scent – ecogreenlove

“Why should you care about greening your laundry? For starters, many of the chemicals found in common laundry products are hazardous to both humans and the environment (and many more have not been thoroughly tested for safety). Any product that clothing is exposed to – including detergents, fabric softeners, and dryer sheets – coats the fabrics in residues that inevitably come in contact with skin. Effects of direct or airborne exposure to these pollutants can include headaches, dizziness, respiratory issues, and even cancer. Chemicals from these products can also contaminate soil and groundwater after entering the sewer system, and are toxic to marine life.

Disappointingly, products labeled “green,” “natural,” or “organic” have been found to emit just as many dangerous chemicals as standard consumer goods. Many of these chemicals are considered carcinogenic and contribute to air pollution. “The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warns that indoor pollution from cleaning products is likely to be hazardous to health, but there are no federally enforceable standards for their use in the home.”

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“Essential oils are not actually oils. They are the highly concentrated plant constituents made by distilling large quantities of whole plants with water, steam, solvents, or mechanical methods. People have used these oils for thousands of years. Recently they have boomed into a $24 billion industry.

Despite their many healing powers, the everyday use of essential oils has some downsides. First, the manufacturing of essential oils raises significant sustainability concerns: It takes large amounts of plant material to distill the oils. In some cases, thousands of pounds of plants are used to produce a very small amount of oil. Most plants for essential oils are eitherover-harvested from the wild or grown overseas in large monocrop farms. They are sometimes ripped entirely out of the ground for distillation.”

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