Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families

Find Out Which Brands are Leading on PFCs (Photo credit: Kim Howell Photography) About fifteen years ago, I remember marveling at a pair of khakis being sold at Old Navy as “stain and water resistant.” How cool, I thought, I can be impervious to rain and pizza sauce forever! I think I bought three pair […]

So what happens when powerful women (and men), who also happen to be actors, get involved in the issue of safer chemicals? Twitter responds.

It’s no secret that Congress is having a hard time accomplishing things recently. Budgets. Nominees. Funding the government. If you can name it, it’s probably not getting done. But here’s a thing this Congress can get done…

Photo Credit: Don O’brien Pepsi’s 2013 challenge In the 1970’s the Pepsi Challenge was all the rage. The soda maker’s ad campaign took on competitor Coca Cola directly with person-on-the-street taste testing, highlighting of course only those tasters who chose the company’s products over Coke’s. But now it looks like Pepsi has lost a real […]

It’s no secret that most people don’t like ironing. It takes time, you have to schlep the ironing board across the house, and the minute you put on your pressed shirt, it seems to magically wrinkle again. But ironing is a small hassle if the trade-off means wearing a shirt that was treated with formaldehyde […]

It’s that time of year. Fruit flies, mosquitoes and other summer-time pests seem to take over our yards. When I went to home for the fourth of July, I provided a tasty feast for northern Wisconsin’s mosquitoes. When I returned back to D.C. my kitchen is slowing being taken over by fruit flies. And on […]

I’ll be honest, if I’m talking to a store manager, it’s likely because I’m really upset about something minor that just happened.
Being mischarged for something, a disgruntled employee or something else that is small in the overall grand scheme of things.

But as we launched our new Mind the Store campaign, asking retailers to get tough on toxic chemicals, I’ve been presented with the opportunity to talk to store managers about something big. Something that really matters, and it feels good.

I gave birth to two fabulous, healthy little girls in the last 8 years and found out the hard way that common everyday household products contain harsh, synthetic ingredients that in many cases, are not tested for safety. So for my family’s sake I have decided that I MUST be a catalyst for change.

It was exactly four years ago today that the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition launched, with a declaration of independence from toxic chemicals. Now, when we take a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come in the pursuit of a world with less toxic chemicals, it’s amazing to see all that we’ve accomplished together. […]