Reduce. Reuse. Rethink.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Tuesday is recycling day in my neck of the woods.
Every household puts out a blue bin for recycling and therein lie a million stories.
If my neighbors knew what can be gleaned from their recycling bins:
Where they shop. What they eat. How they spend.
They'd stop. Dead men tell no tales but recycling bins speak volumes.
Here's the family that drinks non-BgH milk from plastic bottles.
The couple who eat organic beans from cans lined with BPA.
The beer drinkers.
The drinker who stopped.
The self-proclaimed sustainable eater whose bin overflows with packaging from processed foods.
The health-minded young family whose bin sits next to their "Warning. Chemically treated" yard sign.
Who still gets a newspaper. Or two.
Who contributes to the Jewish home for the elderly.
Who clips "Boxtops for education". Who doesn't.
Most remarkable, how the new Trader Joe's has colonized our neighborhood.
From now on, my junk mail is going into a brown paper bag before it hits the bin. The rest of my recyclables -- frankly, I feel smug, although to someone else, no doubt, its a whole different story.

Now they tell us

Image via Wikipedia

In 1998, I wrote:
Kids & Pesticides = 700% more leukemia

We can't print this," said my editor at the Star Tribune, "There are jobs at stake in the lawn care industry."

There were lives at stake.
How many have been hurt in the last 12 years? How many lost? The article ran in CityPages. And the pesticides went on.
Pesticides are just one of tens of thousands of toxic chemicals doing us harm. Poisoning us.
Tomorrow the President's Cancer Panel ("The Mount Everest of medical mainstream" releases a report singing that same tune.
Who will listen? Will anything change?
Of course, industry and their mouthpieces like the American Council on Science and Health will throw everything they've got at this.
But the evidence is in.
Babies are polluted in the womb.