All those green products I buy?
Take Pigment Green 7, the commonest shade of green used in plastics and paper. It is an organic pigment but contains chlorine, some forms of which can cause cancer and birth defects. Another popular shade, Pigment Green 36, includes potentially hazardous bromide atoms as well as chlorine; while inorganic Pigment Green 50 is a noxious cocktail of cobalt, titanium, nickel and zinc oxide.
Green even has a toxic history. Some early green paints were so corrosive that they burnt into canvas, paper and wood. Many popular 18th- and 19th-century green wallpapers and paints were made with arsenic, sometimes with fatal consequences. One of those paints, Scheele’s Green, invented in Sweden in the 1770s, is thought by some historians to have killed Napoleon Bonaparte in 1821, when lethal arsenic fumes were released from the rotting green and gold wallpaper in his damp cell on the island of Saint Helena.
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“Pigment Green 7…contains chlorine, some forms of which can cause cancer and birth defects.” Chlorine was also a poison gas deployed during WWI, and is a major consitutuent of table salt!
“…inorganic Pigment Green 50 is a noxious cocktail of cobalt, titanium, nickel and zinc oxide.”
Cobalt: one element in the lethal compound insidiously known as Vitamin B12
Titanium: a substance conspiratorially incorporated into high quality hip replacements
Nickel: the prime constituent of the nefarious Loonie
Zinc Oxide: a pernicious nutrtional supplement found in breakfast serious, being itself composed of zinc, the barely concealed core of modern US pennies, and oxygen, so corrosive that it rusts steel in damp environments–with fatal consequences to marine and automobile safety!
“nutritional supplement found in breakfast cereal”