If you’ve ever wondered what makes the Lysol under your bathroom sink appear strikingly neon in color, and if it’s ever seemed strange to you that detergents and bath soaps don’t have ingredient lists, you’re not alone. In fact, environmental advocates, including groups such as the American Lung Association and the Sierra Club, want to know more, and they want you, the public, to know more about what common cleaners, detergents and soaps contain in the way of potentially hazardous chemicals.
This Thursday, environmental advocates in New York made began a court battle, demanding that big-time companies such as Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive reveal the make-up of common household products (Ajax, Ivory and Tide, to name a few). Currently, Federal Environmental laws do not require most household cleaning products to reveal any of their ingredients. But if environmental advocacy groups win the case, companies will have to at least reveal their ingredients to the state. The hope is that this will spark nationwide chemical regulation (full ingredient disclosure) and reform.
Although the cleanser industry claims that the case is unwarranted, and that concerns about health risks are “misinformed,” a Senate subcommittee in Washington recently examined current science on people’s exposure to toxic chemicals and found that some studies “link cleaning product components to asthma, antibiotic resistance, hormone changes and other health problems.” The Soap and Detergent Association says “the research is flawed.”
Regardless of such claims, until full disclosure of chemicals is legally required, we can’t really know what kinds of chemicals we’re spraying around. And if we can’t even know that, how are we supposed to know if they’re safe or healthy? As a Buffalo Sierra Club member stated, until we know the chemical make-up of common household items, “We must be careful about exposures for all household chemicals.”
[Via:msnbc]
Follow me on Twitter @SustainablYours
