SP Reads – Moving to a clean, green economic machine

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"1519","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"202","style":"color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; width: 134px; height: 202px; float: left; margin: 5px 15px;","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"134"}}]]In Slow Death by Rubber Duck, authors Bruce Lourie and Rick Smith became guinea pigs in a series of experiments to determine how to increase their blood and urinary levels of “everyday” toxic chemicals, such as phthalates, mercury, triclosan, bisphenol A and a few pesticides.

Those “experiments” were nothing extraordinary – just sitting around in a room with carpets treated with STAINMASTER stain repellent, breathing plug-in air fresheners, eating large amounts of canned and fresh tuna, drinking from polycarbonate containers, washing their hands with anti-bacterial soap and using scented shampoos, deodorants and cologne.

In Toxin Toxout, Bruce and Rick are at in again, with perhaps more “extreme” self-experimentation this time – undergoing intravenous chelation therapy, sleeping in a Faraday cage, and profusely sweating in an infrared sauna (resulting in a 911 call). The purpose of such self-experimentation? To answer the question posed by many of their readers: How do I get this stuff out of me?

Reading about toxic chemicals in everyday products could leave you feeling slightly paranoid and powerless about what to do to avoid all the poisons possibly looming in your house (should you really throw out all those non-stick frying pans?) Bruce and Rick manage to achieve a delicate balance by turning a highly controversial, scientifically complex, and at times depressing subject into a humorous journey (hence the self -experiments) with a good dose of optimism about what can be done, at an individual and collective level, to reduce our dependence on toxic chemicals. Toxin Toxout is an enjoyable, easy read, which may still leave you slightly paranoid, but hopefully better informed.

If you are, however, looking for definite scientific evidence on the health effects of exposure to toxic substances, you may find the references in this book a bit eclectic. Epidemiologists would undoubtedly accuse the authors of committing the epidemiological sin of equating exposure with health risk. While the experiments reveal that your day to day habits affect your short-term exposure to certain chemicals (as measured in urine, blood and sweat), reducing your body burden of toxic chemicals (accumulated over your lifetime in your internal organs, fatty tissues and bones for instance) is the more critical question.

The book does demonstrate how ubiquitous man-made chemicals have become, how our bodies are unknowingly polluted and how our children are born pre-polluted (as man-made chemicals are now measured in amniotic fluid and umbilical cord blood). Thus the rise in the detox industry and the extremes to which people will go to get harmful chemicals out of their bodies.

There is clearly a willingness to pay to avoid exposure to toxic chemicals, as demonstrated by the rise in green and ethical consumerism. ToxinToxout documents both how “traditional” companies are getting in on this exploding market as well as how many small niche companies have gone from “granola to riches” and are struggling to maintain their authenticity as they are going mainstream.

It is clear, however, that individualistic consumer choices will not be sufficient in an economy governed by private corporate investment decisions that do not take into account the societal costs of toxic chemical exposures. Every year, thousands of new man-made chemicals and new products are introduced into the market in Canada, leaving our government regulatory agencies with the responsibility to assess each chemical’s toxicity, one by one.

By the time a chemical is submitted to regulatory authorities for approval, the chemical industry has already invested large sums in R&D to bring this new chemical or product to market. Where are the market signals and incentives to develop less toxic alternatives in the first place ? When will we see the real price of pollution, including that of polluting our bodies, included in the price of products and included into corporate investment decisions? Not to mention the regulatory costs associated with our underfunded health and environmental agencies trying to keep up with the chemical industry, assessing one chemical at a time, regulating one use at a time.

Although action is warranted to prevent our individual exposures to toxic chemicals – eating organic food, reading labels on personal care products, avoiding non-stick frying pans etc. – in the words of the authors ‘we must not become complacent and lose sight of the need for collective action to address the bigger challenge of getting toxic chemicals out of our economy.’ Regulatory agencies cannot continue to shift the burden onto individual consumers by expecting us to understand labels containing hundreds of unpronounceable ingredients or find our way through the myriad of certification standards and so called “green”, “organic”, “healthy” or “natural” products on the market. In other words, buying a bottle of shampoo should not require a PhD in toxicology nor feel like a life and death decision. In this regard, this book will definitely help you become a more discerning consumer.

I applaud the authors’ efforts to look at the full life cycle analysis of our consumption habits and our economic addiction to toxic chemicals, (if you want to know what happens to your non-stick frying pans once you dispose of them read chapter 6), especially the environmental and ethical implications of disposing of our multiple short-lived electronic devices. The authors expose the dubious promise of the green chemistry movement, as well as some fascinating innovations in products coming from biomimicry (turning to nature to replicate a function rather than developing a new chemical to perform that function).

Perhaps, a suggestion for Bruce and Rick for their third book (hopefully not requiring personal experiments this time around) would be to continue exploring the need for collective action to detoxify our economy and for a true cost accounting of the costs associated with our widespread use of toxic chemicals. There is an ever expanding economic valuation literature now estimating the costs of the environmental burden of disease —the direct and indirect health costs associated with the adverse health effects of toxic chemical exposure, including the lower educational achievement of children being exposed to neurodevelopment toxicants and the long term impact on labour productivity. Detoxifying our economy will undoubtedly generate public benefits far greater than the private benefits (profits) to the chemical industries. However this accounting needs to take place in order to warrant investments in alternatives, correct market prices for those products and detoxify our economy.

Now, coming back to the fundamental question addressed by the authors – which detox techniques work? Should you switch to an organic food diet? And which of the many off-the-shelf cleanses, herbal detox therapies, vitamin supplements, chelation therapy, sauna therapy, ionic foot baths or fasting are effective at reducing your body burden of toxic chemicals? And what on Earth is a Faraday cage?

Well, you will have to read the book to find out...