I have one word for you: Plastics

Remember that line from The Graduate? Anyway, that character said a mouthful. Plastics have changed our lives and our world forever. And that's about how long most of them will take to degrade, not that we want them to. All of that aside, here are some simple things I'm doing to protect myself, fully recognizing that there's precious little one can do since the material is so ubiquitous. But I do believe it is the source of many of our modern day ills.

• I never heat plastic. I use glass and ceramic only in the microwave.
• I avoid plastic water bottles as much as possible. I buy a glass bottle of tea, drink it, and then reuse the bottle for water that I carry in my car and at work.
• To help remember which plastics are "safe" for food storage, I have memorized this clever little ditty from the book Slow Death by Rubber Duck: "4-5-1-2 / all the rest are bad for you."
• When I must use plastic cutlery, I use Bioserve Organics which are compostable and dishwasher safe.
• I try to reduce the amount of plastic packaging I support by choosing products with less packaging, carrying my own shopping bags, and purchasing pre-owned products whenever possible.
  

Toxins in Toiletries, or T-in-T

I'm working on reducing the amount of toxins in my environment. Made a list of all of the toiletries I use on a regular basis - and was quite surprised at how many products I use. At any rate, the process for assessing them went like this:

• Look up each product at the Environmental Working Group's "Skin Deep" website: www.cosmeticsdatabase.com. If you don't find your product, become a registered member (free) and you will be able to enter the data from your products and receive a preliminary report/score. I'm aiming for scores of no more than 3. You can also look at scored products in their database by category and sort on product name and score. Very helpful.
• If you decide to try a different, safer product, you can go to www.beautypedia.com (free through the end of February 2011) and learn about the product's efficacy there. That site also has a good ingredients encyclopedia. You can read reviews of products, but note that the reviewers are not concerned about parabens and the like, so a happy face rating does not mean that a product is safe, just that these expert reviewers find that it is effective at whatever it promises.
• If you want to know what other consumers think of the product, there are a number of good review sites, including www.amazon.com, www.drugstore.com, www.makeupalley.com, and others. At makeupalley you can filter reviewers by age group, which is nice; it's a very helpful site with lots of active members and probably worth registering at (free).

Another good website which rates not only the product on its toxicity but also the manufacturer on their footprint is www.goodguide.com, which rates all manner of products, including cleaning products.

In case you are interested, I'll try to figure out a way to easily post the "safe" products I'm using, so check back.