Act Against Deadly Chemicals, Save Children

Here are a few campaigns you might be interested in taking action on today. Each action is very brief and only takes minutes!

Help Get Deadly Chemicals Out of Our Products

Congressman Bobby Rush and Senator Frank Lautenberg are trying to introduce new regulations to the Toxic Substances Control Act. If successful, their changes would create the Safe Chemicals Act of 2010. The Act would help protect consumers from poisonous products, help businesses make safer products, and generally make the things we purchase safer to use. Unfortunately, it still leaves loopholes for new products and product testing. Please click here to learn more about the bill and to ask that new chemicals and products be fully tested and regulated as well as older ones.

Say No to Conflict Minerals

Did you know that right now, genocide is taking place over the right to mine for minerals that are used to make our computers, cell phones, and other electronics? If more people knew that their gadgets were made off of blood money—often the rape of women and the death of children, or the transformation of children into child soldiers or miners who get hurt and die for these minerals on a regular basis—hopefully they would stop buying them.

Of course, it would be wonderful to simply not use these products or have access to them in the first place. Please read more about the Conflict Minerals Trade Act and ask your representative to sponsor the legislation. It would require companies to disclose where they get their products and components so we can make sure that we don’t spend our money supporting war, child exploitation, and death.

Say No to Blood Chocolate

Remember that children are also used as slaves in Africa to pick cocoa beans for many companies, including Nestle and Hershey. More than a quarter of a million kids are forced to labor in harsh conditions, where they are beaten and imprisoned as slave workers to simply make our candy bars. Please think about information like this when shopping for candy. You can also take action against this heinous practice here and here.

Tell the World’s Largest Pesticide Corporation to Stop Giving Babies Birth Defects

I was shocked to learn today that kids conceived between the months of April and June have an increased risk of birth defects, such as spina bifida, a cleft palate, or Down Syndrome, because of the exposure Americans have to the deadly pesticide atrazine during the planting months. Please click here to learn more about atrazine and to write a letter to the editor of your local paper asking Sygenta, the largest seller of the deadly pesticide, to start using safer products.