There are over 100,000 synthetic chemicals in use in commerce today. Only a handful of them have even been tested for health impacts and none have been tested for synergistic health impacts, that means when they interact with all the other chemicals we’re exposed to every day. So we don’t know the full impact on health and the environment of all these toxic chemicals. But we do know one thing – toxics in, toxics out. As long as we keep putting toxics into our industrial production systems, we’re going to keep getting toxics in the stuff that we bring into our homes and workplaces and schools, and, duh, our bodies. Like B.F.R.s – brominated flame retardants, they’re a chemical that make things more fireproof but they’re super toxic. They’re neurotoxin that means toxic to the brain. What are we even doing using a chemical like this? Yet we put them in our computers, our appliances, couches, mattresses, even some pillows. In fact, we take our pillows; we douse them in a neurotoxin and then bring them home and put our heads on them for eight hours a night to sleep. Now, I don’t know, but it seems to me in this country with so much potential, we could think of a better way to stop our heads from catching on fire at night.

Now these toxics build up the food chain and concentrate in our bodies. Do you know what is the food at the top of the food chain with the highest level of many toxic contaminants? Human breast milk. That means that we’ve reached a point where the smallest members of our societies, our babies, are getting the highest lifetime dose of toxic chemicals from breastfeeding from their mothers. Is that not an incredible violation? Breastfeeding must be the most fundamental human act of nurturing. It should be sacred and safe. Now breastfeeding is still best and mothers should definitely keep breastfeeding. But we should protect it. They should protect it. I thought they were looking out for us.

And of course the people who bear the biggest branch of these toxic chemicals are the factory workers, many of whom are women of reproductive age. They’re working with reproductive toxins, carcinogens and more. Now I ask you, what kind of woman at reproductive age would work in a job exposed to reproductive toxins, except for a woman with no other option? And that’s one of the beauties of this system?

The erosion of local environments and economies here ensures a constant supply of people with no other option. Globally, 200,000 people a day are moving from environments that have sustained them for generations into cities. Many to live in slums, looking for work no matter how toxic that work may be. So you see it’s not just resources that are wasted along this system but people too, whole communities get wasted. 

Yep, toxics in, toxics out. A lot of the toxics leave the factories in products, but even more leave as by-products or pollution. And it’s a lot of pollution.

In the U.S., our industry admits to releasing over 4,000,000,000 pounds of toxic chemicals a year. It’s probably a lot more because that’s only what they admit. So that’s another limit because, yak, who wants to look at and smell 4,000,000,000 pounds toxic chemicals a year. So what do they do? Move the dirty factories overseas, pollutes someone else’s land. But surprise, a lot of that pollution is coming right back at us carried by wind currents. So what happens after all these natural resources are turned into products?