Toxin Toxout Reflection

Zoe Peerman

APES Summer Reading

Toxin Toxout Reflection

        Toxin Toxout is an eye-opening book about the harmful toxins that we encounter every day and how to remove them from our bodies and the environment.  Written by Canadian environmental activists, Bruce Lourie and Rick Smith, Toxin Toxout gives practical advice for detoxifying our lives, uses multiple experiments to show where these toxins in our bodies are coming from and explains what these toxins are doing to our environment.

        Before reading this book I wasn’t aware of how popular organic products are becoming.  People want to know where their products – food, cosmetics, cleaning products and clothes – are coming from and how they’re made. But, even though there is an increasing popularity in environmentally friendly products, most people are buying them to “save” themselves opposed to the environment and would only buy environmentally friendly products if they were aesthetically pleasing. One example used in Toxin Toxout was that if a bra store started selling bras made of recycled materials, they wouldn’t do well because they would be a neutral color and people thought that a brightly colored bra outweighed the benefits of buying an environmentally bra.

        I also learned that there is a big difference between using the terms natural, organic and local. There is a stigma that everything that is natural is organic and that everything that is local is natural and organic. In reality, the word “natural” as a label only pertains to how the food is processed. It means that there are no artificial colors or flavors, no artificial preservatives, no irradiated ingredients and no GMOs. On the other hand, all organic foods are natural, but in addition to being natural, when the food was being grown it wasn’t treated with pesticides, growth hormones or petroleum based fertilizers. Local food, similarly to natural food, is not always organic, even though most people think that it is. There is no guarantee that local food is organic or even natural, but it creates a much smaller carbon footprint, especially in the North East where it’s harder to grow produce all year round.  

        I also learned that we do things all of the time that negatively impact our health and the environment without even knowing. For example, when you buy a new car, whether it’s a hybrid or a gas-guzzling 4x4, it has that “new car smell”.  What most people don’t know is that the new car smell is actually the smell of volatile organic compounds (VOC), such as formaldehyde, toluene, and xylenes, evaporating from the adhesives and sealants in the car and sniffing that is the equivalent of sniffing glue. Even if you were trying to make more environmentally conscious lifestyle choices such as throwing away your Teflon pans or plastic containers that have BPA, those products just end up in landfills where their chemicals seep into the surrounding environment. This shows us that we have to be conscious about where we throw our trash too. For example, in the 1950’s people thought that they were helping the environment by burning their waste opposed to throwing it into a landfill. But, it turns out that their backyard incinerators produced just as much smog as cars do. How we dispose of our waste is just as important as buying products without harmful chemicals in them in the first place. If we make more environmentally conscious decisions, we can avoid situations such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a floating island of waste in the Pacific Ocean that contains more garbage than any other landfill.