Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

ALL THE THINGS YOU PUT ON YOUR SKIN

Even people who are very aware of the food they eat—people who make it a point to eat only fresh, organic food—often aren’t aware of the choices they have when it comes to clothing and hair- and skin-care products.

In fact, most people just don’t realize the significance of things like organic clothing and organic shampoo. It sounds kind of out there, like some kind of crazy New Age stuff. But it’s not only what you put into your body that matters; what you put onto it matters just as much, too.

         I used to think Ed was just being Ed about all this stuff. What’s the big deal? But then I learned that the skin is our body’s largest organ, and because it’s porous, it’s absorbing stuff all the time. If medicine can be applied to the skin—hormone patches and that sort of thing—just imagine what else your skin is taking in. Studies on the effects of toxins in drinking water have actually found that people took in more of the toxins by showering in the water than by drinking it!

So contact with your skin—for ten, fifteen, maybe twenty hours in a day—is a big part of why the clothes you wear matter so much. And it’s not just your clothes, but all your lotions and shampoos and makeup—not to mention the air we breathe. Everything that comes in contact with your skin matters.

If you stop for just a minute and think about it, the same principles that apply to organic gardening and organic farming clearly should apply to the growing of crops used to make clothing and hair-care and skin-care products, too. Pesticides that are harmful to food and the ecosystem are just as harmful when they’re used on nonfood crops like cotton and lavender.

And then there are the synthetic materials used to make everything from clothing and shoes to makeup and sunscreen. Manufacturing these materials requires a lot of energy and natural resources—including problematic resources like petroleum—not to mention all the emissions from the manufacturing processes.

So there are real, measurable consequences for the environment—as well as for our bodies—when you choose what to wear and what to apply to your skin and hair. For that reason, it is doubly important to choose carefully and wisely when you shop for clothes and beauty products.

“Conventional” Clothing

If you’ve spent any time reading the labels on your pants and shirts and sweaters or dresses, you know most clothing these days is made of one or more of these materials:

•         cotton         •         wool         •         rayon•         nylon         •         polyester         •         acetate•         spandex         •         acrylic         •         cashmere•         silk         •         linen         •         angora

Some of these materials are natural and some are synthetic. By definition the natural materials are found in nature and include cotton, silk, wool, linen, cashmere, and angora.

Cotton and linen both come from plants. Cotton obviously comes from the cotton plant—specifically, from fibers in the plant’s seedpod. Linen comes from fibers in the stalk of the flax plant.

Silk, wool, cashmere, and angora all come from animals. Silk is made from the cocoon of the silkworm. Wool is made from the fur of animals including sheep, goats, alpacas, and llamas, while angora, a specific kind of wool often used to make soft, furry sweaters, is made from rabbit fur. And cashmere is made from the cashmere goat’s fur.

Those are the most commonly used natural materials, and they are widely available. However, many fabrics combine natural fibers with other, synthetic fibers to give them more durability or other qualities. Many of the synthetics—including nylon, spandex, polyester, and acrylic—are petroleum-based thermoplastics. Plastics! They’re man-made substances manufactured in a lab, and they all contribute to our dependence on foreign oil.

Rayon and acetate are a little different from the other synthetics. They’re actually made from cellulose, which is wood fibers, so rayon and acetate will feel more like natural fibers, such as cotton or linen, but they’re still manufactured fibers that require a lot of water and energy to produce.

So which are the most environmentally friendly clothing choices? The answer is not always obvious.

Growing Cotton

Most people think of cotton as a sort of friendly fiber. It breathes. It’s washable. It comes from a renewable resource. If we need more fabric, we can just grow more cotton, right?

         I always wondered what the big deal was about organic cotton. Cotton is cotton, right? It wasn’t until very recently that I learned cotton is one of the most toxic plants on the planet—not because of the plant itself, but because of the boll weevil, a virulent pest that infests the cotton plant. Boll weevils are very hard to kill, and cotton farmers have to use all these pesticides to protect their crops. Eventually weevils become immune to a pesticide, mutating around it, like a cockroach, and the farmers have to find a brand-new pesticide. They keep adding pesticides and making them more intense until you have a crop with more pesticides used on it than anything else out there.

Rachelle’s right. Cotton is one of the most pesticide-laden crops in the world.

The obvious problem with pesticides is that they’re poisons. Moreover, they’re typically not highly targeted poisons, particularly those used in the growing of cotton. These pesticides work more like a shotgun blast than a sharpshooter’s bullet when it comes to killing insects. Instead of just killing the boll weevil, these pesticides wind up killing spiders and wasps and all kinds of other beneficial insects, putting the entire ecosystem out of whack. Eventually you have aphids multiplying like crazy and wreaking havoc on the cotton, because their natural predators have been destroyed, which in turn requires more pesticides.

Sadly, they work like a shotgun blast when it comes to their application as well. Thousands and thousands of farmers and farmworkers and children and animals have been made seriously ill—and have even been killed—by pesticide poisoning, even when the pesticides are applied in a way that’s 100 percent legal. When you’re flying an airplane over a field and dousing it with toxic chemicals,