I just entered my bottled water’s label into Environmental Working Group’s database for Project Bottled Water. They are going to study where bottled water comes from, how it’s processed, and if it’s really worth the expense — but they need your help and a few minutes of your time.

Grab the nearest bottle and go here to enter in its label information: http://www.ewg.org/issues/bottledwater/

This is part of the Environmental Working Group’s larger project to investigate drinking water, which they do in addition to many other environmental issues.

What does this have to do with diapers? It doesn’t take much to connect many diapering choices to environmental toxins. I’m interested to see how we will end up stepping away from the industrial age choices like buying our drinking water in plastic bottles and covering babies bottoms with super absorbent polymers. It is all related. Once the inevitability of embracing renewable resources really dawns, diapering will again mean cloth diapering.

Eventually, it is obvious to me, we will start to see serious questioning of plastics . It won’t just be a matter of endocrine disruptors , precocious puberty, and banning of phthalates.

At what point do we say that we need all of the petro-chemical products we can get to stuff into the tanks of our SUVs? At what point do we face up to the health hazards of, for example, Super Absorbent Polymers next to our precious babies’ thinnest skin? When will we realize the importance of using renewable resources to deal with predictably reoccurring necessities like babies’ elimination?

Well, not yet. But, I am glad to see the beginnings of questioning plastics as part of the (not quite yet) mainstream conversation on the role of petro-chemicals in our lives.