While we’ve got another several weeks before it’s officially spring, the fantastic weather this weekend - and sunshine streaming in through fingerprinted windows - has many of us thinking about freshening up our homes inside and out. When you’re tidying up inside, don’t automatically reach for a spray bottle of store-bought cleaner – they’re full of chemicals that aren’t listed on the labels that can be toxic to your family’s health, and their harmful fumes can aggravate asthma and allergies. To add insult to injury, most cleaners have synthetic fragrances – and hormone disrupting phthalates as fragrance carriers – added to try to mask the chemical smells. Go easier on your family, and your wallet, by cleaning your home with some simple recipes you can mix up yourself. I’ve been cleaning my home for the past several years with nothing more than white vinegar, baking soda, a can of Bon Ami, and a bit of castile soap. For a full library of great “green cleaning” recipes, check out Oregon Metro’s web site. Here are a couple of my favorite mixtures:
All-Purpose Cleaner: Add ½ cup vinegar to between 1 cup and 1 quart of warm water. (I just glug vinegar into my spray bottle about 1/3 of the way up, and then top off with water. I use this for windows, mirrors, bathrooms, counters, spots on the floor…)
Drain Cleaner: Pour ½ cup baking soda down the drain, followed by ½ cup vinegar. Cover the drain and let it sit for 15 minutes. Follow with a kettle full of boiling water. (The vinegar and baking soda make the “volcano” reaction that you might have used for an elementary school science project – fun for your kids to watch!)
If you need to disinfect, spray the area with vinegar, followed by 3% hydrogen peroxide (the kind you’d find at any drugstore), wait a minute or two and wipe clean. Don’t store the vinegar and peroxide in the same spray bottle. This has been tested by a food scientist at Virginia Tech, and when I spoke with her she said it would work as well as any commercial disinfectant. Super cheap too! Read more about the problems with standard disinfectants in the recent report by Women’s Voices for the Earth, Disinfectant Overkill.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Healthy Kids and Green Parenting Fair - Saturday, March 20th
Mark your calendars and tell your friends about the upcoming Healthy Kids and Green Parenting Fair, sponsored by the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department. This year's fair will be held on Saturday, March 20th, 2010. It will be in the auditorium at the South Park Community Center (4851 South Tacoma Way) and will be open to the public from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Admission is free.
The fair is a place to learn about protecting your child from toxins in the environment, and to find resources to help you make healthier, greener choices, like safer toys and personal care products, natural yard care, organic foods, cloth diapers, breastfeeding, and babywearing. We will have free lead testing of toys and other consumer products as well as free blood lead testing for children and pregnant or nursing moms. There will be a babywearing fashion show at 11 a.m. and drawings all day for really fantastic door prizes including an organic ERGObaby Carrier, Sleepy Wrap, cloth diapers, Hotsling, BabyLegs, organic cotton baby clothes, and a nursing pillow/cover. Free eco-friendly art supplies for the first 50 kids attending!
Contact Chris Matter-Rinehart for more information at 253-798-6492 or cmatter@tpchd.org. See you there!
The fair is a place to learn about protecting your child from toxins in the environment, and to find resources to help you make healthier, greener choices, like safer toys and personal care products, natural yard care, organic foods, cloth diapers, breastfeeding, and babywearing. We will have free lead testing of toys and other consumer products as well as free blood lead testing for children and pregnant or nursing moms. There will be a babywearing fashion show at 11 a.m. and drawings all day for really fantastic door prizes including an organic ERGObaby Carrier, Sleepy Wrap, cloth diapers, Hotsling, BabyLegs, organic cotton baby clothes, and a nursing pillow/cover. Free eco-friendly art supplies for the first 50 kids attending!
Contact Chris Matter-Rinehart for more information at 253-798-6492 or cmatter@tpchd.org. See you there!
Thursday, February 11, 2010
How Not to Freak Out!
In recent weeks we’ve talked about simple ways you can protect your family from arsenic and lead in soil. In upcoming posts, we’ll start learning about some other chemicals and toxins in our environment that can affect children’s health, and talk about relatively easy changes you can make to protect your family.
Please don’t get overwhelmed and feel like you have to make all changes at once. Here are some things to think about:
*Baby steps are a big deal! Every small change you make really does add up to a healthy difference for your family, and often for the planet. One of my favorite blogs is EnviroMom. The two Portland moms who write it are huge subscribers to the baby step approach, and will admit to hardly being “green” before they took a Master Recyclers course a few years ago. Their blog is filled with really easy little changes (Air out your house! Wash and reuse baby wipes! Try growing your own tomatoes!) and some bigger ones too (Reduce your garbage to one can a month!) that demonstrate how baby steps add up, and eventually might even make the bigger changes seem easy.
*Knowledge is power I’m a big believer in sharing as much information as I can with parents so they can make the choices that work best for their families. I work for the government, and I’m telling you that the government is not protecting our children from all of the potential environmental hazards out there. There are some new laws in the works that will help, but at this point it’s still really on us as parents to make the choices that will best protect our kids. We can’t do that without a lot of information.
*Do what works for your family With so much information, you might feel like you need to completely overhaul your life/cupboards/refrigerator/toy box. If that works for you and makes you feel better and you can afford to, go for it. But some of the things we’ll talk about cost more money (replacing plastic storage containers with glass, choosing organic produce, buying new baby bottles), and some take more time (building raised beds for your garden, vacuuming more frequently), and some just won’t work for you or your children (your toddler hates the cloth doll you bought and only wants his ratty old vinyl baby doll). I encourage you, and will encourage you again and again, to not get overwhelmed and to do what works for your family. Make the changes you can now, make more when you’re able, and know that you’re doing your best. Here’s a personal example:
I was off work for about five months after my son was born, and then came back three days a week. He was nursing at home, but would need to have a bottle the days I was at work. When he was born almost four years ago, it was still hard to find baby bottles made without Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical you’ve probably heard about and that we’ll talk about in more detail soon. I was hoping to use glass bottles, but my husband could not get him to drink from one at home. About $100 and a big bag from Babies-R-Us later, we found a bottle he’d drink from. Turns out it wasn’t one that contained BPA, but if it had been that’s what I would have sent him to daycare with. I knew a bottle with BPA wasn’t the best choice for him, but I also knew he needed to drink milk when he was away from me. We were making a lot of other “safer” choices at home that I felt would even things out to some extent.
I hope this blog is a source of information that helps you “even things out” for your family! Soon we’ll start diving in to some of the major chemicals of concern, and I’ve got exciting news to share about an upcoming event where you can learn lots more about making safer, healthy choices for your kiddos.
Please don’t get overwhelmed and feel like you have to make all changes at once. Here are some things to think about:
*Baby steps are a big deal! Every small change you make really does add up to a healthy difference for your family, and often for the planet. One of my favorite blogs is EnviroMom. The two Portland moms who write it are huge subscribers to the baby step approach, and will admit to hardly being “green” before they took a Master Recyclers course a few years ago. Their blog is filled with really easy little changes (Air out your house! Wash and reuse baby wipes! Try growing your own tomatoes!) and some bigger ones too (Reduce your garbage to one can a month!) that demonstrate how baby steps add up, and eventually might even make the bigger changes seem easy.
*Knowledge is power I’m a big believer in sharing as much information as I can with parents so they can make the choices that work best for their families. I work for the government, and I’m telling you that the government is not protecting our children from all of the potential environmental hazards out there. There are some new laws in the works that will help, but at this point it’s still really on us as parents to make the choices that will best protect our kids. We can’t do that without a lot of information.
*Do what works for your family With so much information, you might feel like you need to completely overhaul your life/cupboards/refrigerator/toy box. If that works for you and makes you feel better and you can afford to, go for it. But some of the things we’ll talk about cost more money (replacing plastic storage containers with glass, choosing organic produce, buying new baby bottles), and some take more time (building raised beds for your garden, vacuuming more frequently), and some just won’t work for you or your children (your toddler hates the cloth doll you bought and only wants his ratty old vinyl baby doll). I encourage you, and will encourage you again and again, to not get overwhelmed and to do what works for your family. Make the changes you can now, make more when you’re able, and know that you’re doing your best. Here’s a personal example:
I was off work for about five months after my son was born, and then came back three days a week. He was nursing at home, but would need to have a bottle the days I was at work. When he was born almost four years ago, it was still hard to find baby bottles made without Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical you’ve probably heard about and that we’ll talk about in more detail soon. I was hoping to use glass bottles, but my husband could not get him to drink from one at home. About $100 and a big bag from Babies-R-Us later, we found a bottle he’d drink from. Turns out it wasn’t one that contained BPA, but if it had been that’s what I would have sent him to daycare with. I knew a bottle with BPA wasn’t the best choice for him, but I also knew he needed to drink milk when he was away from me. We were making a lot of other “safer” choices at home that I felt would even things out to some extent.
I hope this blog is a source of information that helps you “even things out” for your family! Soon we’ll start diving in to some of the major chemicals of concern, and I’ve got exciting news to share about an upcoming event where you can learn lots more about making safer, healthy choices for your kiddos.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
More Healthy Actions
This week we’ll finish up our list of Healthy Actions – simple things you and your family can do to reduce contact with arsenic and lead – and other chemicals – in dirt. We’ve already talked about taking off shoes in the house, washing hands with plenty of soap and water, eating a healthy diet, cleaning house, and keeping pets clean. This week we move outside the house.
* Maintain Your Home and Yard Cover bare patches of dirt in your yard with a ground cover like grass, gravel, or wood/mulch product. Even better, choose native plants – they require less watering and maintenance. By covering bare patches that might otherwise be ideal spots for kiddos and pets to dig and play in, you’ll help protect your family from arsenic and lead in two ways – breathing it in while playing in it, and tracking it into the house. A safer choice is to fill a covered sand box with clean play sand.
It’s also important to maintain the painted surfaces of your home. Homes built before 1978 were likely painted with paint containing lead. When lead paint chips or wears away, it becomes a major source of lead, both inside and outside the home. Even if you maintain the paint now, if you live in an older home, there’s a decent chance that at some point lead paint chipped, peeled, or was pressure washed off your home and landed on the dirt around the foundation of your home, contributing to high lead levels in that dirt today. It’s best to discourage children from playing in this “drip line” near the foundation, or to plant low-maintenance plants surrounded by weed fabric and mulch to block access to the dirt.
* Garden Safely Always wear shoes and gloves when gardening or working in the soil and take them off before coming into your home. You can find child-sized gardening gloves, but they can be hard to keep on – try, and be extra-vigilant about hand washing.
Grow your produce in raised beds built with arsenic-free materials. Treated wood produced before 2004 contained chromated copper arsenate, a chemical preservative containing chromium, copper, and arsenic – not something you want seeping into your vegetables. New treated wood is safer, but untreated wood is the best choice. We’ve been very happy with our now five year old cedar raised beds, and they are showing no signs of deteriorating. When purchasing soil to fill your raised beds, ask where it came from to make sure you’re getting clean dirt that won’t be contaminated with arsenic or lead!
Arsenic and lead may be in dust and dirt found on the surface of fruits and vegetables – more likely if you are not growing in raised beds filled with clean soil, or if you’ve got bare patches nearby that contaminated dust could be blown over from. There is a slight chance that leafy vegetables, like lettuce or kale, grown in contaminated soil may absorb very small amounts of contaminants. Wash all fruits and vegetables to make sure all dirt is removed from the surface. Use a scrub brush on potatoes, carrots, and other sturdy vegetables and fruits. It’s important to remember to wash all fruits and vegetables, whether home-grown or store-bought, organic or conventional, to remove any bacteria.
Are you wondering if I really don’t ever eat a cherry tomato fresh off the vine? I do, and so does my young son, but I wipe them off on my shirt first – and we definitely don’t eat sandwiches or crackers or any other snacks until we’ve taken a break from gardening and gone back inside to wash our hands well. Next week we’ll talk more about how to make decisions about risks from environmental hazards without getting totally paranoid (and never enjoying a sun-warmed tomato again!), taking baby steps (maybe I should be wiping that tomato with a damp rag or rinsing in a container of clean water in the garden), and making healthy choices that work for you and your family.
* Maintain Your Home and Yard Cover bare patches of dirt in your yard with a ground cover like grass, gravel, or wood/mulch product. Even better, choose native plants – they require less watering and maintenance. By covering bare patches that might otherwise be ideal spots for kiddos and pets to dig and play in, you’ll help protect your family from arsenic and lead in two ways – breathing it in while playing in it, and tracking it into the house. A safer choice is to fill a covered sand box with clean play sand.
It’s also important to maintain the painted surfaces of your home. Homes built before 1978 were likely painted with paint containing lead. When lead paint chips or wears away, it becomes a major source of lead, both inside and outside the home. Even if you maintain the paint now, if you live in an older home, there’s a decent chance that at some point lead paint chipped, peeled, or was pressure washed off your home and landed on the dirt around the foundation of your home, contributing to high lead levels in that dirt today. It’s best to discourage children from playing in this “drip line” near the foundation, or to plant low-maintenance plants surrounded by weed fabric and mulch to block access to the dirt.
* Garden Safely Always wear shoes and gloves when gardening or working in the soil and take them off before coming into your home. You can find child-sized gardening gloves, but they can be hard to keep on – try, and be extra-vigilant about hand washing.
Grow your produce in raised beds built with arsenic-free materials. Treated wood produced before 2004 contained chromated copper arsenate, a chemical preservative containing chromium, copper, and arsenic – not something you want seeping into your vegetables. New treated wood is safer, but untreated wood is the best choice. We’ve been very happy with our now five year old cedar raised beds, and they are showing no signs of deteriorating. When purchasing soil to fill your raised beds, ask where it came from to make sure you’re getting clean dirt that won’t be contaminated with arsenic or lead!
Arsenic and lead may be in dust and dirt found on the surface of fruits and vegetables – more likely if you are not growing in raised beds filled with clean soil, or if you’ve got bare patches nearby that contaminated dust could be blown over from. There is a slight chance that leafy vegetables, like lettuce or kale, grown in contaminated soil may absorb very small amounts of contaminants. Wash all fruits and vegetables to make sure all dirt is removed from the surface. Use a scrub brush on potatoes, carrots, and other sturdy vegetables and fruits. It’s important to remember to wash all fruits and vegetables, whether home-grown or store-bought, organic or conventional, to remove any bacteria.
Are you wondering if I really don’t ever eat a cherry tomato fresh off the vine? I do, and so does my young son, but I wipe them off on my shirt first – and we definitely don’t eat sandwiches or crackers or any other snacks until we’ve taken a break from gardening and gone back inside to wash our hands well. Next week we’ll talk more about how to make decisions about risks from environmental hazards without getting totally paranoid (and never enjoying a sun-warmed tomato again!), taking baby steps (maybe I should be wiping that tomato with a damp rag or rinsing in a container of clean water in the garden), and making healthy choices that work for you and your family.
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