Comments on: Cleaning the House http://www.ioeblog.org/?p=43 because ecology means business Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:48:22 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.38 By: wayne http://www.ioeblog.org/?p=43&cpage=1#comment-8 Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:56:14 +0000 http://instituteofecolonomics.org/wordpress/?p=41#comment-8 Marc,

I really appreciate your comments. You are right on about the fragility of our water supplies. We need to do any and all that we can to make sure we preserve clean water for future generations. Thanks for your cares and concerns. We would love you to get more involved with here at IOE as we try to do a little to help preserve air, water and soil. Thanks again,

]]> By: markc http://www.ioeblog.org/?p=43&cpage=1#comment-7 Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:10:33 +0000 http://instituteofecolonomics.org/wordpress/?p=41#comment-7 Incidentally, the most effective basin, tub, and tile cleaner I’ve found is the eco-friendly one sold by Seventh Generation, which is a company that puts out a lot of ecofriendly cleaning products that are highly effective that are sold at most grocery stores.

]]> By: markc http://www.ioeblog.org/?p=43&cpage=1#comment-6 Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:06:27 +0000 http://instituteofecolonomics.org/wordpress/?p=41#comment-6 As much as we talk about carbon footprints, we ignore what is likely to be a related and more pressing environmental issue for human health and survival – the availability of clean drinking water. As it stands, the chemicals we use for cleaning, protecting ourselves from the sun, killing pests, repelling insects, and various other things, all end up in the water, and flow downstream to municipal water intakes, where treatment plants for drinking water production aren’t designed to remove them from the water. As a result, many communities (particularly more downstream – whose water is made up of a significant proportion of treated wastewater from communities upstream) can have small concentrations of various chemicals from all sorts of products we use in water. This should be a real concern, as researchers are finding that water that leaves our wastewater treatment plants causes cancer, disease, and feminization of fish and other aquatic organisms in our streams and rivers. We’re talking about concentrations that are much lower than any “toxic” effects, because EPA testing and regulation is designed to prevent levels of substances that are capable of causing death, not those that cause various other detrimental health effects. The non-toxic negative health effects of many of the chemicals we use often act like very strong versions of the female steroid hormone Estrogen, and are suspected of having myriad effects on fish, wildlife, people, and entire ecosystems.

So, from my perspective, the take-home message from all this is that we should all try to be more conscious of both what we put and use in our water, where our own water comes from and what is going on upstream, and how our water is treated before it comes to our taps.

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