Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie
Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie are the authors of Slow Death by Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health.
From their Q & A with Vanessa Farquharson, author of Sleeping Naked is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days and editor of the Green as a Thistle blog:
Thistle: What surprised me a bit about your experiment was the fact that, prior to exposing yourself to all this mercury, phthalates and BPA, you couldn’t get your levels of anything down to zero.--Marshal Zeringue
Bruce: Yeah, the notion of getting to zero is impossible, even if you’re hyper-vigilant about it, because all this stuff is not only in the products we use but in the environment, the water, the air.
Rick: And Bruce and I pretty much obsessed in a way nobody ever would over how to insulate ourselves from these chemicals, but in no case were we able to completely rid ourselves of a toxin. Even with something like triclosan, which is relatively well-labelled in Canada — theoretically, you should be able to stay clear of it, but the problem is that so many consumer products are being made with it and it’s ending up in landfills, leaching out of them into lakes and rivers, and into our drinking water.
Bruce: You can actually test polar bears in the Arctic for most of these things and they’ll test positive, despite the fact that they don’t use deodorant or microwave their food… although the modern ones do.
Thistle: [Laughs] Of course....[read on]
