Chemistry of Common Life: ‘Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things’
MOST PEOPLE WORRY about mold infecting their homes, electrical appliances malfunctioning or gas leaks. But while all those things are dangerous, Canadian environmental activists Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie — authors of “Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things,” which has been a best-seller in Canada and Australia — say there are things a lot more practical and normal that could kill you. You know, like tuna. Or Teflon-coated pots and pans. Or even your toothpaste.
“I think we carry around in our heads that mental image of what pollution is, and that image is usually smokestacks or a big pipe or sewage going into the ocean or exhaust coming out of the back of a car; I think many people are kind of hard-wired to conjure those images when they hear the word ‘pollution,’ and that’s not surprising,” said Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence Canada. “For most of human history, pollution is something that has existed out there — something external to ourselves — so this notion that a lot of the most serious pollutants linked to human disease are chemicals that we have deliberately inserted into the most innocuous items into our home is fairly new.”
But while the idea of house-hold pollutants is certainly different than melting ice caps, acid rain and the dwindling oil supply, the fact that numerous everyday items can affect our everyday health is certainly real, Smith adds. Everything from toys to sofas to computers allow “chemicals to hitch a ride into our home,” Smith says, and are then “absorbed by our bodies … and inside of us. That’s the real problem with pollution.”
Tonight, Smith and Lourie will speak at Busboys and Poets about “Slow Death by Rubber Duck” and how consumers can help change the chemical industry responsible for these pollutants, but before then, they spoke to Express about the experiments they did on themselves as research for the book and how social networking plays a role in spreading this kind of activism.
» LOURIE: It was actually Rick’s idea, but we worked together a lot and it’s an issue that frankly isn’t very well-publicized in Canada; it’s an issue where Canada, frankly, has really lagged behind on the global stage, and in fact, in the United States, you could say the same thing. Virtually nothing has happened, but it’s an environmental issue people are really concerned about, and there’s a disconnect between corporations getting away literally with murder, whereas climate change is getting all the attention. We wanted to use this as a core environmental issue.
» SMITH: The core of the book is really just about the experimentation we did, and that really started literally as a joke or a dare. I think we were talking about the increasing trend of the new scientific tests that are available that allow the direct measurement of pollutant levels in people’s bodies, and one of us said, ‘Why don’t we experiment on ourselves, to see what extent we can raise and lower the amount of pollutants in our own bodies?’ And that was really the key insight of that part of the book.
» LOURIE: And frankly, we’re presenting that almost for the first time as a view of viewing pollution. Pollution isn’t so much out there as it’s in you, in your food, your kids’ toys, your frying pans, your sofa. Historically, that has just not been what people think of pollution, but this is an important way of looking at it.
» EXPRESS: How did you decide which chemicals to work with for the book? Did you have specific chemicals that you already had researched and knew were particularly harmful, or was it more touch-and-go?
» SMITH: We wanted to choose chemicals that we strongly suspect, as scientists, to be a real problem. There’s increasing evidence that for some of these chemicals common in our homes there’s a very strong link with disease, so we wanted to choose chemicals where there was increasing scientific evidence of harm and that come from different parts of our lives — our kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms, on the bus — and things that people absorb in different ways — through their foods or their handling of consumer items.
» LOURIE: At the outset, we were trying to imagine how someone lives their days: You brush your teeth with toothpaste, which can have triclosan; fry something in a Teflon pan; heat something in your microwave. You can just march through a day and look at all the various things that you touch and consume that have these chemicals. We wanted to have something representative of our everyday lives, and also because we work on these issues, we know from a policy perspective the importance of talking about these issues.
» EXPRESS: And what was the actual experimentation experience like? I read somewhere that you guys basically just locked yourselves up in a house for a week and worked on it that way; is that true?
» SMITH: Well, the good news is that we still like each other.
» LOURIE: And, as far as we know, we’re not deathly ill.
» SMITH: And it was the presidential primary season, so there was a lot of CNNto consume —
» LOURIE: — and Guitar Hero to be had.
» SMITH: And we had one cardinal rule, one iron-clad rule: Everything we did had to mimic real life, and that might seem simple-minded and obvious, but it was actually really helpful as we designed these tests. Because you can imagine that if you wanted to increase your personal Teflon level, it would be very easy to do that if you went down to the local hardwear store and bought a jug of Teflon and drank a little bit of it. But obviously, nobody does that, so that’s not really helpful. Investigating the effects of that won’t tell you very much.
» LOURIE: And I ate several meals of tuna; I didn’t sit down and eat a 50-pound tuna or sit in a vat of mercury. We were careful about making sure that we wouldn’t be criticized of doing things that were ridiculous or unnatural — the only reason it would be ridiculous and unnatural is that we measured what we were doing.
» EXPRESS: And what kind of personal effects did you specifically notice?
» SMITH: Nobody had ever done this kind of thing; nobody has been stupid enough to do what we were doing, so the extent of the increase of chemicals in ourselves was quite astonishing — the speed that it happened was very surprising. The fact that over a two-day period, I was able to achieve — just by using a brand-name, off-the-shell shampoo and conditioner and a few other products containing phthalates — 20 the times of that chemical in my body in a 40-hour period, that’s unbelievable. Folks use brand-name products on a daily basis for years — imagine what their blood levels of phthalates look like.
And the thing that blew me away the most was the triclosan tests, so in antibacterial products, soaps, body-wash, deodorant, shaving cream — it’s everywhere. I’ve got to think that since the swine flu scare has begun, that as a population, our levels of this chemical I gotta think went through the roof. Over a 48-hour period, all I did was use soap and antiperspirant and toothpaste, and my levels went up by almost 3,000 times, which is a mind-boggling increase.
» LOURIE: We’re quite conscious that we don’t completely freak people out, so the good news is that virtually every single thing that we tested or used is, I would say, a non-essential ingredient. It’s something that chemical companies and various companies stick in products either because it’s for some kind of ultra-convenience or so your hair is a little shinier; they are not essential at all for human life as we know — in fact, they’re detrimental to human life as we know it.
It’s easy enough [to avoid]; for many of these things, you can look at the labels and see. In the book, we have a lot of detail for how people can avoid it. … In the same way that these chemicals increase dramatically in our blood over a short period of time, we know that by discontinuing our use of them, that the chemicals declined relatively rapidly as well. We’re not going down to zero because this stuff’s everywhere, but there are going to be people in the population with tens or hundreds of times of this stuff in them just because they’re using these products.
» EXPRESS: But do you think there’s a consumer movement that will help more knowledge get out about this kind of pollution?
» LOURIE: I think we’re seeing a dramatic change in a very short period of time. We now have these extraordinary social networking tools where millions of people are getting information and have access to websites that identify what products to buy and not to buy, and companies are a little slow to pick up on this as well, but the ones that are moving very quickly are doing well. In fact, we just saw an announcement that the U.S. government plans to phase out one of the flame retardants that we talk about in the book, and in Canada this year, we were very active in having the federal government here to be the first country in the world to ban baby bottles which have the chemical bisphenol-a. … I think over the next five years, this is going to be the most important and active environmental issue globally. Climate change is going to be out there, obviously, but I think for real, meaningful change in our lives, I think this is going to be the one.
» EXPRESS: What should people expect from this discussion at Busboys and Poets?
» LOURIE: It depends on the venue and people’s patience, but we typically have to cut off the questions because we find people are really, really having lots of questions.
» SMITH: People start diving into their purse to bring out a brand of hand-sanitizer, and they want our opinions on it.
» LOURIE: ‘I have a kettle at home; can you tell me if the plastic in that can kill me?’ It’s a lot of that kind of thing.
» EXPRESS: And what’s next? Should be expecting a follow-up of some kind?
» SMITH: We’re certainly hoping there will be a second book forthcoming. Stay tuned — we’re really delighted at the reception of this one.
» LOURIE: I’m pushing for a romance novel.
» SMITH: I think it’s an area that really deserves further investigation, and we’ve already started working on it. I only hope we can match the title of this first one.
TONIGHT @ Busboys and Poets 14th & V – 6:30 PM
Written by Express contributor Roxana Hadadi
