What’s in your medicine cabinet right now? If you’re like most of us, it’s a good bet that you can make a major move in the green direction by cleaning it all out and starting over again.
Unfortunately, the contents of conventional medicine cabinets contribute significantly to world pollution—specifically dubbed PPCP pollution, for “pharmaceuticals and personal care products.” Our frequent use of nanoparticles and chemical pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics and steroid hormones (cortisones), has serious side effects on our health and also on wildlife and the environment.
Fortunately, we now have the option of choosing remedies for common ailments that are both effective and kind to our bodies and our planet.
Reducing Your Remedies
Green living in general asks us to be mindful of our intake of chemical substances and to reduce their use unless the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages. It is often best for our health to stay organic and natural, and it is best for the environment to reduce the amount of pollutants created in the manufacture, packaging, transport, use, and disposal of these items.
The contents of a chemical-laden medicine cabinet can be especially harmful. As these products wash off our bodies or leave through our digestive waste process, they go down the drain and into rivers, streams, and open water. They don’t just disappear—PPCPs are key environmental contaminants.
Although the sheer number of different ingredients has made isolating the effects difficult, synthetic fragrances from personal care products, for instance, have been found in marine and freshwater habitats, where they accumulate in fish and invertebrates.1
Baby Vitamins
There are some people in the green movement who believe in the value of giving babies a health boost with vitamin and mineral liquid supplements. I have found that such supplementation is generally not needed in the first year because babies receive almost everything they need through breast milk and fortified infant formulas.
I say “almost everything” because I do believe that vitamin D supplementation is often necessary—not because breast milk is lacking in this vitamin, but because the sun-exposure habits of both moms and babies have changed, cutting down on our natural supply. Vitamin D has important preventive capabilities that make it a necessary component of good health.
Thermometer Disposal
Old rectal and oral thermometers contain mercury that should never be let loose in the local environment. Immediately replace these in your medicine cabinet with a new digital one. Call your waste management center for direction on proper disposal of the old mercury one. It should not be placed in the household garbage where it will end up contaminating a landfill.
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