Green Bath and Body Works Soap

January 5, 2009 By Leave a Comment

organic soap

    When we lather our body with our favorite soap, do we know how many chemical ingredients in the soap that gets in contact with our skin and may enter our body through our skin’s pores? These are some of the ingredients used in making commercially bought soaps:
    -Coco Diethanol Amide
    -Sodium lauryl ether sulfate
    -Sodium silicate
    -Sodium tripolyphosphate
    -Caustic potash
    -Ethylene diamine tetra acetic acid
    -Sodium phosphate
    -Benzalkonium chloride
    -Glycerine
    -Carboxyl methy cellulose
    -Triethanol amine
    These are only some of the chemicals that are used in making soaps. They are needed to give the soap the quality of a soap: hard, produces bubbles and can clean oil and dirt in our body. If we use a soap that has added qualities such as a moisturizing soap or a soap that has a scent, then more chemicals are added in those soaps.
    Most of the chemicals found in our bath soaps are not harmful but they are still chemicals. They enter our body through our skin. When they enter our body, they become toxins that need to get out either through perspiration or peeing. When they don’t get out and they accumulate, they will cause illness including cancer.
    Good news is that today there are a lot of stores that are selling organic eco-friendly bath soaps. These soaps may be expensive but they are not made from chemicals. The ingredients are all natural meaning they are sourced from nature.  Using organic bath soaps helps in greening our planet because thsee soaps are not manufactured with chemicals in the factories that use up a lot of energy.
    When we use handmade soaps and organic soaps, we can help in reducing the air pollution that the factories of popular bath soaps emit in their factories. Besides, organic soaps are really good to out skin. They don’t cause skin irritation and dryness. THey can smell really good too when they are added with natural oils such as lavender and rosemary.
Filed Under: Conservation, Energy Saving, Everyday Green, Green Homes, Green Tips, Pollution, Toxic Wastes, Water Conservation, Water Resources Tagged With: ,

Green Hair Shampoo

December 29, 2008 By Leave a Comment

natural shampoo

    Have you ever thought about what our ancestors used as hair shampoo when there were still no factories and no electricity? When my grandmother was still alive, she used a natural hair cleanser: gugo. Gugo is a Tagalog word for this brown thing that looks like very small branches. I remember when I was a child, my grandmother used to use gugo on my hair. I can’t remember where she got it.
    I am looking at the back of the plastic bottle of my hair shampoo. It’s a popular brand name of hair shampoo that I bought in the grocery and these are the ingredients: Sodium Laureth Sulfide, Sodium Lauril Sulfate, Methylchloroisothiazolinone, Sodium Benzoate, Glycol Distearate, Guar Hydroxypropyltrimonium and a lot more listed.
    I didn’t know I put that long list of chemicals on my hair everyday whenever I shapoo. Maybe I should get back to the natural hair shampoo. There are some people who use mayonnaise and avocado instead of conditioners and their hair are really shiny and soft. My roommate in College use beer to soften her hair. It didn’t smell nice but it did look healthy though.
    Come to think of it, using the bounty of our earth to clean our hair is not a bad idea. Here in the Philippines, “lauat” is a very popular herb for treatment of hair loss and dry hair. Green hair shampoo saves a lot of plastic bottle packaging and not to mention that toxins and chemicals that are produced that are harmful to the environment and to our own health.
    Maybe it’s time to go back to the basics. I regret I didn’t ask my grandmother where she get her gugo.
Filed Under: Conservation, Energy Saving, Everyday Green, Green Homes, Green Tips, Pollution, Toxic Wastes, Water Conservation, Water Resources Tagged With: , ,

Pesticides and Water

December 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment

pineapple plantation
I came across this news that 2 of Davao’s watersheds are found to be contaminated with pesticides. They are the Talamo-Lapidas and Panigan Tamugan watersheds. These are 2 dams where the people of Davao get their tap water from.

Davao prides itself as a big exporter of fruits. It has huge tracts of pineapple, mango, papaya and banana plantations. The fruit export industry in the city gives a lot of jobs to the locals and big money for the government in the form of taxes.

But there is a negative effect to these developments. The study reports that the pesticides that were found in the watersheds are from the use of pesticides in the fruit plantations.

The pesticides are dissolved in rain water and seeped down to the ground water which runs off to the watersheds. What’s worse is that they found out that the pesticides content in the watersheds contain chemicals banned by the government.

What can we do with the pesticides? If the fruit growers in Davao will not use pesticides, can they still produce export-quality fruits? But if they continue to use pesticides, how many years before the water resources in Davao become completely contaminated with pesticides?

We need to take care of our environment mainly because if we don’t, then our health is at stake. This is happening already. Just consider how many people in the 1900’s died of cancer?

It is only now that people die left and right because of cancer. One reason is that today, there are more chemicals that we put into our bodies everyday. Today almost everything that we get in contact with has chemicals.

One of them may be coming out of our faucets or showers. Pesticides and water contamination are two big problems that we need to find solutions for. Now.

Filed Under: Conservation, Green Homes, Pollution, Toxic Wastes, Water Resources Tagged With: ,

Red Lead Paint: Environmental and Health Hazard

November 19, 2008 By Leave a Comment


It’s surprising to know that there are still people who are looking for a Red Lead paint here in the Philippines. It is a paint that is used to coat galvanized sheets and iron pipes to prevent rust.

The reason why it is surprising is because lead paint is already banned in the US for years now. Here, there are still a lot of people who don’t know that lead is toxic and can pose serious danger to our health.

The lead content in the red lead paint goes into the air making it an air pollution. When it is inhaled, the lead is easily absorbed by our bodies. Very young children who are exposed to lead are in for more danger because they have a small amount of blood. Even a small amount of lead can poison their blood.

The lead content in red lead paint can also get into our bodies of water. The lead content of water pipes that are painted with red lead paint seep into the water that goes directly to our faucets. That is why you seldom see people drinking from their faucets here in Manila.

Lead and lead pain is toxic. We should not use red lead paint. It is already banned. If there are hardware stores that still sell old stock of red lead paint, you should inform them that they are toxic and can lead to poisoning and other bad health effects.

DON’T USE RED LEAD PAINT.

Filed Under: Pollution, Toxic Wastes, Transportation Tagged With: ,

Shopping the green way

November 17, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Yearly there are tons and tons of plastic bags that go to the open dump sites in the Philippines. Most of them are used shopping bags from Manila’s groceries, supermarkets and department stores. Plastic bags are non-biodegradable trash. When they go to the dump sites, they cannot be recycled or converted into another form just like the paper or the intestines of the fish.

How many plastic bags can one factory produce in one minute? One thousand? Ten thousand? We keep on producing plastic bags, we use it once or twice and then we throw them all away? Where do they go when we are finished with them?

Aside from the dump sites, others go to our seas. They trap the fishes and make it harder for them to breathe under the water.

What shall we do with the used plastic bags that will remain plastic bags in our dump sites forever? There is nothing else to do but to slowly turn to other kinds of materials for our shopping bags. We can use brown paper bags. We can use the rattan basket our lolos and lolas used when they were doing their marketing. There are chains of supermarkets in Manila that are already selling “green” bags which are made from recyclable non-plastic materials. I bought one from the chain nearest my place the first time I did my shopping here. I’ve been using this “green” bag ever since.

Shopping demands responsibility not only in our finances but also in our environment-consciousness. Little things like reducing our use of plastic shopping bags can mean a big acres of land without plastic wastes hundreds of years from now. No one is too small to contribute to our earth.

Filed Under: Non-biodegradable Waste, Pollution Tagged With: ,
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