💡 clean chemistry

Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds.

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

What’s worse is that they are an invisible menace, infiltrating our air, water, homes, and bodies. In fact, there’s now a term for the invisible world of synthetic chemistry that lives inside us: the human toxome.

All the evidence pointed to an alarming situation: synthetic clothing is loaded up with azo disperse dyes that clearly have toxic potential—but we’ve barely scratched the surface about what they could do to various body systems. And children and adults are breathing them in and ingesting them daily.

Such frightful substances would arrive centuries later, when fashion ushered in a new age of powerful fossil-fuel chemistry.

Swan put the blame squarely on “the ubiquity of insidiously harmful chemicals in the modern world” and especially “chemicals that interfere with our body’s natural hormones.” These are endocrine-disrupting chemicals. And they include a lot of fashion’s favorite finishes and ingredients: lead, mercury, arsenic, phthalates, APEOs, PFAS, and bisphenol