KALPECH LATHIGRA/NB PICTURES for TIME Elizabeth Salter-Green detoxified her lifestyle when she decided to have Florence, now almost 1 year old, and cleared her cupboards of chemical cleaners and disinfectants

Posted Sunday, July 20, 2003; 16.11BS
In October 2000, Salter-Green underwent a fat-cell test, in which a sample of her body fat was analyzed for the presence of 14 different toxic chemicals. The results shocked her. Salter-Green's fat showed above-normal levels of DDT and PCBS, organic pollutants that began to be phased out in the 1970s because of their toxicity; lindane, a possibly carcinogenic insecticide that's been outlawed in several European countries, but not in the U.K.; and a cocktail of other insecticides, fungicides and industrial chemicals.

Concerned about the presence of these chemicals in her body during pregnancy, Salter-Green decided to make a change. Heavy-duty cleaners and disinfectants were out. Dry cleaning was stopped because of chemicals used in the process, particularly the solvent perchloroethylene, a possible human carcinogen with suspected links to neurological and reproductive problems. And Florence plays mostly with wooden toys because some plastic ones are made with phthalates, which are suspected of interfering with the normal functioning of the hormonal system. Salter-Green had a second fat-cell test last July, three weeks before Florence was born. It showed her contaminant levels were back within the average range. "I was motivated from a professional point of view as well as a personal one," she says. "Half the time I don't know if I'm doing the right thing in buying what I buy and doing what I do. It gets so much more personal when you have kids."

Household chemicals are about as personal as modern science gets. We are surrounded by hundreds of them every day — they're in our furnishings, our cosmetics, our vinyl floor tiles and plastic baby bottles — but most of us rarely think about them. We breathe them, we eat them, we absorb them through our skin. Are they too much of a good thing?

"We have a great deal of sympathy for confused consumers who are being frightened into believing that their health and our environment are being threatened by chemicals," says Tim Edgar, deputy director of the European Council for Plasticizers and Intermediates (ECPI), a Brussels-based trade association. He cites phthalates — the world's most widely used plasticizer, which helps soften the flexible plastics in car interiors, medical tubes and, yes, toys — as a case in point. Because of their loose molecular structure, some phthalate particles migrate over time. So it is possible that they could end up in the home environment. But Edgar argues that the amounts are "minuscule, and in many cases so low as to be immeasurable. The problem is that studies infer a public health risk without indicating whether the levels found actually pose any risk."

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