ECHOES AND UPDATES

Ecofraud: Tide, Fab, and other detergents now offer little boxes of their product instead of the large family size, justifying it with fraudulent eco-babble. Tide claims this to be better for the environment, and Fab says "This [48 oz] package requires less energy to produce and deliver." Very strictly speaking, that is not an outright lie: it just fails to state that still less energy would be required to produce and deliver thimble-sized packages. Volume is proportional to the 3^rd power of a characteristic dimension (such as height), surface to the 2^nd; the ratio is therefore propor-tional to a characteristic dimension, so that the bigger the volume, the bigger the contents per packaging¾every housewife knows that bigger eggs have more egg per unit shell, and bigger oranges have more orange per unit peel. All these would-be-green frauds do is waste more funds and energy on unnecessary packaging. The real reason, of course, is to raise the price of the product per unit volume, which they conceal behind advertising fashionable green garbage.

Hehehe Dept.: The Campaign against Alar by NRDC, EPA, CBS, Meryl Streep and other obstructionists has become so dis-credited that even Eliot Marshal, Science's most anti-nuclear, anti-defense and anti-industry gossip writer, authored an article "A is for Apple, Alar . . . and Alarmist?" (10/4/91). And the flap over dioxin turned out so disastrous that the EPA has ordered a new study for its risk assessment ("US government orders new look at dioxin," Nature, 8/29/91, p. 753). Finally, the EPA's grandstanding campaign against asbestos has now been deflated by a report com-missioned by the EPA. The report finds that "there does not seem to be sufficient justification on grounds of risk to the health of general occupants for arbitrarily removing asbestos containing materials from well maintained buildings" and that in general the fear of asbestos fibers is exaggerated. The report "Asbestos in Public and Commercial Buildings" is available free from Health Effects Institute¾Asbestos Research, 141 Portland St. #7100, Cambridge, MA 02139.