Pesticides in your toothpaste

Posted 8/21/12

As the end of the New York State legislative session draws near, environmental groups in Albany are pushing to have triclosan banned from most products sold in the state.

The New York State League …

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Pesticides in your toothpaste

Posted

As the end of the New York State legislative session draws near, environmental groups in Albany are pushing to have triclosan banned from most products sold in the state.

The New York State League of Conservation Voters (NYLCV) is one such group. According to its website, the presence of triclosan, which was first registered as a pesticide in 1969, has been found in New York waters, and it “impairs muscle function in both animals and humans, including heart muscle.”

So what is it, and how did it get into our soaps and toothpaste?

Triclosan is a pesticide that also kills bacteria. For decades now, American consumers have been taken with the idea that it is best to try to kill all of the bacteria we come into contact with. So, manufacturers put triclosan into soaps, toothpaste and many other personal-care and cleaning products.

More recently, triclosan has been the subject of a lot of testing, just about all of which shows that humans and the environment would be better off without it. A post on the website Beyond Pesticides (tinyurl.com/zdzpgmj) says, “Studies have increasingly linked triclosan (and its chemical cousin triclocarban), to a range of adverse health and environmental effects from skin irritation, endocrine disruption, bacterial and compounded antibiotic resistance, to the contamination of water and its negative impact on fragile aquatic ecosystems.”

For some time, there was a consensus that humans should routinely combat all bacteria with chemicals, but recently that has been changing rapidly. Add that to the fact that triclosan is currently showing up in lakes and rivers, and it’s not surprising that there is a growing movement to get it out of many products.

Lawmakers in Minnesota passed legislation in May 2014 that will ban the use of triclosan in personal-care products beginning in January 2017. That move came after some manufacturers voluntarily began removing it from their products.

Proctor and Gamble, one of the largest international manufacturers of personal-care products, has this post on its website: “Although triclosan is known to be safe through numerous studies and regulatory reviews, there are ongoing discussions about how effective it is for reducing bacteria compared to regular soap. Due to our limited use of the ingredient, we have decided to eliminate triclosan from our products. We have eliminated triclosan from more than 99% of the products where it was used and have an exit plan for the few remaining uses.”

In June 2015, the European Chemicals Agency announced that the use of triclosan in personal-care products would be phased out, saying at the time, “No safe use could be demonstrated for the proposed use of triclosan.”

However, not all manufacturers are on board with the idea of a ban, and Marcia Bystryn, president of NYLCV, told the television show “Capital Tonight” that there was some resistance from one particular industry (but did not specify what that industry was). But NYLCV hopes to overcome that.

In May 2015, the Food and Drug Administration denied a citizen’s petition to ban triclosan across the country, but the trend seems to be that it will soon be eliminated from personal-care products in the United States. That’s a ray of hope for those of us who believe that chemical interventionism by humans frequently causes more problems, in the way of ecological imbalances and toxic consequences, than it solves. And it also shows how persistent grassroots pressure by consumers can sometimes accomplish goals even without government intervention.

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