Fil d’Actualités

Sustainability professionals and Columbia students from varying backgrounds and degree pursuits gathered to discuss the opportunities, skills and projects in sustainability and climate.

Transcript of EWG podcast 'Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode' – Episode 43 JR Culpepper November 12, 2025 In this podcast episode, EWG President and co-Founder Ken Cook talks with Lindsay Dahl about how to regulate chemicals, protect public health and decide product safety.Dahl has worked for more than two decades in the private and public sector. She’s the author of “Cleaning House: The Fight to Rid Our Homes of Toxic Chemicals,” that discusses why environmental health has always been a bipartisan issue, despite today's polarized politics. She emphasizes the importance of holding all elected officials accountable, regardless of party, on their environmental health records.She addresses the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement, noting that Republican women joining the fight against toxic chemicals represents a continuation of decades-long grassroots organizing, not something new. She warns that voters who supported President Donald Trump based on Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA promises need to hold the administration accountable as it rolls back air quality regulations, protections from the “forever chemicals” known as PFAS and other environmental safeguards.Dahl encourages people to cut through social media disinformation to engage meaningfully with environmental health issues through their votes and advocacy.____________________________________________________________________________ Ken: Hi, it's Ken Cook and I'm having another episode and it's election day. Right now as people are heading to the polls, so many of the issues my guest has dedicated her career to are quite literally on the ballot. Questions about how we regulate chemicals, protect public health, and who gets to make decisions about the safety of products in our homes. These aren't abstract policy debates. They're kitchen table issues that will be shaped by who we vote for and who wins. Today my guest is someone who has fought hard for all these kitchen table issues, someone who's really helped shape the environmental health movement over a period of decades. She's been a leader in both the nonprofit sector and in the private sector. Her new book is called Cleaning House, the Fight to Rid Our Homes of Toxic Chemicals. She's really been through the gamut of experiences over the past 20 years as a leader of the Clean Beauty Movement, the movement to control and regulate toxic chemicals at both the state and federal levels. She's been deeply involved in developing clean beauty products and personal care products. She's been a lobbyist, an organizer, and now she's Chief Impact Officer at Ritual, a supplement brand. All of these titles point towards someone we look to for leadership in the nonprofit public health and environmental health movement, not just on the science, though. She's an amazing science translator. But really on the politics and culture as well. In fact, she has a substack called Science, politics and Culture of Wellness, which is a great read. I encourage all of you to check it out. So Lindsey Dahl, welcome to Ken Cook, is having another episode. I'm really tickled that you're here and given the people are listening to this on election day. I think it's the perfect moment to ask. How are you doing? This is what we say these days in environmental health, right? The world is fraught, to put it mildly. So how are you doing? How are you feeling about environmental health today?  Lindsay: Thanks for having me on, Ken. It's good to see you and good to be here. And the field of environmental health has never been for the faint of heart. I mean, at the end of the day, from 20 plus years ago when you and I first met and I was learning from you to now, the enemy has evolved. In the early days, it was the chemical industry and still is in many ways. But now we have different beasts to slay, so to speak, which we can talk about. Yeah. And I have a niece who just graduated from college and she graduated with a degree in sustainability and she was kind of going downtrodden into her first foray into the professional world. And I said, look, I'm gonna tell you right now. You have to be just as energized by the fight as you are energized by the times that you're winning if you wanna go into this field. So to answer your question, Ken, I'm kind of fired up like I always am and trying to stay levelheaded.  Ken: Yeah, well always fired up. That's Lindsay Dahl in my estimation. I've never known you not to be, but it is a tough time and you write about it in the book. You started off as a climate warrior and then you had a fateful meeting that you recount in the book. Your eyes were opened to environmental, health, toxic chemicals in everyday products and so forth. Say a little bit about that because I think a lot of people don't think of some of the areas where you and I work, personal care products, cleaning products (I didn't) as environmental until my colleague Jane Houlahan back in the day told me that phthalates in women's personal care products were likely the cause of the phthalates showing up in their blood.  I just thought it was a consumer issue. Talk a little bit about, oh, I don't want to say journey, but it is a journey. Say a little bit about it.  Lindsay: Yeah, I, you know, it's interesting because we're actually kind of coming full circle. So where I start the book is in the early part of my career, I'm 23, 24. I graduated from college and I had a couple short term paid internships in the environmental community working on climate change like you mentioned. I had a short resume, but you know, a lot of passion as people do when they're young. And I was interviewing for jobs and cocktailing on the side, and no one would hire me. And then finally I got a job working on what seemed like a real dud of an issue. It seemed like consumer safety, sad trombone. I was like, I want to  work on climate. I didn't realize that the issue I was about to get transported into was actually directly related to climate change because a lot of the consumer safety issues were around petrochemicals and the, you know, the enemy of big oil is married with big chemical and the trade associations that I was about to go fight, but I really, I was like this, you know, this woman who bless her, she's a great colleague of mine that I learned from over the years, but she was really trying to make the case to me as a 23-year-old, you know, about the issue of phthalates and she was talking about Anderson Cooper and how he was exposed through his makeup from being on set every night, and I was just kinda like tuned out. I'm like, I want to be one of those people who's fighting and defending the ecosystems that don't have a seat at the table. Like that was the passion of mine.  Ken: Yeah. Like pollution wasn't at the drugstore, it was coming out of a smokestack or a tailpipe, right? Lindsay: Exactly. Yeah it was an invisible threat in our rivers that the fish were sick, you know, like that's what I wanted to be... proceeding for. I started to dive into this world and I was like, I kind of remembered environmental health, and I'm like, okay, it's asbestos and mesothelioma. Lead and paint and air pollution and asthma, like that's the whole story, right? And what really kind of unfolded before me was a huge body of science, even at the time, even 20 years ago, around different types of chemicals that we now know. BPA people are familiar with, phthalates people are familiar with, but at the time no one knew like this. It sounded like a foreign language to many and what my beginning of my career, I kind of stumbled into this, you know, it was a little bit of a stretch to get people to care about these invisible ecosystems or threats.  Ken: Yeah.  Lindsay: But people certainly care about what's in their home. And once I started to connect those dots, I actually found it to be an exciting and energizing thing to work on. Because I love the idea of building true grassroots power and what more kind of politically potent thing that has real science behind it than kind of coming in through the consumer safety lens.  Ken: Yeah. Everyday life. It literally is kitchen table and kitchen counter. Bathroom counter and medicine cabinet kind of issue. One of the things that I think is so valuable about your book is you go through what it was like for you personally to try and connect to all kinds of people. Everyone from distinguished scientists like Shana Swan, who you know, made you aware of BPA and endocrine disrupting chemicals, and that science was still fairly new when you were cutting your teeth in your early twenties, but also organizing people who, you know, busy moms, how to get them engaged and involved in issues.  And you did that so very well. The sales force, the associates, I think they were called at Beauty Counter, it made me think, you know, there's a, a bit of a, maybe more than a bit of a conceit in the world of MAHA now. That this has never been organized or done before, that somehow this is a new transformational force that's unheard of and unheralded and unlike anything that came before, and that is not even remotely true.  Lindsay: That's exactly right. The field of environmental health, consumer safety, non-toxic living, whatever you wanna call it, has always been a bipartisan issue. And for those of us who have been working in this field for the last several decades, we know that it's bipartisan because we've been talking to people in all corners of the country. And at a time before there was even a reflection or the ability for social media to polarize this issue, it has been one of the best parts of my career. I remember in the Tosca days, I was in Little Rock, Arkansas and rural parts of Ohio and driving across the state of Wisconsin, and again, meeting with people. And I have always been someone, I don't care about your personal politics. I really don't. I think having different points of views is what makes us a beautiful, healthy democracy. And what I care about is getting people regardless of political background to buck these ideologies we have and to hold elected officials accountable for industries who are doing harm. And that can be any sort of toxic chemical pollution in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the products we bring into our home. So I'm not surprised at all. And you know, one of the things with the timing of my book coming out and really seeing a lot of the commentary about today's MAHA movement, it's a new term for a group of people, primarily Republican women who are just as pissed off as the rest of us and have as much of a seat at the table as anyone. So I'm not here to gate keep which political party can have a voice and have a movement around these issues. What I am here to hold people accountable to is to try to help guide people based on where there is real science, because this is an easy to complicate issue and get confused. So follow the science. Ken: a hundred percent  Lindsay: and also hold all elected officials accountable regardless of political party. So like I am in the same breath, applauding Governor Newsom for signing into law a bill that EWG and Ritual both worked on around heavy metal disclosure in prenatal vitamins. And I'm simultaneously saying how disappointed I am in him for vetoing a microplastics and PFAS bill. And that is what bucking political ideology is all about. And I think MAHA Moms, which is a new brand of a group that has been there for a long time, has the power to hold their party accountable as well in their legislatures and the cities and states where they live.  Ken: Yeah. You know, it's, it's interesting. I find that when I criticize Kennedy, some of his supporters will come back at me and say, well, I didn't see you criticizing Democrats. And I send them all the clips where we criticize Democrats. Harshly sometimes, right? So I know that's a reflexive response, but I think for the most part it's not partisan. I think in particular at the public level, it's definitely something, a set of ideas and concerns that are widely shared across partisan lines. And like you, we don't ask people when they come to a talk, are you an R or D? 'cause the R sit over there. No, no, we don't do that. And I think the real polarization is at the official party level, that's what you have to break down. That's where something won't really be transformative until you can break that down and say, Hey look, you don't get to tribally oppose or support something just because the other side is on the opposite end of the issue. You have to look at the substance of it. And I loved in your book how you talked through the challenges and the techniques and the shoe leather, the hard work, Lindsay, to listen to people, to not judge them. Even when, in this day and age, there's lots of judging going on, and how to find people where they are and bring them into the issue. Say a little bit about how you learned how to do that. I think it's a little bit of a lost art. We can now just pick our social media channels. Scream at people that are screaming the same thing we are. What are the techniques? Is it just being open and human and non-judgmental?  Lindsay: Thanks for saying that. I think I learned the hard way when I was young. I remember in college I would come home and kind of berate my parents for who they were voting for and world politics and stuff that I just did not agree with my parents on. And I learned the hard way.  Ken: Happy Thanksgiving.  Lindsay: Yeah. Welcome to raising an activist. Good job. I think, look, I learned the hard way. I would show up and have these kind of contentious arguments with my parents and I quickly learned, oh, this doesn't change people's hearts or minds. You know, it immediately puts people on the defensive and I actually kind of learned from just falling flat in any sort of changing of their worldview. And I also had really good mentors where I got to kind of tag along when, you know, they were lobbying and I got to see that they really did not judge whatever the person was sharing. Maybe it was a rural legislator and the top concern was the canning factory in their city. And I got to see, you know, my mentors actually care and put themselves in that person's shoes. And so those have been early career learnings that I found really consistently have stood the test of time is how I try to show up on social media. I also try to get people to actually have real conversations in person like we used to about these different types of complicated topics. I think the kind of like smug, elitist, dismissive responses, regardless of where you stand on issues, doesn't get you anywhere. It only just kind of feeds your base. It does not bring people to your side. And I am energized by winning. I want to get something across the finish line. I want new laws passed. I want more people to care about an issue or companies to grow that are trying to do things right. And the only way to do that is to bring people along with you. Ken: Yeah, I think that's great advice, a great observation. I feel the same way. We have found it harder and harder to do that in the policy context in DC because things are so tribal from the leadership down the signal, ascent and I will just say it, it's particularly on the Republican side. We notice it where, you know, staff members and even elected officials will tell you that they agree or they think there's a need to take action or that you have a point. But they're hearing from leadership that it's not okay to move forward because it would look like a victory for the other side. And you know, over time it's been very hard for a lot of Republican officials who are more moderate in their views to survive primaries, support legislation. And we've seen that again and again. On the other hand, the bill you mentioned that just got vetoed by Governor Newsom and several that he signed that we worked on, including ones we worked on with you, these were bipartisan, wildly, broadly bipartisan. And one theory is that because Washington's so evenly divided, it makes it hard to be bipartisan. Whereas if you have kind of a lopsided situation. In West Virginia, lopsided for Republicans and Democrats went along with a bill to finally do something about food additives. In California, Ultra Process Food Republicans joined on. We had leading co-sponsors of the legislation, co-authors of the legislation from the Republican caucus. So it's a really tricky time, but it always pays off to listen to people, to let them have their say, to take their amendments if it's possible, right? To not let the perfect be the enemy of the good as it often is.  Lindsay: Yeah. I think, you know, there's two threads I'd like to pull on there, Ken. The first of which is something that I do, I've done my whole career and I certainly do in my book, which is I kind of poke at both political parties. For example, you'll remember, I dunno, 2009, we had a bunch of people working on TOSCA reform, which is the primary statute governing the safety of chemicals used in commerce. And there was a democratic super majority at the time, similar to there's a Republican super majority now. Democrats really kind of sat on their hands because they were really trying to get trade industry, you know, buy-in and they fumbled that. And like I was very critical at the time of you had all the power to be able to really push a large piece of regulation and they fumbled that, Democrats did. And same today, you've got a Republican super majority. The issue of environmental health was used in many ways as a political chit to help get voters to put Trump in office again.  And part of that again, I am kind of excited to see, and this is where science communication and not being judgmental or gatekeeping who gets to be a part of this movement. I'm excited to see if these MAHA moms, many of whom I know personally and follow me, get fired up. And if republicans want to use environmental health as a thing that they see as a politically powerful topic, great. Then they're gonna have a lot of really pissed off constituents as they continue to roll back air pollutant regulation, PFAS, you name it. All the different things that are kind of on the chopping block, including TOSCA reform and the work that was passed in 2016. And I do believe in the power of moms in a bipartisan fashion of getting pissed about issues. And the question is, are we gonna get past the disinformation and echo chambers on social media in order to really be able to politically mobilize?  Ken: That's exactly the problem. If you voted for Trump, following the principle of MAHA and Bobby Kennedy said, the way to get the MAHA agenda accomplished was to elect Donald Trump. Then you sort of have to look at the full range of things that's happening in the Trump administration. You didn't elect Bobby, you elected Trump, and when that happened, you had some people come into EPA, Department of Energy, Interior Department, Consumer Product Safety Commission, who are going in the opposite direction of what we were hearing, at least from Kennedy during the campaign. Very much the opposite on clean air, clean water, pesticides, especially pesticides, toxic chemicals, and so forth. And Kennedy himself so far, has not made tremendous progress. Most of what he's done is in the vaccine area, in my opinion officially. He’s used the power of his bully pulpit usefully, I think, to raise concerns about food additives and a few other topics, but mostly what he's worked on as a policy matter are not the things that MAHA was expecting early on. Pesticide controls regenerative agriculture to make food healthier by regulation. That hasn't happened yet. So that accountability is, that's where kind of the rubber meets the road, holding elected officials accountable. Because the Republican position still on a lot of these issues is not very close to where MAHA’s ambitions were. Lindsay: Mm-hmm. I think there's an important learning moment for all of us, and I say this not to be disparaging of anyone, but I think a lot of people, regardless of political background, fundamentally have not understood the role that Congress plays and how it relates to our federal agencies. In its simplest form is big government versus small government, right? But when you actually start to drill down a few layers deeper, you know, there's actually a lot of people who maybe have been voting for the concept of small government because they're upset with what has happened at the federal agency level. You know, I've been widely critical regardless of administration of actions that have been taking place, both at the FDA and at the EPA. And again, that's what it means to be a good, engaged member of our democracy. But really, I think people are starting to realize, and I don't know, I don't mean to be naive, to assume that everyone's going to start to really understand this and go back to our civics class, the seventh grade, you know, our middle school class. But more people I think are starting to, at least in my world, realize oh wow, I didn't realize that the FDA or the EPA can't just do things. They can't just start to come down on industries. Congress has to pass legislation that then gets turned into rules and then the agencies implement them. And that is a fundamental disconnect that I think has shaped our politics and how we handle public health and environment. For decades now, and I think people are starting to realize that, and my hope is, and part of what I'm trying to do with my book is to try to bring people along to help understand this without it feeling like too Schoolhouse Rock-ey. Ken: Yeah. I think one of the many great things about your book is that you give people step-by-step guides and you encourage them to get involved and the way you find out what the limits of the FDA are or EPA or any other agency, like you and I in various stages of our careers figured out, the real school is that you learn from is the school of hard knocks going into these issues and these agencies and trying to get something done. And I think it's true of Democrats and Republicans too, and not to, you know, leave Democrats out of the line of fire here entirely, but I think Democrats really blew it on food and personal care products.  And as you suggested, toxics, a lot of focus on climate change when there was a super majority and Obama was in the White House first term, a lot of emphasis, of course, on healthcare reform, really important issues. But I think this was right in front of people. It was very accessible, the fact that this was in people's everyday lives. I'm all about the polar bears, but I'm also in favor of people having healthy consumer products, having the ability to shop without having to go on some app like EWG’s app and see if it's okay.  This is stuff the government should be doing and Democrats didn't really get the Kennedy agenda that he was talking about during the campaign, and it was a huge missed opportunity. Biden did great on PFAS, did only okay on pesticides. And we criticized them when they fell short. And when they did something right, we would say, good job. We do that with Trump too. That’s pretty rare. The important thing is to get your teeth into it a little bit. Find out what's really going on, what it takes. Don't just listen to what some politician says. You know, I like that people do their own research. Why would we ever want to discourage that? It's what kind of research do you do? And your book is a guide to help people think critically, not just about specific issues, but more how to figure out on specific issues you're concerned about, how to figure out who you accept is authoritative.  Lindsay: It's really hard in today's world, and that's part of the reason that I have a big take action section at the end of my book. And it's a menu. It's not a to-do list because you can't, you know, I don't expect people to take this on as their full-time job, nor should they have to. But I think there's a lot of different ways for people to have a tremendous amount of impact if you care about the issue of toxic chemical pollution. I really think that we should think about the different ways and biggest levers we have, whether that means supporting the consumer marketplace because there's been a tremendous amount of growth with companies that really care. Yes, of course, there’s always greenwashing that happens. That's not gonna change. I think in the same way we are seeing right now the effort it takes to be a savvy consumer. There's a high bar. There's also a high bar that is expected of us to be engaged in our democracy, and that means an informed electorate as the founding fathers of this country, built as a requirement for us to have a functional democracy. And I think the shift that happened in COVID, where people went from primarily getting their news from news sources, even if those news sources were skewed or biased, to really getting a lot of their breaking news, especially around the issues like science related issues or environmental health through influencers on social media. That was really the time that I started to write this book because I saw these early seeds of what I'm calling wellness wars or clean wars, whatever you want to, where we're totally losing the plot.  Like people are now, instead of getting their information about which toxic chemical hazards to be concerned about from the nonprofit community, they're getting it through the lens of wellness influencers, who sometimes overstate the science or maybe they totally get the science wrong. Or they're getting it from Sycom (I consider myself a science communicator), but Sycom influencers that are PhDs in immunology. Great, but not experts in environmental health science that are saying, don't worry about this. This is all BS, you know, chemical industry talking points, which is shocking. I think that is where we have totally started to lose the plot of this entire thing, and I don't think it's too late. I think we're at a critical window of time. The leading scientists on environmental health, they're not on social media. Like they are fighting for their funding, they're making sure they still have money to conduct the critical research we need to know how these chemicals are behaving. And so all the more reason that we do have to be savvy consumers, unfortunately, for the time being. And, we do have to be savvy consumers of information and that's really why I went analog and I wrote a book. Because this topic and the science is complicated, it requires nuance, and I really wanted to use the power of people's stories to help us realize that it's actually, yes, it does matter if an ingredient is safe in a particular product, but we're now at the point where we need to move away from ingredient wars and start to think of the entire life journey of that particular chemical. Because there are a lot of communities at the front and the very end of that chemical’s lifespan, primarily communities of color or low income communities that are disproportionately impacted by these toxic chemical exposures. So I could argue with an online influencer, which I do not engage in those comments about. Is PFAS really that toxic or toxic flame retardants though it's too small, the dose makes a poison. Guess what? Those toxic flame retardants are impacting people from Louisiana to Alaska. And I wanted to be able to tell those stories to help people realize, wait, there's a much bigger world outside of my exposure to the toxic chemical with a product in my home. Ken: No question about that. And you know, a lot of the influencers, they're scientists, they have a degree in some area, but I don't remember any of them ever showing up for any regulatory fights. I've never seen them anywhere nearby. And I think there's also a big divide between physicians, scientists who've come up through the world of medicine and drug development, and people with backgrounds more like ours, whether we're scientists or advocates, lobbyists, what have you. Dealing with regulatory toxicology because regulatory toxicology is not about science. It's about money. It's about controlling technologies, making sure they meet certain criteria. Those criteria are heavily lobbied through by the companies that make the technologies. In this case, the chemicals. And It's a very different world when you're exposed involuntarily to those things in your home, in your personal care products, in your food, than it is when you have a drug developed with far more science, not just animal studies, which sometimes is all we have for some of these chemicals and inadequate animal studies, lab studies at that, animal studies, and then a series of clinical trials. Where you have human beings taking a placebo or a medicine and seeing what happened. Well, we don't do that for toxic chemicals, and so the margin of error is enormous when you look at the regulatory framework, and I think a lot of these influencers who come from a background either in nutrition or drug development or what have you. And even medical doctors. We've been taken a task by some medical doctors for our Dirty Dozen work, but it's pretty clear they don't understand how these things are regulated and how limited the science often is, before something gets approved and put on the market, which you're eloquent about on topic after topic. I loved at the beginning of the book, you talked about how you really needed to dig in and understand the science and you didn't want to come into a hearing or even speak to a small group of lay people without digging in first and understanding the science. Say a little bit about that process, because I think that's something when we talk about doing your own research, you did your own research. Lindsay: So there's a few things. The first of which is, you know, I had learned from certainly my undergrad that peer reviewed science was the gold standard and that not all science was created equal. And so I have a high radar for BS and encourage others to as well. So I knew that it was important to look for scientific research because I was really questioning the validity of this entire field. Which I think a lot of people also come from a skeptic’s perspective. And so I really wanted to look for a few things. Peer reviewed science journals that publish peer reviewed literature have different impact scores. So trying to make sure that it was higher impact journals that have, you know, a really good reputation for some of the best peer reviewed processes to make sure that the scientific is really rigorous. There's also a lot of industry backed science within the chemical space that kind of establishes and looks for, especially when it comes to low dose exposures, those types of studies that really question or take to task traditional toxicology. I wanted to make sure that I was making sure, you know, I wasn't reading industry science and taking that in. And so what I did is I really looked for not only these key markers of peer reviewed literature, but at the time there were already several scientific consensus statements. There was enough research that scientists then came together to create a consensus around that, and that has only exploded in the last 20 years around different scientific consensus. And as a result, again, you know, today, as I call them, dismissors on social media about this issue, they’re also upholding organizations like ACOG, AAP. A lot of these, you know, medical organizations, professional organizations have statements about toxic chemicals and their impacts to public health. And so if someone like the American Academy of Pediatrics is creating a statement on toxic chemical exposures and the validity of that. It's almost like years past when we should have had, Ken: Yeah, yeah. Lindsay: Action. And so those were the things that I was really looking for when I went down this rabbit hole. And then I think the thing that is most important and is common in the nonprofit community is I was trained, time and time again, by the researchers doing a lot of this research. So, you know, Shawna Swan, Arlene Bloom, Leo Trisande, like Pete  Ken: Pete Myers? Yeah, yeah. Lindsay: Yeah they're the one, you know, in the early days it was like Phil Landrigan top, you know, expert on children and lead and like, they would take the time to train us to properly understand and then translate the science, whether it was through the lobbying that I was doing, testifying, or through communications that I was having at the grassroots level.  And I think that's one of the big things that is missing and why I really push people in my book to follow and engage with nonprofits like Environmental Working Group and others, because there are scientists on staff that are trained to translate this for consumers in a way that is responsible versus having someone who's untrained do the communication around chemical hazards for us. Ken: One hundred percent. A lot of these scientists are doing this work, obviously to protect people and to advance our understanding of how the environment and human health interact and they have been very courageous leaders in the public square, standing up alongside people like you and like me. They don't have to do that. They could just keep building their resumes, publishing more studies, but there's an awful lot of them too numerous to name. I've had a whole bunch of them on my podcast who really have done that. And then I want to underscore a point you made, which I include in talks I give now, routinely. Something we didn't have back when you were starting out at the early part of the 2000’s, right? These medical societies now that have statements on their website, some of them are shockingly candid. I'll give you an example, The Endocrine Society. I would invite anyone to look at the Endocrine Society. If you're concerned about doses that are too small to make a difference, if you think that the dose makes the poison and therefore a part per million or a part per trillion, can't possibly matter, go to the people who, for a living, look at parts per trillion hormonal activity. The people you would go to if you had any kind of endocrine related health challenge.  Researchers, practitioners, that's the endocrine society. There's 19,000 of them, and they have some of the strongest statements about toxic chemicals and about the need to be careful about not trusting industry science right on their website. Academy of Pediatrics, American Lung Association, American Heart Association.  For the most part, all of these major professional organizations in the health community have come around to understand the role of the environment in our health. We've got a ways to go, but there's an awful lot there that puts the naysayers, I think, in a shadow. I want to get into clean beauty a little bit and into Beauty Counter, and I know you've surely shared the dismay that Beauty Counter fell on such hard times. Greg has been a friend for decades. We were talking, we helped, I think with the initial criteria that they began to develop Nikolaiba on our staff and Jane Houlihan and others. We saw the potential there and then, you know, things got crossways. It's the same thing with my good friends at Juice Beauty, Karen Banky. Outside money came in, took over, and things went south, and it's women leaders. I've said that a number of conferences before clean beauty related personal care, product related. I don't think it's an accident that clean beauty became such a thing around the same time women started leading cosmetics and personal care product companies. And pioneering like Greg, right? And maybe you disagree, but say a little bit about women leadership and what it's meant and I find myself thinking that it's still, unfortunately, in a bad way, very bad way, a man's world when it comes to making some of these decisions. What’s your take on that? I know this is, might be coming out of left field, Lindsay.  Lindsay: No, I think, look. You know, both when I worked for Greg at Beauty Counter and certainly working for Kat now at Ritual, there's a reason that some of the most cutting edge mission led businesses are run by women. Over my eight years at Beautycounter had so many things that I had to bring to Greg and really hard decisions, like decisions that would cost the business money. Every single time Greg made the right call and she did it because she really believed in what she was doing. It wasn't just a marketing ploy. Beauty Counter was one of the few brands, especially when the business launched. It was really focused on natural beauty. It was not cool for the core market to be using synthetic ingredients, and our whole thing was you need to look at the safety profile regardless of source, natural or synthetic. Like these are things that were very kind of contrarian to say at the time, but it's what the science said.  Ken: That's where we were. That's where EWG was at the beginning too. I mean, the chemicals in poison oak that give you a rash are natural. Lindsay: Yeah. I think the ability to kind of hold competing or conflicting concepts in one's brain is critical for CEO’s and founders to translate that because anyone that's mission led, if you're focused on ingredient safety or sustainability or human rights, you have to be able to navigate a business where everything isn't black and white. And that's why I do think a lot of women leaders do exceptionally well for these businesses that I've been lucky enough to work for two of them. It is challenging and one of the recipes of, does conscious capitalism work? It's like something that all of us kind of grapple with. And I think how a business is structured really makes all of the difference. So Beautycounter, by the time when I left and when Greg left was profitable, was, you know, as publicly reported, over 400 million in revenue, which is wild. Like we built a really successful business. Ken: Incredible Lindsay: And when you have people take over a business, regardless of who it is, we've seen this playbook play out that don't, you know, maybe fully understand the importance of mission and the kind of complexities it takes to lead a mission-led business.  Things can go south pretty quick. I am excited for Greg that she bought the assets to that business and relaunched as Counter, which I think is pretty cool and good for her.  So, you know, happy about that. But I do think, you know, I love my work at Ritual in the sense that we get to really kind of push the supplement industry and the status quo within the supplement industry, through our clinical research and through our ingredient traceability. I think it takes a woman leader to say, I'm gonna publish the ingredient supplier names in the final place of manufacturing on our website when we start, you know, that's what Kat did. And people were like, why are you sharing your competitors all year raw materials? And she was like, we vetted them and they're great. I want other people to shop and support those businesses. That's a very cool thing.  Ken: It's a super cool thing, and I love that about your company now, and I love that about, you know, but Greg, I mean, bringing people to Washington, dozens and dozens and dozens of mostly women. I think almost entirely women would come to Washington and lobby on cosmetics reform. You know, that was a central part of the business model that Beauty Counter built. And that's unusual.  Lindsay: It is unusual. And it's also the reason that we were able to pass over 16 pieces of clean beauty legislation in 10 years at both the state and federal level. And it's entirely because we took an old, dusty sales model and saw the power, and this was Greg's vision to get people and instead of winning a new car, you won a trip to Washington DC to lobby. Ken: To lobby. Wonderful Lindsay: And we had, you know, people from all 50 states. It was really cool.  Ken: I remember encountering groups of them on the Hill lobbying, because we were up there lobbying on the same legislation often and mm-hmm It was just a breath of fresh air. Our evolution at EWG, we started off and remain an aggressive policy shop. We probably lobby as much as anyone in the environmental health community, but we've also developed this understanding, and for me it came about over a series of meetings with executives from companies like Karen Bankey was one of them. Greg was one of them.  Where it was pretty clear that people wanted to do something through the private sector that was very similar to what we were trying to do as a nonprofit at EWG. And you know, we began to work with these companies.  Mostly we had common cause and then we started our certification program in part because we thought, well the only way we're going to learn a lot more about these products, the ingredients, where they came from, their concentration, what's in fragrance was by stepping across that dividing line and starting to work with companies collaboratively and having contracts with one another and so forth to hold one another accountable. You've been treading that line for, you know, like I have for a long time, Lindsay. What are some of the strengths of it, and then what, what do you think are some of the weaknesses? Some of the things where we have to be careful? Lindsay: There isn't a single certification out there that has credibility and a team of scientists doing the rigor that you need for a certification that you don't have to pay for. So the idea that any sort of certification is like an automatic pay for play, I think is totally misguided. And it's just a fundamental misunderstanding. People could criticize EWG verified, but then they celebrate USDA organic or a different type of certification, like Made Safe or something like that. Like it doesn't make sense. So it costs money to get your product certified as a business, and you have to pay for that clean label project certification. We have to pay them to certify our products. We don't get to influence the results. And so I think it is entirely smart and okay for watchdog NGOs to start certifying bodies because there's a credibility of being a nonprofit. You're not in the corporate space, and so I think that's going to always be some sort of misconception that probably will never go away. And I feel very bullish on having both been on the NGO side of it and now being on the corporate side of it. Like there's no influence of like, oh, just give us the label. Like, no, that's not how it works. Because if anything the hyper vigilance from the certifying body is one where you know you have to maintain your integrity so you're not going to be capitulating to businesses. So I think third party certifications are incredibly important. I think it is entirely okay for nonprofits that are leaders in these different areas to be certifying bodies. And I think the way that EWG verified was both set up and the kind of evolution of it, I think is one of the reasons that I recommend it, is one of the most credible science-based certifications in my book because it's a very complicated marketplace. There's a lot of consumer apps that don't get it right. They are started by well intended tech bros as I lovingly say, and maybe they hire a toxicologist that is kind of team old science. It's really misguiding a lot of the market, whereas when you've got different certifying bodies like EWG verified, I think it's great to have the scientists that are there again, translating environmental health sciences. And I also think to your point, like your team probably learned a lot, just like I learned a lot when I went from to the corporate side of, oh wow, you cannot actually control everything. Contaminants are a real thing. But contaminants can't be just an excuse for an action. Like all of these things that I really learned going into the real formulation dirty work of like rolling up your sleeves and bringing beauty products to the market. I think your team probably also benefited by and now Skin Deep and EWG Verified is gonna be that much more sophisticated based on that certification.  Ken: No, one hundred percent. And that again, is another, I think, your transition from advocacy in Washington DC to working for Beauty Counter. You know, I often tell young folks when they come and ask for career advice, why not think about the public interest or government work if it seems like it's stable, but also look at the private sector. Because you can get things done deeper and faster in many cases, with the right company, with the right leadership, the right mission than you'll ever get done with regulation. I mean, there's no regulatory system that's gonna meet EWG verified standards or meet beauty counter standards. You are just so far above it. And yet I love that Beauty Counter was in there pushing for tougher standards for the whole field of personal care products, even though none of those new rules would affect them because they would surpass them every time. And now I see some of these certifiers or these websites or apps, and there's no sense of what information they drew upon to reach their conclusions. It's an AI system. Speaking of tech bros or tech sisters, it's just, you know, we found databases. We found the ones that said these chemicals are bad. And we conjured up a rating through an algorithm and through AI, and here it is on your phone. How convenient. It is convenient, but it might be wrong. And that's the part that has me worried now that I think we need to understand that in a perfect world, you'd have a very robust government regulatory presence and the standard setting of third party certifiers would be above that. We now have such a big gap between what the government does and what something like EWG verified or a, a great company like Beauty Counter or Juice Beauty or Attitude, you know, obviously ritual, that gap between what's legal and what's safe seems to be getting wider. What do we tell people about that, Lindsay? Lindsay: Yeah, I think, you know, we have the need to continue to push companies and push the market towards safer products, more sustainable materials, and we also need to continue while, to your point, the regulatory environment is either slowing or there's potential rollbacks to a lot of the laws we've helped pass. Even in the most perfect worlds with the strongest regulation, you're still gonna need the market to be pushing and certifying bodies to push. And so the reason I wrote a book is because I think books have the power in the same way that documentaries really do to change culture. And yes, our culture is shaped by these micro social media moments, but I really think we're smarter than that. I do think books are having a comeback for this very reason. If people are wanting to get into the nuance, which is required for us to push certifying bodies, the market and government all at the same time, and not everyone's gonna have the capacity to do all of that all the time, which is again, why it's like pick and choose from this menu at the end of the book of things you can do, everything helps.  But to your point about young people going into the workforce, one of the things I also am trying to do in this book is there's a lot of founders and CEOs of these mission led companies who really think they're doing things clean. They think they're doing things right, but they haven't hired anyone on staff that really knows this. And so the greenwashing that I see happen is really from naivete. It's not because they're malicious, it's because they just don’t know how hard it is to actually be and formulate safer products. What does it mean to actually have your own in-house band restricted substance list, rather than just relying on the contract manufacturer? Oh wait, we actually have to like test for contaminants and know that there's bad stuff in our products? You know, I'm really pushing a lot of CEO’s that ask me for advice of how to do this. The first thing I say is, you need to hire people internally that have expertise in this. So my hope is that a lot of young people that are yes I loved growing up in the nonprofit community professionally, I would do it again the same way, even today, but I do think there's a lot of space in the corporate side of things for companies that can be shaped by smart young scientists who can really help pave the way for the next future of companies.  Ken: I think that's exactly right and we encourage these companies all the time. A lot of the companies that come to us initially at least are just as you described, they're basically, it's someone with a vision that they wanna make a clean skincare product or what have you, and they have a marketing person, and then they have a contract manufacturer and that's it.  We fulfill that role of doing the scientific vetting and so forth. That's why the companies come to us because they don't have the budget to hire a full-time scientist. They don't have the budget to go through all that rigmarole, and so we do some of that for them. That's one of the benefits of working with us. But you're right, that's really a structural problem across a lot of consumer product good categories, is that market driven structure. They often have small margins. They can't make a profit, they hedge at some of these things, even though their intention, as you say, is very good.  They want a clean product, they want a healthy product, they want to revolutionize a market category and they have a good idea, but it takes more than that. Good idea. You need to mind your Ps and Qs.  Lindsay: It does. I also wanna push on this point, 'cause I think it's important. Yes it does. You know, there's tight margins and a lot of these startups are trying to, you know, become profitable. However, I have been in so many conversations where this narrative of, oh, doing it right or sustainability or clean or whatever is more expensive, or it's nice to have, it's not a need to have. You know? I see. Even in the early days, how startups are allocating money without even thinking twice to throw at growth marketing for ads on Meta or expensive agency fees like that a fraction of that could actually hire an internal expert. So I've been someone that kind of calls BS on this idea within the corporate thing of oh, you have to have sustainability in the corner. It can't be integrated into the strategy. It's too expensive. That's why companies can't scale. I think it's total BS like, we're talking about one headcount when I see fully staffed marketing teams, for example. So I think part of it's also kind of challenging some of the lessons that come from MBA curriculum. Ken: Yeah, I think that's right. And there's no one who could challenge it better than Lindsey Dahl, who comes from an advocacy background and switched over to the private sector with all her integrity intact. And her book is Cleaning House. The fight to rid our homes of toxic chemicals. And if you rid your homes of toxic chemicals and follow her advice in her book, you'll rid your body and your kids' bodies and your neighbor's bodies from these toxic chemicals too. Lindsay, it is just really wonderful to spend some time with you. Congratulations on the book and also on your Substack, which is entitled Science, Politics, and Culture of Wellness. It's also a great read. I'm really, really grateful for your advocacy over the years. You've contributed so much to making public policy, regulatory policy better. It's a constant fight, but you've also contributed to bringing some incredibly important companies forward and advancing them to do the work that we need done in the marketplace, even when policy isn't following. So thank you so much.  Lindsay: Thank you so much for having me on and I'm honored that you enjoyed the book. You're someone that I've learned from, from the early days of my career and I've learned so much from the EWG team over the years as well. And just thank you. It means the world to me and I think it's, you know, cleaning houses, I always joke, I'm not gonna tell anyone to clean their house. It's really a metaphor. We have to clean house of both our governments, companies, and our hearts and minds to let go of some of this dogmatic thinking in order to actually win, which I'm confident we can do.  Ken: And we have no choice. We have to win because losing on this is losing our health and losing the planet. And, so far as I know, those are the most important things we have to offer. Lindsay: That's right.  Thank you to Lindsay Dahl for joining us today, and thank you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links to take a deeper dive into today's discussion. Make sure to follow our show on Instagram @kencookspodcast, and if you're interested in learning more about EWG and I hope you are, head on over to ewg.org or check out the EWG Instagram account @environmentalworkinggroup. If this episode resonated with you or you think someone you know would benefit from it, send it along. The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community. Today's episode was produced by the remarkable Beth Row and Mary Kelly. Our show's theme music is courtesy of Moby. Thank you Moby. And thank you again for listening, and if you haven't already, go out and vote.  Areas of Focus Toxic Chemicals Press Contact JR Culpepper jr.culpepper@ewg.org (202) 779-9990 November 12, 2025

Meet Lisa Sachs—a lawyer who specializes in how public and private investment can help achieve environmental, social and economic goals.

Archaeologists and local First Nations groups have uncovered early evidence that reshapes our historical understanding of high-altitude human occupation and mobility.

Columbia and Climate School representatives share their goals for this year's global climate summit in Brazil.