Have you looked at ingredients in your daily use products? Teenager Ankita shares her opinion with Lakshmi Sankaran

Awareness is the key for an average Indian household for the well-
being of their family and environment. However, the accuracy of this
sentence can be checked with a quick look into one’s grocery list.
Let’s take a look at our usual habits as a consumer, and then check
the validity of the above statement.

Apart from food essentials, our grocery lists largely consist of
personal hygiene products and household cleaning products. We
ensure that we pick up the most well-known brands and best quality
products, be it shampoos, detergents, soaps, dishwashing liquids,
floor cleaner, Toilet cleaner etc.

While buying such items, one doesn’t have the awareness to check
ingredients on the label of the product for they tend to be beyond
our understanding, made up of chemical names that seem foreign to
us.
The advertisements and endorsement by
celebrities/doctors/Medical fraternity definitely is a trust factor to
believe that these products are completely effective for a person’s
use in their homes and on themselves. The ignorance/innocence
about what goes into us and to the environment definitely takes a hit
leading to our own compromise on the wellbeing of ourselves and
our environment.

These products that we use everyday contain a bunch of chemicals
like Phospates, Phthalates, SLS, SLES, Parabens, Flourides,
formaldehyde etc. which are known to cause various health effects
like Allergies, Nausea, Cancer, lung issues etc. These chemicals which

eventually end up in our bodies through the pores present on our
skin, saliva, etc. Toxins enter the body in 3 ways.
A. Ingestion B. Inhalation C. Skin Contact. From our bodies these
chemicals gets washed into our soil and water thus polluting them
and making them lifeless. These chemical cleaning products also tend
to have detrimental effects on the environment. The foam and froth
produced by soaps and detergents end up polluting our water
bodies. Lot of natural resources/fossil fuels is used in manufacturing
these chemical products which are mostly packaged in Plastic. Do
you know there are minimum 15-20 types of chemical laden
products on a day to day basis a single household person comes
across.
The problem is in our hands and so is the solution. Altering our
consumption with a conscious approach and beginning to adopt
more environmental-friendly alternatives benefiting our personal
health and hygiene is a definite step ahead for a bright future for us
and environment contributing to a clean water and soil.
An activity for readers: Please read out the ingredients of the
products you use in day to day life and research about the
ingredients used in it and its effect.
Do let us know in your comments

Ankita