Category Archives: Environment

The Truth About Air Fresheners

Say No To Plugin Air Fresheners
Say No To Plugin Air Fresheners

“Air Freshener” – It has a nice sound to it, right? Makes you think of spring time and flowers. The air after a Spring rain. Sadly, the air fresheners you buy at the store do nothing to truly freshen the air. In fact, they contribute to indoor air pollution. According to the EPA, indoor pollutants have been found to be 2 to 5 times higher than outside air.

What you need to know about Air Fresheners

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This Made Me Sad

What made me sad? No it wasn't the pathetic looking pregnant cat.
What made me sad? No it wasn’t the pathetic looking pregnant cat.
Over the weekend, we were at a local restaurant. One where you stand in line to order your food. Quite often I wind up in line either in front of or behind someone who is enveloped by a cloud of perfume. You can’t see it but it’s there. Because you can smell it when they’re about 4 feet from you. And it hangs around long after they pass you.

For some reason, their perfume is also the worst possible smelling stuff that can still be considered perfume. Or perhaps that’s just me. You see I long ago fell out of love with perfumes and fragrances. The fact that they gave me terrible, incapacitating migraines let me know that they wanted me to have nothing to do with them.

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Plastic Nightmares

This past weekend, while we were driving around, we saw a tree that had plastic shopping bags hanging form its limbs. It was in an area that is known to flood and no doubt the bags got caught in the tree during a flood. It reminded me of the plastic bags that litter the road on the drive from San Antonio to Corpus Christi. They are everywhere and it is such an ugly sight.

Below is an infographic on the nightmare caused by plastic. The infographic was originally published by Education Database Online.

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ADHD – The Neurotoxin Connection

ADD-ADHD

Modern chemistry has brought us many things, but not all of them are good. We live in a world where we create substances in the laboratory that wind up in our foods, our personal care products, our laundry detergents, our household cleaning supplies and our “air fresheners.” We want to believe that they’ve all been tested and shown to be safe, but that just isn’t true.

We’ve seen an increase in a number of conditions recently, and the modern chemicals are a likely culprit.

FOOD:

  • Processed foods
  • Food additives
  • Food dyes
  • Aspartame & other artificial sweeteners
  • MSG
  • Sugar
  • Foods treated with pesticides

ENVIRONMENT:

  • Cleaning products containing solvents or fragrances
  • “Air fresheners”, plugins, candles, even potpourri which has added fragrance
  • Fragrances, colognes, perfumes, after-shaves
  • Personal care products with added fragrance – even with “masking fragrance”
    Pesticides
  • Clothes that have been dry-cleaned using PERC
  • Petroleum disinfectants (Lysol, Pine-Sol)
  • Moth balls
  • Anything containing Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs)

I found this article on Neurotoxins And ADHD: Connecting The Dots. The neurotoxins referred to come from home cleaning products. But the author goes on to talk about many things that can be neurotoxic:

  • Solvent-based markers
  • Furniture polish
  • Conventionally dry-cleaned clothes (using PERC)
  • Moth balls
  • Cleaning products containing VOCs
  • Most modern fragrances
  • and more

References:

Photo Courtesy chris.corwin via Flickr.

President’s Cancer Panel Report

Picture of Air Pollution in Delhi
A report by the President’s Cancer Panel was brought to my attention recently. The report is from May of 2010, but is still important and relevant.

Here’s an excerpt from the article in Environmental Health News:

The President’s Cancer Panel on Thursday reported that “the true burden of environmentally induced cancers has been grossly underestimated” and strongly urged action to reduce people’s widespread exposure to carcinogens.

The panel advised President Obama “to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.”

The President’s Cancer Panel was created by an act of Congress in 1971. Yet, this is the first report that focuses on environmental causes of cancer. It addresses the many, many carcinogens and toxins that are found in our food, our water and our air. They’re hard to avoid and the combinations serve a bigger threat than most people realize.

The American Cancer Society tried to downplay the role of environmentally induced cancers in a statement issued in response to the report. Surprisingly, the ACS tries to suggest that these environmental concerns are less important than lifestyle changes and need not be addressed.

Photo Courtesy jenspie3 via Flickr