My daughter is glaring at me. I have told her that nail polish, like TV and fast food, might be considered "normal," but is banned in our house. She is working on her best pre-teen "I hate mom" look, something I have grown accustomed to. Mood swings, self-consciousness, and a general feeling of mortification at everything I do or say have become commonplace in our home. Our doctor tells me that -- based on her development -- my tween will have her period within the year. Except she isn't a tween; she is only nine.

She is not alone. All her friends in Grade 4 are "budding." The mothers gather in groups, whispering, comparing notes, bewildered that our daughters are going through such a huge hormonal change at least three years earlier than any of us did. An eternity of time in child-years. Three years that should be spent hating boys, and running amok in disheveled groups. Instead, they're talking about periods, body odor, and going through the horror of buying their first bras. At nine.

And those are just the social implications. The Breast Cancer Fund website says early-onset puberty in girls is heavily linked to the global breast cancer epidemic.

Of course we had heard of this happening, you know, down in Latin America. But we represent the best in B.C. holistic childrearing; our children have been raised on organic snacks, and non-GMO grains. They were refused TV, and brought to expensive Montessori pre-schools. We are young, fit, healthy and educated, so how could this be happening to our children?

Our kids as guinea pigs

North America has become a great chemical experiment and our children are the guinea pigs. By the time we tuck them into bed at night, they have spent the day in contact with a cornucopia of toxins, in combinations that no scientist has ever studied. Our carpets are off-gassing, air fresheners are nerve-deadening, and our shampoos are potentially altering fetal development. According to recent studies by Heather Stapleton and the Boston University School of Public Health, even our babies are crawling in a sea of toxic dust-bunnies that can lead to cancer and infertility.

What can we do? As consumers, we don't have the right to know what is in our cars, homes and children's toys that is making us sick. Want to know if your child can get cancer from her water bottle? Better break out your science degree, if the toxins are listed at all. Unlike European countries, which force manufacturers to fully disclose toxic content in plain language, Canada has no labelling requirements for most consumer goods. Canadian companies are allowed to protect their "trade secrets" even at the cost of human health.

What is that cost? Up to $9 billion per year are spent dealing with respiratory diseases, cardiovascular illness, congenital affliction and cancer associated with mostly preventable adverse environmental exposures. That's the finding of a 2007 study entitled The Environmental Burden of Disease in Canada produced by Simon Fraser University. And that doesn't take into account things like dropping sperm counts, and early-onset puberty, for which it would be hard to estimate a cost.

Even though we know we are poisoning our environment and ourselves through a dangerous addiction to consumerism, most of us continue to feel unable to control what is happening to the planet. Ineffectual Kyoto accords, green initiatives (like hybrid cars) that only the rich can afford, along with a recent study from Wal-Mart Canada that showed that 79 per cent of Canadians choose price over the environment when it comes to buying products -- these all inspire the general feeling that going green may be going the way of the dinosaur during hard economic times.

Perhaps our apathy about buying green stems from our skepticism about green claims that we cannot check. A study put out in March by BBMG (a socially conscious marketing agency) found a 23 per cent "green trust gap" in U.S. consumers.

But what if we could check the ingredients of many of the products we use every day? What if we had the ability to control what kinds of chemicals were being manufactured and used in the world around us? Sound impossible?

Not entirely. The rights you do not have as a consumer, you wield in the workforce. Canadians have -- right now -- real power to change our environment through labour laws that have existed since the mid-'90s, and are arguably the strongest environmental laws in the country.

More importantly, a number of ordinary people are already quietly doing just that. This is the first in a five-part series that looks at how we can control what is happening in our environment, and how a new breed of eco-warrior is emerging from what some might find and unlikely source, the labour unions.

What are manufacturers trying to hide?

According to the Cancer Smart 3.0 Consumer Guide, put out by Toxin Free Canada (formerly the Labour Environmental Alliance), toxins break down into three main categories: carcinogens, reproductive toxins and endocrine disruptors.

In plain language, carcinogens are substances that cause cancer by altering or damaging the cell's DNA: a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms. We continuously make copies of our DNA; the quality and integrity of those copies determine our health.

Asbestos and vinyl chloride (predominantly used in the production of PVC) are examples of carcinogens that have been effectively reduced in consumer and workplace components. But industrial and household cleaners, pesticides, insecticides, and pet-flea control are just some of the products that still contain "safe" (according to industry standards) amounts of carcinogens.