
I’m not amused at the irony anymore in seeing these stickers everywhere. Although I’m glad they are there to inform, there have to be higher standards for consumer goods.
Let’s get real. Is it always aging causing cancer and other irregularities, or is it the known carcinogens in everyday products?
What might be minuscule exposure in individual products, adds up when those chemicals are in lots of products and then get trashed. (Great innovation happening on the waste management front by the way.)
Today I returned a fancy Minolta digital camera that I was otherwise excited about unopened today because of the cancer and reproductive harm Prop 65 sticker.
Until Prop 65, which took effect in 1986 in California, is taken seriously across the country, it’s difficult for me to take cancer cure research and endless fundraisers completely seriously. Plus, Cancer should not be an industry. I’ve written this before.
Okay, “dis-ease” and public health — those are definitely multifaceted issues that have numerous solutions and ways to address them.
Yet — if causes go unaddressed, there will still be a lot of swimming upstream, and wasted resources.
Education, to accompany, must impart real world contextual knowledge — and that includes how materials actually behave and can be used safely.
At this stage of civilization there have to be higher standards for manufacturing because of public health and survival.
Just churning out polymers without any consideration of their life cycles and environmental effect isn’t going to cut it anymore. And Weaponizing atoms and molecules in general doesn’t seem like a good idea, especially in light of the post on cosmic memory from the other day.
Here’s more information from the California Office of EnvironmentalHealth Hazard Assessment on Prop 65:
https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/general-info/proposition-65-plain-language