Slime and the Slimers

“There’s no Elmer’s Glue to be found anywhere on Oahu,” my eleven-year-old granddaughter announced dramatically as we got into the car at Honolulu airport last Sunday. Still groggy from the ten-hour flight across so many time zones and with my ears still stopped up, I thought I had misheard her. Asking for some explanation, I got a very rapid paced explanation. Every sixth grader on the island is making slime, a concoction composed of Elmer’s Glue, cornstarch, and some secret ingredients known only to very aware eleven-year-olds and which I’ve already forgotten. The run on glue was so substantial that as soon as word got out of the arrival of a new shipment, someone texted the location to her friends who texted it to their friends and in no time that store, too, found its shelves of glue stripped bare.

Fads like this are nothing new. What makes them spread so quickly and completely is the kids’ use of the Internet. And sure enough, within days of our arrival the Wall Street Journal described the slime phenomenon. There are even enterprising youngsters making money out of sharing instructions for making it and using Instagram to purvey already confected slime.

inre run on Elmers Glue....

Years ago there was a local weatherman named Louie Allen.

He was on TV and always had a ..it eating grin, and would end his forecast with something akin the ‘Italian salute’ that was famous in my youth. (bringing your right arm with a clenched fist and slapping your inner forearm with your left hand)

Anyway, one evening he was ending up his broadcast and mentioned a ‘toilet paper shortage’.

Sure enough, in a couple of days you couldn’t find a roll of TP in the DC area......

Guess that was as good as a Nelson Rating to see who was watching who.....

Borax is no more toxic than table salt, thus, as with using dry ice to kill rates underground, it can be expected to be made the subject of regulation to protect people who know how to use the Internet for social media but will not do a simply search on the proper use if it.

Basic Slime

½ cup of craft glue
1½ cup of warm water
Food coloring (optional)
1 tablespoon borax powder - http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Slime

All of the studies that showed evidence of possible hormone disruption in animals either used ridiculously high doses of borax (many grams delivered intravenously), or they conflated borax with boric acid, which is NOT the same stuff.

Borax (sodium tetraborate) is used in the process of making boric acid, but there is a tremendous chemical difference between the two. Many of the studies used to demonstrate the alleged danger of borax often used boric acid instead, or were ambiguous about which was used.

Boric acid is toxic at far lower doses than borax, so any study that isn’t clear about which of the two is used for the data should not be considered credible. (This includes the EWG data.)

Borax can be toxic at the very high doses used in animal studies. It has this effect at high doses is because it is essentially an overdose of the element boron, which is a nutrient required for hormone regulation in small quantities. Iron, zinc and calcium are required by the body too, but an overdose of any of these will also send you to the hospital!

However, adults could never possibly ingest anything even close to the amount of borax required to do harm—unless they worked unprotected for years in a borax mine or packaging factory. (However, you will want to keep your small children out of the borax, just as you would keep them away from the chewable vitamins.)..

In sum, borax is wholly natural and has no inherently toxic ingredients. It doesn’t cause cancer, accumulate in the body or in nature, or absorb through the skin.

Because the dose makes the poison, borax is not harmful to the body or the environment with normal usage any more than salt or baking soda is. In fact, the largest borax (borate) mine in the world—found in Boron, California—is considered to be one of the most ecologically sound and environmentally sustainable mines in the United States.

https://www.smallfootprintfamily.com/is-borax-toxic

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