Copier paper danger

How could any com­mon item in the age of com­put­ers and print­outs cause me to beware? I was unsus­pect­ing as I stood before my printer col­lat­ing the papers for the paper clip. Nor­mally, I might have sat down with the papers on the table before me, but I was in a hurry. It would prob­a­bly have been the paper clip I put in my mouth to give me more use of my two hands. How­ever, I put the small cor­ner of the copy paper — my mid­dle page — between my lips and made room for its inser­tion. Came time to include the paper, it wouldn’t come — instead, it “glued” its chem­i­cals to the damp lip and stuck there! Removal took away a layer of skin!

The pain trig­gered a line of thought I couldn’t have pre­dicted. Copy paper is every where. I’ve known crawl­ing infants and tod­dlers who crave paper — chew­ing away the cor­ners of their favorite book. What if they had put copy paper in their mouth? Not only the lin­ing of the mouth would be harmed, but the chem­i­cals in the paper we just take for granted as safe — what more harm might they cause ingested?

I lis­ten to radio — some­times in the mid­dle of the night from other coun­tries like the BBC. Do you remem­ber how night clothes for chil­dren were required in the USA to have a fire retar­dant on them? I made my chil­dren their night clothes to avoid the chem­i­cal, but it was hard find­ing any­thing with a children’s print that was free of the chem­i­cal. Now I heard on radio that nurs­ing mother’s milk con­tains fire retar­dant. Not only will the child get it in mom’s milk, but also in the night clothes he is wearing.

Are we too trust­ing of our envi­ron­ment; the man made devices and coat­ings “to pro­tect us from harm” added with gov­ern­ment approval, which we take with­out question?

Another pro­tec­tor or preser­v­a­tive found in com­mon items we use is formalde­hyde. It isn’t on cot­ton fab­ric, but if you walk the isles of a fab­ric store and feel spaced out — you may be amongst the poly­esters on which it resides. Clean­ing liq­uids, foam insu­la­tion, and on new fur­ni­ture have formalde­hyde in the fab­ric and in the foam cush­ions. Some­one with aller­gies to it might find sit­ting on it, body heat “soak­ing” it through the skin can cause a myr­iad of reac­tions from spaced out to joint pain.

Why is it there? Well, for one thing it pre­vents dust mites from tak­ing up res­i­dence, but so does rou­tine vac­u­um­ing or using Ozone-2 or Ozone-3 in the air. Put a sim­ple machine that spews super oxy­gen air in the room when not in use, and gone are the dust mites, spi­ders, flies, yeast and molds.

Per­haps we should be more dis­cern­ing in our environment.

Posted by Gary Henery on Aug 29 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.