That fresh pine scent may be harming your health and polluting the environment. A study of 25 scented products—from air fresheners and dryer sheets to deodorants, shampoos, and hand sanitizers—found that they collectively emitted more than 100 volatile organic compounds, reports Environmental Health Perspectives.

Specifically, University of Washington researchers found 133 VOCs in the 25 products, according to EHP, with the most common chemicals being the familiar limonene (citrus) and pinene (pine) scents. They also found lots of ethanol and acetone, which are used as carriers for fragrance chemicals.

Here are some of the more surprising findings about the 133 compounds:

• 24 of them are classified as toxic or hazardous under federal law.

• Only one was listed on any product label.

• Only two were listed on any of the products’ material safety data sheets, the more detailed—but hardly comprehensive—disclosure forms required by federal law.

• Some of the products were labeled “organic,” “natural” or “non-toxic.”

So yes: That cleaner with the searing pine scent, the dryer sheet with the cloying perfume smell, the soap with the faux-almond aroma that doesn’t go away even when you rinse your hands—these probably aren’t making your world “fresher” and “cleaner” but rather more polluted and unhealthy.

Lead author Anne Steinemann tells Emily Sohn at Discovery News that scented-product labels can be misleading:

“ ‘Natural’ does not mean no synthetic chemicals. ‘Green’ does not mean safe or healthy. ‘Fragrance-free’ does not mean nontoxic or without fragrance. There are a lot of paradoxes and surprises here.”

Last year, Sen. Al Franken introduced the Household Product Labeling Act, which would have required manufacturers to list all a product’s ingredients on it labels, but the bill didn’t even make it past the committee stage. So no legislative crackdown appears imminent, but in the meantime, one expert contacted by EHP suggests a change in our mindset: 

Steinemann’s study “strongly suggests that we need to find unscented alternatives for cleaning our homes, laundry, and ourselves,” says Claudia Miller, an allergist and immunologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Source: Environmental Health Perspectives, Discovery News  

Image by functoruser , licensed under Creative Commons .  

Perhaps the argument for tougher government drilling regulations and more renewable energy production can be made on the basis of our distaste for “tarballs” washing ashore while we’re laying siege to each others’ sandcastles. The Texas Observer has posted a scary little tarball history of sorts, in which they point out:

Anyone who visited Texas’ beaches in the 1970s is familiar with the tarball. Ranging in size from a penny to a basketball, these dough-like masses of raw petroleum stained our skin and swimsuits with an unfortunate brown smear. They also made handy projectiles to throw at crabs, seagulls and friends. Tarballs seemed like just another hazard of playing in the waves, like jellyfish—the price paid for living in an oil-producing state.

In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill, the tarballs are likely rolling back up Texas beaches this summer.

Source: The Texas Observer

Image by elleinad, licensed under Creative Commons.

Barack Obama’s administration has not yet passed a health care bill. Nor has it passed a climate change bill. Nor has it closed Guantanamo Bay. There is, however, one progressive issue where the Obama administration has been extremely productive: regulation.

Under previous Republican administrations, John B. Judis reports for the New Republic that the alphabet soup of federal regulation agencies—the EPA, OSHA, SEC, FCC, and others—were systematically dismantled. Industry representatives were chosen to regulate the industries they represented, and budgets were strategically cut. Obama is turning the tide, appointing actual regulators and increasing funding, even in the midst of the recession. “In doing so,” Judis writes, “he isn’t simply improving the effectiveness of various government offices or making scattered progress on a few issues; he is resuscitating an entire philosophy of government with roots in the Progressive era of the early twentieth century.”

Source: The New Republic 

The economy is not “unhealthy” right now. It’s neither “ailing” nor “suffering.” The economy is not an autonomous entity like the human body; it’s made up of people taking actions that have an effect on other people. Anat Shenker-Osorio writes for New Deal 2.0 that talking about the economy like a living, breathing thing deemphasizes the actions of people—including irresponsible bankers—and makes efforts at regulation more difficult.

Most people don’t need external interference until something goes wrong. The same is not true of an economy. But when people say, “the economy shed jobs,” they’re reinforcing the idea of the economy as an autonomous thing. It’s better to say, “more people are unemployed,” or “companies laid people off.” Shenker-Osorio writes:

We personify the economy to our peril. Even as our overt messages insist the economy requires consistent external oversight, our language conveys the economy is an autonomous, self-regulating thing. The more we imply that the economy is something that exists and functions on its own, the less credible are our arguments that there’s no such thing as an unregulated free-market.

Source: New Deal 2.0 

Image by Photos8, licensed under Creative Commons.

“Sometimes the only thing worse than homeopathic products that have no effect are the ones that do,” Terry J. Allen writes for In These Times. Allen is referring to certain Zicam products, popular homeopathic cold remedies that contain “pharmaceutically significant” amounts of zinc. Zinc can cause anosmia—loss of the ability to smell—when taken intranasally, which is the case with Zicam.

Back in June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning for consumers to stop using the Zicam products in question. Allen says that the incident shines a bright light on “the giant regulatory loophole that is homeopathy.” While the FDA requires conventional prescription drugs and over-the-counter medicines go through testing to be proven safe and effective, these regulations do not apply to homeopathic solutions.

The FDA reserves the right to step in when necessary, which is what happened in June. Up until then, however, this loophole allowed Zicam-maker Matrixx “to slap on the label ‘homeopathic,’ slip under the regulatory wire, and sell 1 billion doses of untested Zicam,” Allen writes.

Source: In These Times

Canadian lawmakers are looking ahead to a time when smoking bans will extend to all public sidewalks and outdoor places, reports Spacing. Canada has some of the toughest anti-smoking laws in North America, but the unintended (although perhaps foreseeable?) consequence of the bans has been a glut of smokers in open-air spaces.

What’s the harm of smoking in open air? Spacing points to secondhand-smoke research conducted in Finland that found air in outdoor cafes to be 20 times more polluted than the stuff people breathe on the sidewalks of traffic-heavy streets. Nasty. “I absolutely see a time in which there will not be any smoking in all public spaces,” Toronto city councilor Pam McConnell told the magazine.

South of the border, cities in various U.S. states, such as Minnesota and California, have already banned smoking at parks and beaches. Berkeley introduced a sidewalk smoking ban in 2008.

Source: Spacing (article not available online)