Friends, it is officially Earth Month! The sun is shining, spring cleaning is in full swing, and, as Earth Day approaches, our email inboxes are getting cluttered with increasingly ridiculous marketing emails. My personal ‘favorite’ of the last few years? A friend forwarded me an email from a fast-fashion company that, on Earth Day, proclaimed “We ❤️ the 🌎” with an enclosed discount code.
What are the metrics we need to determine whether a company has a demonstrated commitment to sustainability? Wherever you set the bar, it surely must be higher than an online retailer with a deceptively high carbon footprint that destroys millions of unsold products offering livestream videos like “My Top Earth Day Products.”
Earth Day, like Valentine’s Day, Easter, and countless other holidays, has become yet another excuse for companies to push things we may not want and almost certainly don’t need. (Before you go calling me a holiday grinch, I love a good celebration. Sign me up to look at Christmas lights or make paper hearts on Valentine’s Day. But the celebration of these holidays is, in fact, a completely separate event from clicking “add to cart” for any item related to these holidays).
And, quite frankly, I’m not willing to fall for the ridiculous marketing tactics of companies that can’t be bothered to care about the Earth the other 364 days a year.
Certainly, some companies do, in fact, ❤️ the 🌎. They take measures to become certified B corps, run on renewable energy, limit waste in their production stream, and work with recycled or natural materials. But even these companies spend the month offering “promo code PLANET20.”
To turn Earth Day into a marketing tactic, however, is to undermine the fact that one of the most effective ways to care for the Earth is to buy less.
Up to 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the manufacturing and use of household goods. Want to cut your carbon footprint? Buy less.
The average American produces 4.5 pounds of trash per day… adding up to over 60 tons of landfill waste over the course of the average life. Want to produce less waste? Buy less.
But there’s another space where I really want to focus on this Earth Month.
Since its establishment in 1970, Earth Day has more or less been associated with planting trees. Trees are great, don’t get me wrong. Please, feel free to plant a tree… the more the merrier. But there were a few events in the 1960s that really galvanized public attention towards the nascent environmental movement, including the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, and the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire on an oil slick in Cleveland, Ohio— and this public attention helped create the first Earth Day. What these events had in common was quite simple.
They galvanized public outrage at the toxic chemicals polluting our products and, by extension, the planet.
The single biggest misconception consumers have— besides, perhaps, thinking that we need the products being marketed to us— is assuming that products that make it onto store shelves are safe. And to be sure, there’s more awareness and more regulation of certain chemicals now than there was in the 1970s— but the toxic chemical landscape has also gotten much more complicated.
Lead paint on children’s toys. Cadmium in dinner plates. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals in water bottles. PFAS in waterproof jackets and fast-food containers. Toxic flame retardants in mattresses. Each of these headline-making finds are disturbing in their own right, but they collectively point to a more significant problem: Unsafe chemicals make regular appearances in our home furnishings, clothing, dishes, and other consumables. And to make matters worse, the vast majority of the time, these dangerous chemicals are completely legal.
In other words, we live in a society that has repeatedly prioritized what is cheap for businesses over what is safe for our bodies and sustainable for our planet.
So we’re going to return to the roots of Earth Day, spending the next few weeks diving into some of these toxic chemicals, answering questions like: What are they? What impact do these chemicals have on our bodies and the planet? How can we spot them (or, really, run far, far away from them) in our daily purchases? What policy changes might help?
I’ve been spending lots of time these past few months delving into these issues (my apologies, as I know it’s made my publishing schedule for the last few weeks a little wacky!) so I could feel sufficiently embedded in all the science to pass it on in the best way (read: informative but hopefully not boring or pedantic!) to you… and I can’ wait to dive in later this week!
Know someone who would be interested in this deep dive into the chemicals in our homes and store shelves? Share now!