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My friend loves whales and I love sewing. The mother-to-be received the plush cetaceans with delight, but as I’d worked, my own satisfaction waned.
Most children’s toys have a limited lifespan. Kids grow up; toys get lost. Yet the polyester and spandex fibers in the whales’ fabric and stuffing would last for decades, centuries, even millennia. Polyester is spun from polyethylene plastic, the same stuff used in water and soda bottles; while spandex is made, in part, of polyurethane, the main ingredient in memory foam mattresses. Petroleum-based textiles don’t readily biodegrade like wool or cotton — instead, they break down into ever-smaller bits of plastic. Textiles are a major source of microplastic pollution. According to a June study, we inhale about a credit card’s worth of floating plastic fibers each week.
I imagined polyester filaments wafting into the newborn’s lungs or washing down the drain and making their way to the ocean, where they’d wind up ingested by creatures as small as krill and as huge as humpbacks.
I resolved to make a new, better, improved set of plush whales — ones that would be plastic-free, and entirely home compostable. All I had to do was source 100% cotton fabric, stuff it with cotton and kapok — a natural fiber from the seedpod of a rainforest tree — and embroider baby-safe eyes with cotton thread. All the scraps would be sent to my backyard compost pile, and slowly transform into soil for my organic garden.
It sounded simple.
Soft, fluffy and full of plastic
The author, with additional polyester-based whale iterations, slowly going mad.
A stuffed animal must be, above all, huggable. And, given that I was making whales, they needed to be blue. I looked for biodegradable fabric that was both blue and appropriately fluffy.
German teddy bear fabric, made of cotton and Angora goat hair, was an attractive option, but it ran $150 per yard. Every other suitably furry cotton fabric I could find had some form of plastic in it. That lovely, stroke-able organic cotton velour? Five percent polyester. That wooly cotton “sherpa” fabric? Twenty percent polyester. At last, I found something that seemed too good to be true — a fuzzy, baby blue, 100% cotton fabric. I ordered a yard, waited for it to arrive, and began to cut and sew.
Except something was off. As I worked, the fabric’s fibers stretched and snapped in a most un-cotton-like manner. Perplexed, I took a lighter and singed a piece of scrap. Instead of burning into ash, as cotton does, it melted. I wrote to the fabric vendor and received bad news: the bolt had been mislabeled. It was 5% spandex by weight.
It was too late to reverse course. My friend’s baby arrived in April, and while the mostly plastic-free whale was graciously welcomed, I wasn’t about to let the fossil fuel industry declare victory. Armed with my new knowledge, I got busy making a truly compostable toy. Or so I thought.
Huggable hazards
A year after my experiment, I spoke with sustainability expert Alden Wicker to understand where I’d gone wrong. Wicker is the author of “To Dye For,” an investigation into the almost entirely unregulated world of synthetic chemicals in fashion.
My first mistake, Wicker told me, was assuming that the fabric’s label offered a full picture of everything that had gone into making it. “A fabric that is correctly labeled as 100% cotton actually almost always has dyes and finishes added to it,” she said. “The dye and finishes on a fabric can be up to 8% of the weight of the fabric depending on what they are and what they're doing.”
Wicker gave the example of washable wool. In this process, wool fibers are treated with chlorine gas and then coated in a petroleum-derived resin. Epichlorohydrin, used in the manufacture of this resin, is classified as a probable carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Over time, this coating flakes off, making its way into air, water and household dust.
Even OEKO-TEX fabrics — certified to a high standard for environmental and human safety — can contain synthetic chemicals, Wicker explained, albeit at levels below what’s considered hazardous. “You don't want those in your organic garden,” Wicker said.
The pervasiveness of synthetic chemicals in textiles leaves fashion designers and crafters like me with few options. “If you wanted a petrochemical-free, all-natural fiber,” Wicker said, “you would have to go find an undyed, unbleached cotton potentially, or a very, very minimally processed, locally raised wool.”
The problem here was availability. As far as I can find, there’s no such thing as a teddy-bear-style fabric that’s 100% wool. And as for the naturally colorful, no-dye-needed cotton that Wicker recommended, it was gorgeous, but not suitably blue or fluffy.
Dyeing of frustration
The almost plastic-free whale, sporting a baby blue back made of 5% spandex. The blue fabric had another drawback: ripping into shreds under an embroidery needle — hence the vestigial eyes.
The whales that ended it all. Plastic-free, but not petrochemical-free. The author left for grad school before she got around to sewing on the whales’ glass eyes.
Back in the summer of 2022, I thought I’d found a fix. After days spent trawling fabric websites, I’d found something that seemed to fit the bill — a shaggy, teal blue, 100% organic cotton fabric, sporting the more or less reasonable price tag of $40 per yard.
Except there was a hitch. The sole company that sold the fabric no longer offered it, after their textile mill had raised its prices. I raced to order what might have been the last few yards left on the planet from a local fabric store in Montana.
After much sewing, stuffing and stabbed fingers, I finally had what I assumed to be a truly compost-safe whale, plastic-free from his German glass eyes to his Korean cotton corduroy belly. With a small mountain of fabric leftover, I began sewing whales big and small, planning to sell them for some pocket change. All the while, my compost filled up with fluffy blue scraps and fraying bits of corduroy. I felt, if not virtuous, at least a bit smug. Take that, Big Oil.
Until I began to wonder about the fabric’s lovely teal hue. The color came from a dye and I had absolutely no idea if that dye was safe for babies or gardens. At first, I reasoned that the dye was such a tiny component of the fabric that it couldn’t do much harm. But the more I read, the more my assumptions unraveled.
“Almost all dyes, unless specifically stated otherwise, are petrochemical dyes that are made from fossil fuels, and that are synthetic, and you just don't want those in your compost,” Wicker said.
Synthetic dyes are poorly biodegradable, can sicken textile workers and pollute local waterways and are linked to health harms including skin conditions and cancer. On top of these risks, toxic heavy metals such as lead and cadmium can be added to dyes to make their colors more vivid, Wicker said.
If I really wanted a blue whale, Wicker said, the safest option would likely have been to use natural indigo, a pigment derived from one of several plant species.
A year ago, I’d come to the same conclusion — and finally thrown in the towel. Dyeing with indigo is a long, messy, odiferous process. Factoring in the costs of materials and labor, indigo dyeing would have pushed the price point for a single small whale to more than $100. I’d wanted to sew a few cute cetaceans on the side, not turn into a one-woman textile factory.
When individual action is not enough
I went into this process expecting to learn more about sewing: how to make a pattern, how to stitch on a curve, how to use a four-inch long doll needle to embroider eyes (ouch). Instead, the lessons I learned were of the skin-crawling kind.
The chemical industry has infiltrated every corner of our lives, transforming even the most innocent items into potential hazards to our health. Until governments better regulate the 350,000 synthetic chemicals currently in use around the world, we consumers are left to muddle along in a world of cancer-linked food packaging and hormone-disrupting houses.
Long after I myself have turned into compost, my whale experiments will linger on in one form or another. A sprinkle of microplastics. An ooze of questionable dye. A legacy that no one would want to leave behind.
The talk was on environmental medicine and elaborated five pearls of advice about how to protect your immune system from common substances that can poison it. It was originally titled “Take the Lid off your Coffee Cup” – and that was about as punchy as the content got.
Why, then, would it be censored? Was the coffee lid advice too hot for TV? The key points of my talk seemed innocuous enough:
- Certain chemicals in your immediate environment can damage your immune system.
- Some are worse than we thought or worse than we were told.
- There are steps you can take to avoid these chemicals as an individual and even to help shift how these chemicals are used on a community-level.
It’s more about what I didn’t say than what I did that triggered TED’s censorship radar. If you read between the lines in my TEDx talk you’ll get the message, which I didn’t explicitly articulate for good reason: The federal regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect U.S. citizens from the chemicals I mentioned are doing anything but that.
The truth hurts (almost as much as environmental chemicals)
While I never explicitly mention the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, or the National Toxicology Program, the implicit comparison to European chemical regulatory activity intimates how feeble the theater of safety is in the U.S. I highlighted a new public health recommendation in Europe regarding the toxicity of BPA (a chemical that frequently shows up in plastics) to human health. The European Food Safety Authority (aka EFSA) has always taken a more cautious stance toward BPA than the FDA, but in a recent draft opinion that reviewed a large body of BPA studies conducted between 2013 and 2018, EFSA lowered the “tolerable daily intake” of BPA by 100,000 times. About a month after I gave my talk EFSA revised the new tolerable daily intake by five-fold (now to 20,000 times lower than their 2015 recommendation). The numerical edit amounts to a negligible difference in reality as complying with either of the new recommendations means getting plastics out of food and beverage storage and production completely.
If U.S. federal regulators didn’t already have egg on their faces, they certainly do now. EFSA’s draft opinion comes on the heels of a multi-million dollar investigation in the U.S. called CLARITY-BPA that combined the efforts of the FDA, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program to settle a longstanding dispute in BPA toxicology research. For most of the near decade over which the investigation was conducted, the independent researchers involved in CLARITY reported that the FDA was cooking the books on the studies for which they were responsible and willfully misleading the public about the safety of BPA.
Plastics are poisoning your immune system
So why is TED protecting the interests of the FDA and chemical manufacturers like Dow Chemical, Bayer Material Science, Sunoco Chemicals, SABIC Innovative Plastics and Hexion Inc (to name a few…)? Shady investors? Conflicts of interest? Maybe they’re there, maybe they’re not. I don’t want to follow the breadcrumbs back far enough to find out.
What I do want is for your immune system to work the way that it’s supposed to: To protect you from cancers and viruses and not attack your own tissues and cause chronic diseases. A functioning immune system is your birthright, but you were born into a rigged game and the people whose job it is to protect you are in on it, too. I’m not here to take TED down, and ultimately I still have respect for almost everybody involved. I just wish they’d stop supporting the guys who rigged the game.
Protect yourself from plastics
The author's now-censored talk was titled, “Take the Lid off your Coffee Cup."
Credit: Brian Yurasits/Unsplash
The good news is, now I’m actually mad. Things happen in environmental medicine. The bad guys come for your colleagues and friends. You get the message, time after time, that speaking up will hurt you more than it will help anyone else. Once in the 90s my mom received an implicit death-threat (an unmarked envelope filled with photos of me playing) while she was working on a public health initiative to get cigarettes out of public indoor spaces in Colorado. These people are ruthless, so actually mad is where I need to be right now, both to mount the energy to push forward and to keep from spooking when they come for me. The alternative is to cower and watch generations suffer at the hands of these disease-mongers.
I’m in ally gathering mode now, and my promise to you, dear reader, is that I will teach you how to protect yourself so that you don’t have to rely on the systems that are failing you. There’s one thing you can do for me if you feel like you’re in support of this cause: For the rest of the day, look at where plastics show up in your life (especially around your food) and visualize an alternate solution. What would it look like and feel like in your hands? Get the image in your head and keep it there for 30 seconds. Then think about puppies! (It’s a long story, but it actually works).
And to my censors: Here’s an idea worth spreading! If you’re going to choose to be a pawn, at least have the presence of mind to know which side of the chessboard you’re standing on.
A version of this article originally ran on the Body Logic substack, and is republished here with permission.
See the full length TEDx talk — which was subsequently banned — given in Ibiza, Spain, in March 2023 below.
In order to receive the alert, residents had to preregister for the city’s opt-in emergency alert system or check the social media of local government agencies. With these limitations, it’s unlikely that everyone received the message in time. Those that don’t speak English often have to rely on direct translations from the social platform, or hope the alert service translates correctly.
The video above documents the sulfur dioxide leak, as well as a chemical fire in May that resulted in a death and an electrocution death in February.
Marathon has a long history in Texas City. The records used to evaluate violations issued from the Environmental Protection Agency or Texas Commision on Environmental Quality in Texas City can be found here. Violations related to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, for Marathon’s Galveston Bay Refinery can be found here.
The timeline below provides more details about each individual event.