From Climbing Mountains to Cleaning Couches: The Woman Eliminating Toxic Chemicals From Our Lives
Some challenges are worth taking on more than once. That's what Arlene Blum decided after realizing her work to reduce toxic chemicals in the home was in jeopardy.
Arlene Blum took 20 years to write her memoir, Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life. This isn’t surprising, considering her life has taken shape as a constant and gradual learning process, with very few resting moments.
As a young scientist before the age of green consumer awareness, Blum had put common household chemicals in the news when she published a paper on toxic flame retardants in kids’ pajamas in 1976. Within months, the paper led to a complete ban of the chemicals in consumer products, which made headlines and got America talking about chemicals and science.
It was only a few years after the chemicals ban that Blum quit science, focusing her time on writing, climbing mountains, and parenting. But in the early 2000s, after 26 years away from science, an itch for scientific inquiry resurfaced. She’d been independently researching flame retardants again, when she was pulled back into science and advocacy.
“When my cat got sick, I said, I think it could be the new chemical that hadn’t been around. I asked, and they measured the amount of flame retardant in my dust and my cat,” Blum said.
The results were astounding. There was no direct link of the chemicals to her cat’s hyperthyroidism, but there was definitely an extraordinarily high amount of chemicals in both the cat’s fur and the dust. At the time, hyperthyroidism in felines had already reached near-epidemic levels, a rise that began back around 1977, with no known cause.
Blum wondered if her cat’s illness had to do with the chemicals she had already studied decades earlier, and so she began her research by looking at couches and their foam. She found is that the same toxic flame-retardant chemicals once used into kids’ pajamas had worked their way into our furniture, with little to no regulation.
