Vasil - Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products, & Services

[when youre addicted to the planet]

Copyright 2007 Adria Vasil

Adapted from the Ecoholic columns previously published in NOW Magazine, Toronto, Canada.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2007 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Vasil, Adria
Ecoholic : your guide to the most environmentally friendly products, information and services in Canada / Adria Vasil.

eISBN: 978-0-307-36613-9

1. Green productsCanadaGuidebooks. 2. EnvironmentalismHandbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title.

HF 5413. V 38 2007 640 C 2006-904695-6

v3.1

You know, its funny: Canadians are surrounded with so much damn nature we think that automatically nominates us for outdoor MVP of the year. But when hundreds of trees fall in the boreal every minute, does anybody really care? Well, aside from a few folk singers and some placard-bearing enviro-groups, my answer just a few years ago was a reluctant no. Observers declared environmental consciousness dead. Earth Day marches had long been cancelled due to lack of attendance. Indeed, there was but a faint green pulse left in us as we dragged our recyclables out to the curb then hopped into our gas guzzlers with the a/c blasting. Memories of acid rain, dead lakes and the Exxon Valdez had faded to black, along with any recollection of feathered hair and shoulder pads.

Then, sometime in the last year or two, someone somewhere pulled out the defibrillators and called clear. Was it the spike in the price of oil, forcing us to reconsider the value of spending 80 bucks a tank just to drive ourselves to the corner store? Was it the increased alarm-ringing of climate change scientists? The drowning polar bears? The breaking levies? The freak storms? The reports that DDT is still swimming in our childrens bloodstreams decades after it was banned or that non-stick chemicals are sticking to bald eagles and floating in breast milk? Maybe, as my local souvlaki guy noted, it was the realization that ever-climbing hydro bills could be tackled only with conservation and sharp questions about why our government isnt more aggressively subsidizing solar panels and geothermal heat pumps. More realistically, it was all of the above: a perfect storm of factors that made us sit up and say, Holy Toledo, Dorothy, were not in Kansas anymore.

But whats exciting about this surge, this outpouring of interest in all things green, is that everyone, from the trucker up the street to the CEO of Wal-Mart, is taking notice. And whether youre expressing your concern for the planet by reaching for organic milk, turning off the taps as you brush, driving a little less or not driving at all, it all adds up to a movement.

Sure, sticking to a five-minute shower rule may seem fruitless in the face of a melting planet and relentless emissions from the coal plant two towns down. But are we to throw our hands in the air and bury our heads in the sand as our federal government has? Every drop of water you conserve, each watt of power you save, every green pepper you purchase from a local organic grower sends a message. To paraphrase hockey dads everywhere, if you want to be on a winning team, you have to think like a winner. And sometimes, when that team is slacking, youve gotta step up and take the lead. You dont have to start a march on Parliament Hill to make a statement (though, hey, if youre itching to try out a megaphone, go ahead). Start small. Start by leading by example. Get your workplace to turn the lights off at night and the thermostat down. Tell your grocery manager you dont need California mushrooms vacuum-packed on polysterene when he should be pushing local ones, loose. Tell your brother idling is just burning up gas (not to mention the planet) and tell your minister of Parliament you want real action on greenhouse gas emissions for once.

The tough part is that figuring out whats green and whats greenwash, whats eco-friendly and whats ozone-deadly can be downright dizzying. This is where knowledge comes in to play. The more you know, the more effective your choices, actions and movements can be. And if GI Joe was right that knowing is half the battle, just buying this book (and reading it cover to cover, of course) should turn you a finely trained eco-warrior, or at least make it easier for you to decide what cleaning products to buy. Dont worry: you dont have to give up shaving and chain yourself to a tree to be green. Just do what you can, one step at timeuntil youre a full-blown ecoholic.

Human beings are so evolved, arent we? Where a cat uses spit and a tongue to clean itself, we have hundreds of products to preen every part of our bodies. Where the duck is stuck with the feathers the universe gave it, we can pluck and paint ourselves into glorious swans. But how evolved are we really? You can scoff at those silly Victorians for powdering their noses with lead, yet theres embalming fluid in our nail polish and hormone disruptors in our hair spray. Talk about dying to be beautiful. But dont stress: going natural doesnt mean giving up your grooming habits, no matter what you might have seen in the 60s.

A dab of this and a spritz of that can quickly turn your morning routine into a chemical bath. The average adult uses nine personal care products a day, containing a grand total of 126 chemical ingredients, according to a report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). The synthetic slather is even more intense for the one in four women who use more than 15 products daily. The next time you get ready in the morning, do your own count. Facial wash, shampoo, moisturizers, lip glossthey add up quickly. And while the $5.3 billion Canadian industry likes us to believe its shampoos and creams are oh-so-natural thanks to well-advertised ingredients such as ginger and ylang-ylang, the truth is that youre drenching your lips, cheeks and hair in a largely untested and lengthy list of petroleum-derived, genetically modified, animal-tested or animal-based ingredients.

There are roughly 10,500 chemical ingredients stirred into the personal care products that line shelves. Its a mind-baffling number, really, but it gets even scarier when you consider that neither Canada nor the U.S. requires much testing for these products. The result? Only about 11% have been tested for safety, according to the EWG. And those tests arent done by Health Canada but by the cosmetics companies themselves and, in the U.S., the Cosmetic Industry Review Board.

Chemicals: Ever notice that some products make your eyes water or your skin itchy? Thats because many common ingredients, such as diethanolamine (DEA) or sodium lauryl/laureth sulfate (SLS), can be just plain irritating. But beyond a little rash, over a third of the 14,000 products the EWG catalogued and cross-referenced against toxicity databases have at least one ingredient thats linked to cancer. Formaldehyde and potentially carcinogenic parabens are common preservatives. And, although youll rarely see the word phthalate on a label (its often one of the thousands of chemicals represented by the word fragrance), these plastic softeners are everywhere. Despite industry assurances about their safety, one type of phthalate in particular, DEHP, has been found to cause birth defects in rats, and Harvard researchers found that another, DEP, causes DNA damage in the sperm of adult men. Kind of nerve-wracking when you consider that phthalates showed up in 52 of the 72 name-brand beauty products lab-tested by a coalition of environmental and public health groups (www.nottoopretty.org). Theyve even made their way into breast milk. Fortunately, some of the worst phthalates have been banned from plastic baby toys in Canada for a few years now. But do our regulators care that