Toxic Free NC Tip Du Jour: Sunscreen Shopping Guide & Federal Toxics Reform

Least-toxic fun in the sun + call to action on federal toxics reform.

I love summer.

I love reading novels at the beach, vibrant green everywhere you look, heading home from work with hours of daylight left, cold beers with condensation running down the bottle, the drama (and relief!) of afternoon thunderstorms, sundresses and flip flops, tomatoes and basil, cucumber salads, Locopops…...sigh, I could go on.

There’s a lot I don’t love about it too: mosquitoes love me, my dog sheds, and the contrast between air conditioned offices and the baking street is jarring to my system. Not to mention sunscreen, ugh, slimy sloppy oily sunscreen that I am forced to apply and reapply before doing anything fun. The only thing worse than sunscreen? Sunburns, which I get every summer like clockwork on those first couple trips to the beach or the pool.

As if to add insult to injury, a lot of the sunscreen on the market is either A) full of toxic chemicals that mess with my hormones, B) only protecting me from the UVB rays that cause sunburns and not the UVA rays that also cause cancer, or C) both.

There’s a great shopper’s guide to the best sunscreens put out by Environmental Working Group that gives you the best ranked products, as well as the short list of sunscreen ingredients to avoid - most notably oxybenzone (it’s a nasty hormone disrupting chemical) and the added insect repellent pesticide DEET (because you need to reapply sunscreen way more often than you need to reapply DEET….and you don’t really need DEET most of the time anyway when safer alternatives will do - stay tuned for my next article for more on ticks and mosquitoes!). Meanwhile, mineral sunscreen ingredients (zinc and titanium dioxide) and avobenzene are less toxic sunscreen ingredients. Very helpful, I encourage you to check this guide out!

While we’re on the subject, are all these “shopper’s guides” pissing anyone else off? They are helpful, to be sure, but they point to a bigger problem: Why do we need shopper’s guides to avoid cancer-causing, hormone-disrupting, and otherwise bad-for-you chemicals in consumer products? Why are toxic chemicals allowed in my stuff at all, without any kind of disclaimer or warning label? Shopper’s guides help, but they’re like a little band-aid on a problem that’s really too big to shop our way out of. We’re going to have to fix the system that puts toxic chemicals in consumer products in the first place.

There’s a bill in Congress right now that could take a big bite out of this problem. The Safe Chemicals Act of 2010 would revamp the Toxic Substances Control Act, a 34-year-old law that governs the production and use of toxic chemicals in the US, influencing everything from sunscreen to baby bottles, and pesticides too. Perhaps most notable, the bill would put the burden on chemical manufacturers to prove chemicals are safe before they arrive in the marketplace and wind up in your beach bag. Here’s a PDF summary from the bill sponsor’s office, Senator Lautenberg (D-NJ), and here’s the full text of it, also PDF, and 169 pages long. So, if you’re sick of shopper’s guides, consider asking your Congressional reps to support this bill - here’s a form to send them an email, or you can call them - here’s a link for phone numbers and a sample script.

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Politics , Other posts by Billie Karel.

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Toxic-Free toxicfreenc summer sunscreen sunblock toxic takeaction TSCA toxic-free tsca

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