Should My Toxic Garden Hose Be Replaced?

There is no safe limit for lead ingestion - it can be harmful at any concentration. So why is it that garden hoses contain lead? None of the nasty chemicals found in hoses are necessary, and the good news is that the industry and retailers are moving toward cleaner, non-toxic varieties. 

But as usual, it is buyer beware, because our system encourages producers to cut corners and maximize profits, even at the expense of the health of you, your family, and our planetary life support system.

Hoses can also be a dangerous soup of other unwanted ingredients that have been shown, in some situations, to leach into the water passing through them. 

Water sampled from hoses after they were left in the sun for two days contained  levels of BPA, phthalates, and lead, all above standard approved drinking water limits. 

Most cheaper hoses are made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which uses lead as a stabilizer. The fittings are often made of brass, which can contain as much as 8% lead. 

Lead has been shown to build up in the body from even low levels of exposure, and causes all kinds of trouble once there.

But wait! There's more. 


Some cheap hoses contain chemicals associated with e-waste, none of which you want on your vegetables, or on your grass where your kids and pets play.

Information I have read on the topic ranges from alarmist - "kill your toxic hose now", to a more complacent attitude of "don't worry about it, there are far more poisonous things to worry about". Hardly reassuring. 

What is a gardener to do? 

The best case scenario would see all hoses containing toxic ingredients being replaced with alternatives that are drink-safe. Natural rubber is recommended, as well as plastic hoses that are rated "drink-safe". 

These hoses have fittings plated in nickel, which is lead-free, meaning cleaner water for your veggies.

For now, I will keep my two cheap hoses which are only 3 years old and still in good shape. However, I will also follow a few rules to minimize the risk of spraying chemicals all over my vegetable garden.

1. Always wrap up hoses after use, and store inside in a cool, dark place. Or store in an outside location shaded from direct sunlight. 
2. If the hose has been in the sun for a while, run the water for a minute before watering your garden. 
3. Never drink from a non-drink water safe hose.  
4. Take action - let manufacturers and retailers know that you will NOT tolerate dangerous chemicals in your garden hoses. 

None of the toxic chemicals are necessary in any hose, and they only benefit the seller's bottom line. That is why they are in hoses in the first place. I guess they don't care that their consumer goods are poisoning us and the planet. What a system.

Eventually, when my current hose is at the end of its life, I will pay more and buy a new safer hose for my vegetable garden. Polyurethane and other non-vinyl hoses, like rubber, are much less likely to contain chemicals of concern.

Always check the label when buying a new hose. If it does not list the material, it is most likely of the toxic variety.

But what should you do with your old cheap potentially toxic hose, either right away, or when it reaches the end of its life? From what I have found out, they should probably be delivered to a toxic waste disposal site along with your old paint and spent batteries. 

 “We now know vinyl garden hoses may leach toxic phthalates and BPA into water. 

It’s time for retailers like Home Depot and Wal-Mart to safeguard our children’s health and phase out the use of these poison plastic vinyl hoses.” 

- Mike Schade, Center for Health, Environment & Justice

Things Are Getting Better

The March of Progress?

If I hear one more person say that things are getting better I am going to scream. Or cry. Or both.

When I am bringing people down by expressing my current world view they stop me mid-rant to remind me that, "things are getting better". But are they, really?

Oh yes. The gays have it better. Women have it better. Blacks have it better. The poor have it better. Aboriginal people have never had it as good. And peace is breaking out all over the place, while the environment is improving!

Usually it is a well off consumer class privileged individual sharing the optimism. They might even tell me to "lighten up" or "get over it" or "move on" so that I can join in and enjoy the privileged life that we can all have if we work hard enough.

What I want to do in those times is take them, and find someone who is gay and ask them if they agree that "things are getting better". Maybe a ask a gay person from Orlando, Florida.

I want to ask a woman if she thinks that things are getting better. Is receiving 77% of the wage of a male doing the same work evidence of this improved world?

Maybe they can visit a First Nations reserve here in Canada and see if the people there share this Polyana view of things. We could ask about the lack of clean water, or adequate housing, or the persistent racist attitudes of their settler neighbours.

And how about the perpetual war that the planet has been in for the past decade? Do Syrians think that things are getting better? Libyans? Egyptians? Ukrainians? Iraqis?

I used to be an optimist, too. But come on - our planet has never been in as rough of shape as it is now. We have had 10,000 years of civilization to get things right, and what do we get? Trump and his ilk.

Come on - we should have nailed this thing several thousand years ago.

Are things getting better? Perhaps. But as Neil Young said in Vampire Blues, the "good times are comin', but they're sure comin' slow". We are moving at a snails pace when we aren't actually going backwards.

If things are going to accelerate enough to get us back on track, we are going to have to have a simple living revolution the likes of which we have never seen before. Happy, comfortable consumer/slaves are going to have to get out of the bubble they have been in for a few decades, and start talking to the  rest of the planet that is suffering in order to prop up their unsustainable lifestyles.

Only then can we work to make this a simpler, more sane world where everyone can truly say "things are getting better". And getting better now. Right now.

If not now, then when?

R. Crumb And The Consumerism Illusion

Building the illusion of the consumer capitalist dream

Underground artist Robert Crumb drew comics that expanded and distorted my malleable mind when I was a kid. I loved his twisted take on our crazy world.

After growing up with Crumb's alternative art, as an adult I discovered his writing and learned more about the man behind the drawings. In his words I found the source of the twisted views which generated so many classic silly images like the Keep On Truckin guy and Mr. Natural.

I found that this artist was a serious philosopher and social critic. I loved his way of thinking even more than his unique way of drawing.

Crumb, was born in 1943, the year that shoe rationing went into effect in the US due to WWII. But such restraint was not to last for long. Soon many parts of the world, including the US, transitioned into the post-World War II economic expansion, or the "Golden Age Of Capitalism".

During the period that lasted from 1945 until the 1970s, many western economies saw consumerism and advertising take over. Cheap mass produced items hit store shelves and shopping was packaged as an activity unto itself.

Lifestyles began to change. Both the complexity and speed of life began to ramp up in a way never seen before. The era of excess was about to dominate the common person's sense of reality as people were transformed from participating citizens to passive consumers purchasing distractions with their new "disposable income".

Of this period Crumb says, "As a kid growing up in the 1950s I became acutely aware of the changes taking place in American culture and I must say I didn't much like it." Indeed, the times were turning toxic.

Chemical fertilizers and pesticides promised "better living with chemistry", and they weren't even the most toxic inventions unleashed upon a dangerously unaware public at the time.

Other inventions like Disneyland, The American Dream, and corporate controlled mainstream media and entertainment were toxic to former free thinking, free living people across the land. It was the beginning of the consumerism illusion.

"What we kids didn't understand was that we were living in a commercial, commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold. As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. 

The conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world."

Crumb does not feel optimistic about how this experiment in social engineering will turn out. He envisions a result where everyone is scamming everyone else, a situation that we seem to have achieved.

"The problem is that the longer this buying and selling goes on, the more hollow and bankrupt the culture becomes. It loses its fertility, like worn out, ravaged farmland. 

Eventually, the yokels who bought the hype, the pitch, they want in on the game. When there are no more naive hicks left, you have a culture where everybody is conning each other all the time. 

There are no more earnest "squares" left—everybody's "hip," everybody is cynical."  

Robert Crumb knew that we left something important back in the 1950s, something authentic, slow, human, and real. It was all replaced with an illusion that keeps us complacent and too busy to think clearly about what is going on.

"It's much easier to lie to humans and trick them than to tell them the truth. They'd much rather be bamboozled than be told the truth, because the way to trick them is to flatter them and tell them what they want to hear, to reinforce their existing illusions. They don't want to know the truth. Truth is a bring-down, a bummer, or it's just too complicated, too much mental work to grasp."

I guess all we can do is keep on truckin' for the kind of changes that everyone will benefit from. I am sure Mr. Crumb would approve of a bit of free thinking that leads to restoring sanity to our increasingly crazy world. 

Is Squeaky Clean Too Clean?

Queen Elizabeth I of England boasted that she bathed once a month, "whether I need it or not". It wasn't so long ago that the majority of us bathed about as much. That was before our modern cleanliness myth - "if clean is good, squeaky clean is better" - was developed to create the multi-billion dollar cleanliness industry.

If cleanliness was once next to godliness, it is now found between social phobia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Katherine Ashenburg, author of "The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History", thinks our hyper-hygiene has become "hedonistic, anxious and oversanitized", and I agree.

Of course, life expectancies rose sharply in the 1930's and 40's thanks in large part to the improvement of cleanliness, sanitation and hygiene, but we have since fallen overboard into the great Soapy Sea. There are a growing number of people that believe that this obsession with clean is actually making us sick.

Essentially, the philosophy of those advocating for a less clean world says that the more we try to protect ourselves from the environment, the weaker we become. They feel that our immune systems need to be challenged in order to develop and maintain function. Within limits then, being less clean could improve your health.

I used to shower every day, but it doesn't fit with my lifestyle now. These days I find I have better things to do with my time than attack my body daily with a range of smelly chemicals. Consider that people rarely used soap to wash their bodies until the late 19th century. Olive oil-based soaps that were gentle enough for skin were too expensive for the majority of people.

Smelling like chemicals is expensive to this day, and it is an expense I jettisoned from my budget a long time ago. I haven't used deodorant or anti-perspirant for years, and I do not miss these aluminium-laced concoctions designed to mask who you really are.

What's wrong with humans smelling like humans rather than soap, sandalwood, or Musk Deer scent? Within reason of course - I do not want to be as odoriferous as a medieval Christian desert hermit displaying his holiness by not washing. Reports are that these dedicated desert dwellers could set off one's 'Smell-o-meter' from a mile away.

Even Napoleon ("I'm coming home, don't shower") might have been taken aback at such a dedicated funk. However, depending on how your body works, warding off unpleasant odours does not require one to take on a cleanliness obsession like an acquaintance of mine that showers several times per day.

Also, frequent showers do not agree with my desire to conserve resources. Luffa-ing under a constant stream of steamy hot water takes a lot of energy, and this energy use has negative consequences on the environment. Plus, all the hot water and smelly products cost a lot of cash.

I want to save money and be clean enough that I am not detectable from a kilometer away. I find that after a few days it is time for a scrub down, but I see nothing wrong with being a 'free range human' and getting down and dirty every once in a while. If nothing else, it makes the occasional hot shower seem like a dreamy spa treatment rather than just another chore in a busy day.

My cleanliness product bag contains a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo. That's it, and I use them about once a week whether I need it or not. Once-a-month Elizabeth, former Queen of England, might wonder why I shower so frequently.

Where do you stand on the cleanliness - compulsion continuum?

Canada Not Buying Anything Containing Bishpenol-A

Last week Statistics Canada reported that 91% of people tested had toxic bisphenol-A in their urine. Disturbingly, the highest concentrations were in children. In 2008 Environment Canada banned BPA-laced baby bottles. Shortly after that France followed suit. Now Canada is ready to declare BPA a toxic substance and ban its use in any consumer products, becoming the first country in the world to do so.

Bisphenol-A is used to harden plastics and is found everywhere, from the plastic linings of tin cans to water bottles, plastic food wrap, and some plastic containers. There are also many non-food uses for BPA plastic such as CDs and DVDs, and sunglasses. Research has linked this all-pervasive chemical to hormonal and neurological issues. It is often identified as #7 plastic, and is associated with diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, and developmental problems in children's brains and hormonal systems.

The American Chemistry Council is already pleading with Environment Canada not to declare their product toxic, but the Minister of Environment, Jim Prentice, is not being swayed by their pursuit of profit over safety. It is not known exactly when, but the ban will be implemented.

Many are accusing those in the chemical industry of attempting to sabotage the implementation of public policy meant to protect us from the nasty toxic cocktail developed to give us 'better living with chemistry". Some of the tactics being used are: developing blue ribbon panels, constructing studies with pre-conceived outcomes, and publishing white papers in order to convince the public of the safety of controversial chemicals.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reported that it would be virtually impossible for the average person to ingest enough BPA to be dangerous. But this finding was discredited when it was discovered that the agency had ignored the advice of its own scientists and allowed representatives of the chemical industry to write significant portions of the final document.

“There are an estimated 85,000 chemicals in the stream of commerce, and very little is known about most of them. The health effects of almost half the major industrial chemicals have not been studied at all. Of those that have been studied, approximately 1,400 chemicals with known links to cancer, birth defects, reproductive impacts and other health problems are still in use today.”

- Californians for a Healthy and Green Economy (CHANGE)

It is good to see that Canada is leading the way to make sure that in the future we will not be buying anything containing toxic BPA. Undoubtedly this will lead the way for more nations to press the chemical industry for the truth about BPA and other products, which will end up making our lives better without chemicals, or at least, better with less harmful chemicals.

In the meantime, you can reduce exposure to BPA in the following ways:

• limit your use of foods packaged in plastic lined cans (canned pasta and soups appear to have the highest levels of BPA)
  
• use a stainless steel water bottle (without a liner)
  
• do not heat food in plastic containers in the microwave
• use powdered baby formula instead of pre-mixed liquids (liquid formula contains more BPA)
• buy products in glass bottles or non-plastic lined containers
• do not use BPA plastic baby bottles
• do not use #7 polycarbonite (PC) bottles for hot liquids
• #1, 2, and 4 plastics do NOT contain BPA
• avoid using old, scratched water bottles