In a world full of products that increasingly contain plastic and harmful toxic chemicals, figuring out how to keep our kids safe and healthy feels like it’s getting harder. How does someone even start to navigate the process?
That’s where the Mom Detective comes in. It’s a recurring “myth buster” column run by Moms Clean Air Force — a 1.5 million-member organization of parents and caregivers fighting to protect their children’s health — that untangles product labels, offers tips on toxic chemicals to avoid, demystifies environmental health studies, and provides simple steps to tackle modern parenting concerns.
“It’s important to know this stuff. It’s an important part of being a parent, a modern parent,” said Alexandra Zissu, the resident “detective” at Moms. She’s a longtime journalist who investigates the truth behind what’s in our everyday products, and she’s been digging into tough questions like these since her first kid was born 20 years ago.
The Mom Detective column comes out once a month, and anyone can submit their own personal question to be answered here.
“I’m just here answering questions in a realistic way. It’s not perfect. It’s always rooted in science,” Zissu told The Cool Down. “I don’t want to tell people just go buy this and you’re fine. I want them to understand what’s going into these products, what the issues are, and how to navigate when I’m not here to answer.”
We recently chatted with Zissu about her best healthy recs for concerned parents, as well the most surprising Mom Detective articles and what’s on her radar these days.
Biggest myths to bust
Myth 1: Where you store plastic water bottles doesn’t matter: False! Single-use plastic like what’s in most disposable water bottles is going to leach harmful microplastics no matter what — and it’s always a good idea to try to use alternatives like reusable stainless steel bottles — but where you keep these bottles may reduce the amount of leaching into your water.
One parent asked the Mom Detective what to do with a cooler of single-use plastic water bottles for her daughter’s swim team that had been sitting in her garage for a whole summer and an entire winter. She wondered, “Are plastic water bottles safe after all this? Should I throw this water out before the next swim season begins?”
Zissu’s response: “Heating plastic encourages it to leach its chemical components into whatever it’s containing, in this case the water … in your garage. Sunlight, hot liquids, heating, and microwaving are all known to break down plastic. Ditto warm environments.
“I want to leave it up to you to decide what to do with this damning information because I hate the idea of telling anyone to toss even more plastic. But also, no, I would not drink this mystery water after many months and temperature fluctuations.”
Learn more about how to protect your family from disposable water bottles here.
Myth 2: Reusable totes can do more harm to the environment than plastic bags: False! Usually, at least. A reader from Georgia wrote in after her town passed a ban on single-use plastic bags, wondering if what she’d heard in the past about reusable totes doing more harm to the environment than plastic bags was true.
Zissu explains that while “the overall takeaway is that reusable bags need to be reused,” studies do show that we need to reuse them a lot before their environmental impact offsets what it takes to produce single-use plastic bags.
Here are just a few of Zissu’s recommended next steps:
• “Use and endlessly reuse the reusables you already own. Stash them in your purse, your baby stroller, your bike basket, and your car.
• Want a new reusable bag? Ask a friend or family member for a hand-me-down or extras they aren’t reusing. Or hit a secondhand store to find new-to-you options.
• If ever you’re stuck in a store without a reusable, ask your fellow shoppers if you can have one of their bags. It might feel awkward, but since we are all drowning in our bag hoards, there could be someone grateful to unload one. Or choose paper if shopping in a store with a plastic-bag ban—then reuse it. Some stores will even offer you a cardboard box they were otherwise planning on recycling—it never hurts to ask.”
Learn more about how to get the most out of reusable grocery bags here.
And perhaps the biggest myth of all …
That “advanced recycling” is in fact recycling.
It’s a misleading practice promoted by the plastic industry that takes plastic waste and burns it as a form of “recycling.” This creates harmful air pollution, while giving the false impression that it’s solving the nation’s plastic problem.
“It’s called advanced recycling, but it’s just burning, and we all know that combustion equals air pollution,” Zissu said. “Setting plastics on fire is not recycling.”
Traditional “mechanical” recycling is what we think of when we toss a milk carton in the recycling bin and it gets reprocessed into something else. “Advanced” or “chemical” recycling puts that on hyperdrive, breaking down plastic to a much more granular level that hypothetically is then used to make other plastic products. In theory, this sounds like a good solution (especially given mechanical recycling rates hover around 5-6% of plastics generated in the U.S., according to the World Economic Forum), but what’s missing are the serious health impacts to workers and communities because of this process.
To protect families from “advanced recycling” pollution, Moms Clean Air Force hosts events and webinars to raise awareness, petitions Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency to call for the strongest possible pollution controls on plastic burning facilities, and even has created a video explainer that has been viewed more than 100,000 times on social media.
And all the hard work of exposing the harms of burning plastic is paying off: Moms reports that two of these waste-to-energy “recycling” facilities have shut down for good. Plus, a proposed facility in Pennsylvania was canceled and another in Ohio was placed on a one-year moratorium.
You can learn more about how to take action against “advanced recycling” here.
Zissu’s favorite article so far
“I think in a period of time where it feels really impossible to make change — anyone interested in anything environmental is really bumping up against some devastating stuff, rollbacks and so on and so forth — I actually think mom to mom, caregiver to caregiver, a difference can be made,” Zissu told us.
That can be big adjustments like fighting to stop “advanced recycling,” and it can be everyday adjustments like even just considering what sheets you’re sleeping on. One of Zissu’s favorite Mom Detective articles is on how to find non-toxic sheets — which you’d probably never think were harmful in the first place.
“Some of the [articles] that I do that are ‘small,’ like why would anyone care about bedding and sheets? I mean, it just hits … home: People can be really careful about plastic and know to be careful about plastic because it’s in the news, but they wouldn’t think about a finishing chemical,” which is a substance typically added to textiles to make them more durable, water-repellant, wrinkle-free, etc.
“How does a wrinkle-free sheet happen? … There’s so many things that get said to us when we’re shopping and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s cool. I’m so glad this is wrinkle free,’ but that’s mind blowing to me, because that’s the shift. That’s the Mom Detective shift: ‘How did you become wrinkle free?’ is what I want people to start thinking when they look at claims that are so great that it makes you smile,” she said.
In that case, most likely “it’s too good to be true.”
Here’s the full scoop from Zissu on nontoxic bedding.
“That one feels mind blowing to me in a quiet way that is very core Mom Detective,” she said. “The quieter columns … I would love to draw people’s attention [there], because that’s where the mind shift happens.”
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