What happens when a mother and lawyer decides to protect her children’s health from everyday toxins and become an eco-activist? Major companies start taking notice.
Lori Popkewitz Alper is the founder of GroovyGreenLivin, a website devoted to living a greener, healthier lifestyle, with an emphasis on foods and non-toxic home products. With appearances on ABC World News and The Weather Channel, as well as writing for The Huffington Post and Mom’s Clean Air Force, Alper has been on a mission to spread the word about eco-friendly living for over a decade.
Burnt out from the stressful lifestyle of being a lawyer, Alper decided to start focusing on taking care of herself and her family.
“I slowly shifted my focus towards creating a green and clean lifestyle and began to educate myself about chemicals and other toxins that were going into and on my body,” Alper said.
Her children were the driving force that really fueled Alper’s desire to become an eco-mom on a mission.
“A few years later, two of my children developed life threatening food allergies. My commitment to living as toxin-free as possible became even stronger as a way to gain some control over their allergies and our family health in general,” she said.
“Blogging offered a venue to share information and connect with others interested in advocating for safer products.”
Content not only to share information on what products to buy and which ones to avoid, Alper wants to create a driving change that will have major corporations remove toxins from our everyday products, so that all parents can buy items for their home without worry or fear. She has created two petitions that have gained nationwide support.
“The first petition demanded that Procter & Gamble (makers of Tide laundry detergent) strip a harmful cancer-causing chemical out of Tide Free & Gentle®,” Alper said. “Women’s Voices for the Earth (WVE) released a report, Dirty Secrets: What’s Hiding in Your Cleaning Products?, which revealed high levels of the cancer-causing chemical 1,4-dioxane hiding out in Tide® and Tide Free & Gentle®. This toxic chemical didn’t appear on the Tide product label or on the product website, so consumers had no way of knowing it was there.”
“The petition went viral. Almost 80,000 people came together demanding that Procter & Gamble remove this cancer-causing chemical from their Tide Free & Gentle® laundry detergent. Finally Procter & Gamble agreed in a California court to reformulate its detergents to reduce levels of 1,4 dioxane to below 25 parts per million,” she said.
“The second petition asked Disney to be a leader for children’s health and to stop using dangerous chemicals in their Spiderman and princess lunch boxes. A study from the Center for Health, Environment & Justice found that all the children’s lunch boxes tested contained up to 30 times the amount of toxic dust deemed safe by the federal government. Once the petition launched, over 62,000 people signed,” Alper said. “Although Disney never complied with the request, the petition did raise awareness and consumers spent extra time researching safer lunch box alternatives.”
There’s still a lot of work to do to clean up our environment from toxins, but Eco-Moms such as Lori Popkewitz Alper will most definitely be leading the way and creating a greener blueprint for concerned parents to follow to protect their children’s health.