk of can­cer and may be absorbed by any­one sit­ting on a sofa or chair to watch Friday-night TV.

Were our homes always such dens of poi­son? According to the authors, the cur­rent prob­lems began just after World War II, when petrochemicals—the main­stay of plastics—boomed as an indus­try. The US became the leader of this indus­try and, con­se­quently, US cit­i­zens became the guinea pigs in an unan­nounced human experiment.

Through the book, we fol­low Smith and Lourie as they exam­ine seven dif­fer­ent chem­i­cals rou­tinely found in the home—chosen because of their com­mon­ness in every­day life. These include phtha­lates, Teflon and its chem­i­cal rel­a­tives, fire retar­dants, mer­cury, the antibac­te­r­ial tri­closan, pes­ti­cides and her­bi­cides, and bisphe­nol A.

Weren’t the authors wor­ried that they would pol­lute them­selves as their exper­i­ments pro­gressed? As it turns out, not really—and their rea­son­ing ties in with why the book is posi­tioned by Smith and Lourie as a mes­sage of hope. “In some ways, you could look at what we did and see it as pretty scary,” Lourie said. “We were expos­ing our­selves to known toxic chem­i­cals, car­cino­gens and endocrine dis­rupters. But the other way we looked at it was we didn’t do any­thing that 10, 20, 50 mil­lion Americans don’t do every day, which is just going through the daily rou­tines such as hav­ing a shower, wash­ing and con­di­tion­ing their hair, using shav­ing cream, and microwav­ing food. Our one car­di­nal rule for all of our exper­i­ments was that they had to mimic every­day life, so we didn’t do any­thing crazy like bathe in vats of chem­i­cals. The only dif­fer­ence was that we mea­sured the lev­els of chem­i­cals in our blood before, dur­ing and after the tests, and we had sci­en­tific advi­sors guid­ing us dur­ing the whole process.

“Throughout the time of these exper­i­ments, we saw the dif­fer­ent lev­els of these chem­i­cals increase in our blood dra­mat­i­cally. So what we know is that, in the same way that the lev­els of chem­i­cals increased dra­mat­i­cally, if you don’t expose your­self to these things, the lev­els of these chem­i­cals will actu­ally be much lower in your body.

The other encour­ag­ing fact is that, while Smith and Lourie were engaged in writ­ing the book, they saw pos­i­tive change occur­ring on both a gov­ern­ment and a cor­po­rate level. “All the way through our work we were con­stantly in touch with sci­en­tists in dif­fer­ent gov­ern­ment depart­ments and busi­nesses,” remarked Lourie. “We’re see­ing world­wide advances in terms of gov­ern­ments ban­ning these chem­i­cals and com­pa­nies decid­ing to stop using them, as well as peo­ple in com­mu­ni­ties mount­ing efforts to make sure cit­i­zens aren’t exposed to these things. So there’s a lot of progress going on around the world that we’re very excited about and that we’ve been able to include in the book.”

Slow Death by Rubber Duck is avail­able from Organic Connections books and videos and other book out­lets. Click here to view a video clip about the book.

You can also find out more about the authors by vis­it­ing the web­site of their orga­ni­za­tion, Environmental Defence, at www.environmentaldefence.ca.