We’re speaking, of course, of the stuff called Triclosan. It’s present in most soaps and toothpastes and possibly other personal care products, even soaps that aren’t loudly proclaiming their antibacterial properties.

Funny thing is, the marketing of antibacterial soap, dish soap, hand-sanitizers would have people believe that soap alone is no longer enough - and this is a convenient but definite lie, preying upon people’s fears of sickness and the desire to keep their families healthy. It also exploits the ignorance that most people have of how prevalent use of Triclosan will actually speed the ability of microbes to develop resistance.

The main property of any kind of soap is to give water the power to pick up grease and dirt. The slipperiness of soapy water allows us to wash microbes off our hands and bodies and down the drain, where we can stop worrying about them. Killing microbes is only necessary if you’re a surgeon.

(Ongoing research on allergies even hints it is healthy to be occasionally exposed to some relatively-harmless bacteria, training our body to react to those instead of developing more inconvenient allergic reactions to pollen, dust mites and dander.)

More reasons to give “anti-bacterial” products a miss:

Producing Triclosan on the large scale we do now not only takes resources but produces pollution that includes dioxin-like compounds being released into the environment - chlorinated Triclosan falls under this category. Dioxins are nasty business, and all living organisms suffer from exposure to these cancer-causing substances.

In addition: You can now file Triclosan as an endocrine-disruptor (another one to add to the list we’re exposed to everyday in perfumes, cosmetics, pesticides, certain plastics and so on). Kind of important if you happen to be an animal whose body is regulated by hormones! Germ fighter works as endocrine disrupter

WIKIpedia: Triclosan, Soap, Endocrine_disruptor, Dioxins

Worldwatch Institute: Soap

BlueGreenPlanet’s Links are slowly but surely being expanded all the time. I want to highlight Climate Crisis Coalition’s blog whose News category is a wonderful archive of climate related stories - I wish I could find the RSS feed!

Link: Climate Crisis Coalition News

And here’s another link to a sobering story actually on CNN (sustainability - no longer a subject confined to treehugging websites!): Report: Humans stripping away earth’s resources

Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets’ worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends, the WWF conservation group said on Tuesday.

It would be wonderful if environmentalists, politicians, economists and urban planners could talk with one another more - but unfortunately it doesn’t seem so in most parts of the world. The affluence and conspicuous consumption of the First World, alas, is held as the ideal that the rest of the world must try to achieve - and no one is thinking of the large-scale consequences and the sustainability of this pursuit. By no means should anyone advocate that the Third World should continue suffering squalid conditions and exploitation by the more affluent countries - but it is within the power of the more fortunate to question the exploitative system in which they are complicit.