In an Earth Day essay for SheKnows, Moms Clean Air Force’s Director and Co-founder, Dominique Browning, sounds the alarm on plastic: “Most people don’t realize it, but those plastics clogging our waterways and littering our roads and parks, blowing through our skies, and trapping ocean creatures are made up of thousands of toxic chemicals that harm our health, our children’s health, and the health of all the creatures who get tangled up in plastic, or unwittingly eat it or breath it. We have plastics in our lungs, in our brains, in our blood. Nowadays, babies are born polluted with plastics,” she writes.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From the Plastics and Petrochemical Industry
She broadcasts this alarm on the heels of a recent summit Moms hosted, Plastics: A Health Crisis in Plain Sight, where one public health researcher, Dr. Leo Trasande, explained there’s basically no health concern, from cancer to chronic diseases, that isn’t linked to or worsened by plastics. He even mentioned new research tying plastics to heart and arterial problems.
At the summit, Dr. Shanna Swan described her decades of studies that show that endocrine disruptors (which mess with our hormone systems) in plastics, pesticides, soil, and our food may be associated with a global decline in sperm count that shows no sign of leveling off. Dr. Swan now considers it a vital part of her work to inform and educate the millions of people who have never heard of this problem. “They have no idea they are being poisoned,” she said at the summit.
Dominique’s reaction to hearing this is to tackle plastic for herself—and to inform and educate others on how to do the same. “We should be freaking out. And we should also be angry. And then we should use all that energy to make some serious changes. Lots of ‘should’ in those lines. But you know what? If we don’t demand change, it isn’t going to happen,” she writes.
The first thing to do, she says, is to get as much plastic out of our lives as possible by finding and choosing safer products. Dominique is particularly concerned about phthalates, chemicals added to plastics to increase their flexibility, durability, and transparency. “You will find them in your house in carpeting, PVC piping, vinyl cladding, and other things, but they are also used in nail polish, moisturizers, eye shadows, liquid soaps, and perfumes. Small amounts, sure, but we are exposed every single day, for years, until we are no longer talking about inconsequential exposures. And we’re exposed to many kinds of these chemicals mixed together, too, changing and amplifying their impact. That’s why more companies are advertising phthalate-free shampoos and clothes detergents, for instance. Buy them,” she urges.
While it’s “next to impossible” to rid our lives of all plastic, there’s still a lot we can do: “Keep those plasticizers off your skin, keep those plastics off food, transfer cheese and chickens and whatever else to glass, and please don’t microwave food in plastic containers. Don’t buy peanut butter in plastic jars… Use loose tea steeped in stainless steel infusers. Get your kids into cotton or bamboo sleeping clothes—not fleece (made of plastic)—and get plastic, a.k.a. polyester, a plastic polymer derived from petroleum, out of your bedding.”
This can be a daunting process. Still not sure where to start? “There’s tons of guidance available, and once you start noticing exactly how plastic creeps into your life, you will be amazed at how much you can control,” says Dominique.
As we clean up our own lives, we can and must also demand that the people who make the products we buy, the people who sell our stuff, and the people whose job it is to protect us from dangerous chemicals, get to work.
Read Dominique’s full Earth Day-inspired plastic purge, including her thoughts on demanding change and believing our voices matter at SheKnows. Then get to it!
Tell Congress: Protect Families From the Plastics and Petrochemical Industry