Currently, there is no law requiring warning labels on the packaging of our products, be it personal care, food or otherwise, aside from the standard BPA warning on plastic containers.
Plastic containers are labeled in ways that can be confusing to the consumer. Educating the consumer should be our number one priority; after all, it is the consumer that keeps businesses in business.
According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), plastic and plasticizers are linked to hormone disruptors, endocrine toxicity, breast cancer, infertility and autism, to name a few. While it may solve problems for companies and can seem convenient for the consumer, there are serious risks to both human health and the environment.
Take something all of us use on a daily basis: deodorant. Leading commercially available deodorants use the active ingredients aluminum zirconium tetrachlorohydrex and cyclopentasiloxane, which have been linked to breast cancer and Alzheimer’s, according to the National Cancer Institute. These ingredients coupled with the plastic packaging can be quite a potential deadly dilemma.
Every plastic container, be it for personal care, food or other uses, has a number rating on the bottom that correlates with the type of plastic used. The number located inside the triangular shape indicates both the type of resin used to make the plastic and the product’s recyclability. According to the EWG, the biggest offender—which also happens to be widely used in deodorant packaging—is the number seven. It is the most difficult to recycle and the most harmful with its cancer-causing agents and endocrine disruptors.
Consumers need to be cognizant of not only the products they use on a daily basis but that in which they are packaged in as well. When companies package their all-natural products in plastic, the product has the potential to be breached when the plastic leaches its toxins into the product.
That said, knowing numbers isn’t all that necessary if we are buying products that are packaged in glass.
Source: Nobodo Inc. The company, which sells all-natural deodorants and other body products, decided to package Nobodo products in glass so that there would be no possibility of carcinogens leaching into its products. For more information about Nobodo products, visit NobodoInc.com.
