fibergarden

Sorry I’m still not posting about fibery stuff, but I have to get this one out there. Mattel is recalling 92 (YES, you read it right, I count 92 product numbers on their recall page–horrific!!!!!) children’s and baby fisher price toys that have lead paint on them. Here’s a link to the CPSC page about it. Most of them are Dora and Sesame Street characters, and all of them seem to be aimed at kids under 6 or so–the ones most likely to get brain damage from lead poisoning.

I’m on the CPSC mailing list for recalls, and every week it seems that I receive 2-3 emails of toys or kids’ jewelry that contains or is painted with lead paints. Remember the lead pvc lunch box scandal of two years ago? The recent Thomas the train recalls? Why can’t these companies have quality control? You know they would turn the stuff away if a shipload arrived in the USA painted green instead of orange. Why can’t they attempt to keep their customers safe? It makes me sick to think about it. I paid $2 apiece for good-quality lead testing swabs to check my house. Why can’t these companies simply test samples of this stuff before they make billions selling them to our children? I think that corporate lead testing needs to be a law to protect our kids. It’s simple and can’t cost more than a few bucks per item. Enough is enough.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I believe that PVC is an evil toxic product and that much of it is tainted with lead (no real science behind it yet, but from a little reading I’ve done I’ve come to this conclusion…apparently lead is often used as a stabilizer in vinyl–remember warnings not to drink from the hose? That’s one of the reasons!) Beware and be suspicious of all PVC products, and all items that come from places where manufacturing standards are questionable. Think of those poor people who painted all that stuff, probably not wearing any protective gear, and then going home to spread the lead onto their kids. No doubt the recall won’t protect them. Blech.

Off to throw away anything suspicious while little A isn’t watching, and to pray that someday our corporations act responsibly, sigh.

Sadly, I have to add this bit, from today’s Reuters news, 8/13:
China recall toy factory boss hangs himself IMO, despite the lead painted toys being his fault, and that he does bear responsibility for the safety of his workers and their families, ultimately the burden for this horrible crime rests elsewhere. If they had simply done routine and cheap testing (as I suggested above) when the toys left the factory/entered the US, the whole problem would have been avoided. At the heart of it, corporate execs in charge of quality control at Mattel and Fisher Price are responsible for this mess. So sad…

A rant on how artificiallly colored mulch is now yet another symptom of a failing, sick society. Two recent mulch ‘incidents’:

1. Craig went to Home Depot to buy some bags of soil amendments and mulch. After much searching, he discovers that the only bagged mulch they sell is all DYED. Choices being Ronald McDonald Red and Black. They no longer offer natural brown or natural reddish-brown cedar mulch.

2. A friend who is an organically minded, natural living enthusiast purchased 3 yards of mulch, bulk, delivered to her house this week. Her goal was to mulch her gardens without the waste produced by all those bags. She consulted with me a few times–here’s a loose interpretation of one of our conversations:
S: They said it’s triple ground
me: that’s good, that means it won’t have a lot of stringy bits in it.
S: They’re delivering it today
me:fast service–good, what kind of mulch is it?
S: I don’t know, they said it’s black
me: natural black or is it dyed?
S: OH NO! (click, hangs up phone)
S: (calling back 3 minutes later) It’s dyed black aargh!
Of course, the mulch company had already charged her credit card, loaded the truck and were on their way to her house, so she spread it around, probably grumbling quietly to herself the whole time.

My point in this post is this: What the heck is wrong with society that we need to add color to mulch? What is the source of the pigment? Is it water based or will it leach out and eventually poison the groundwater some more and kill all the plants around it with yet more petro chemicals? Are we so vain that we need ‘designer’ mulches to match our designer lifestyles? What is so wrong with the plants being the important element in our gardens? Mulch is meant for weed suppression and moisture conservation. It is not ‘makeup’ designed to dress up lost cause landscaping. If your yard looks that bad, I promise you that orange mulch isn’t the answer to your problems, really.

IMNSHO, this is yet another symptom of a society that is really, really ill. I realize that nobody’s perfect. We all have things that we do/buy/wear/eat that are maybe not the best for us and the earth in different ways. Some of this stuff is just part of living in this society, some is unavoidable, some of it can be chalked up to the choices we make as individuals for whatever reasons. For example, I understand if you want to wear purple. It happens to be my favorite color. It takes dyes to make clothing in colors, and without some color, life would be boring. There is a long standing tradition of dyeing cloth. Food coloring is another example. My family chooses not to ingest this poison, but I realize that it is an old product that people find difficult to eliminate, or are so used to thinking is benign that they don’t realize it’s a petroleum product (yeah, really–makes you think twice, doesn’t it?). What I don’t get is why NEW products that are perfect the way they come (from nature) are adding to the list of pollutants and chemicals in a day when the effects of this stuff is so brutally obvious…terrible allergies and asthma, rampant cancer rates, global warming, trash piling up all over the planet. Honestly folks, why can’t we just put natural stuff in and on our yards? If you need something exciting, plant something that actually BLOOMS in your garden, instead of that buttload of ugly evergreen shrubs sheared into pompoms and gumdrops and cubes. And keep your nasty chemical dyes the hell out of the mulch. It really burns my britches, my eyes, and the earth. Can you just give nature a chance this one time? I beg you.