Given the world we currently inhabit, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Synthetic chemicals are literally everywhere; they seem hard to name, harder to avoid, and even harder to replace. So what are we supposed to do? What choices should we make? Where do we even begin?
Some answers to these questions are simple, and some are quite complex. Some require only small changes, and some could, if taken seriously, lead to deep adjustments in our personal lives and the way we think about entire systems. Changing brands of toothpaste or throwing out the roach spray is easy. Learning how to paint our houses—and our faces—with products that won’t harm our health is a bit harder. Firing the lawn service and planting native species—an action that would improve the health of your family and your watershed—requires an even bigger shift. Getting toxins out of our food? Making our rivers clean enough to swim in? How far do you want to go?
As with any investigation into the subtleties of the human body or the natural environment, every thread is connected to every other thread. Pull one, and you tug at the whole—this is the lesson Swedes learned when they banned toxic flame retardants and saw breast cancer rates drop by a third. Such connections are everywhere. What’s the link between a light bulb and a can of tuna, for instance? It turns out that much of the mercury that ends up in the fish we eat comes from emissions from coal-fired power plants. So if you want to reduce your body’s mercury levels, you might think about switching to wind power, and convincing your neighbors to do the same. Once you learn that the packaging of greasy prepared foods contains Teflon chemicals, you have one more compelling reason to eat better. And so on.
“The hopeful part of all this is not that we have to give things up,” Russell Libby, the organic farmer in Maine, told me. “It’s that if we can make changes and address our prime exposure pathways, we can make a big difference fairly quickly. Twenty or thirty years ago, the first organic farmers were operating at a really small scale. There were a lot of failures. People would lose a crop because they didn’t yet know how to do it successfully without pesticides. By the time we got to ten years ago, there were at least some people who could grow every crop without pesticides. Now all those practices are starting to cut across into conventional agriculture.”
The paths to making similar changes with other products, Libby said, are parallel: you develop alternative technologies or product designs; and you push policy that encourages—or forces—the development of these alternatives. Until both of these things happen in tandem, we will remain stuck with what we have.
“Can an individual solve this? Only a little bit,” Libby said. “You can make decisions at a few key points in your life. You can make a difference each time you buy a car. You can have an impact on your food and your ongoing consumer purchases. We can turn the thermostat up and down, make good choices in our furniture, our toys. But the major pathways are systemic issues that have to be addressed as a country, and that’s really the challenge. When people have a severe illness, getting politically active is not the first thing that you think of. It’s all about ‘How do I get better?’ Once you’re better, often you’ve been through such a major challenge—your household finances are severely impacted, you’re trying to find a pathway back to normal—and yet that might be exactly the time when ‘normal’ might need to include the bigger system. That’s the heart of the policy challenge. We haven’t really made this a public policy discussion yet.”
So, Libby said, we need to learn to shop smarter. But we also need to vote better. Only when we do both will we decrease our exposure to toxic chemicals. Thankfully, there are pioneers out there ready to take the lead.
Wendy Gordon hardly looks like the revolutionary type. Her neat blond hair and matching coral sweater and skirt might be more suited to the produce aisle at a Whole Foods than the Maine Agricultural Trades Show. But in the push for safer consumer products, Gordon is firmly on the front lines. She grew up along the Hudson River, in Englewood, New Jersey, and Ulster Park, New York. Like anyone else coming of age in that region in the 1970s, she thought of the Hudson as a chemical sewer, all but dead because of the PCBs and other toxins dumped into it since the 1950s.
For her geology degree at Princeton, she studied a groundwater contamination case at an IBM facility in central New Jersey. She went on to get a master’s degree in environmental health sciences from Harvard’s School of Public Health. She did an internship with the Natural Resources Defense Council, and ended up staying a dozen years. She worked mostly on the staff of the Toxics Project, using scientific studies to support legal cases against polluters or changes in public policy. It was at the NRDC that Gordon learned about federal laws regulating everything from insecticides to Superfund sites—and saw just how hard it was to change the way people think about toxic chemicals.
Her focus was on the exposure of infants and toddlers to toxic pesticides found on fruits and vegetables. When she started, she noticed that most studies done on the health effects of pesticides had been conducted on healthy twenty-one-year-old males, a group that seemed to offer little insight into the heath of children under six. The vulnerability of the younger subpopulation, she realized, had never been taken into account. Armed with a series of new studies, NRDC found that pesticides that were considered safe for adults were unsafe for infants; and not long after this, the National Academy of Sciences confirmed these results.
In 1989, the NRDC crystallized these findings in a report called “Intolerable Risk,” which warned about the health risks to children from eating fruits and vegetables contaminated by agricultural chemicals. Of particular worry was the chemical daminozide, more commonly known by Uniroyal Chemical’s trade name Alar; the compound was sprayed on apple orchards so that the fruit would all ripen at the same time. In 1984 and again in 1987, the EPA had listed Alar as a probable carcinogen, and in 1986 the American Academy of Pediatrics had urged the EPA to ban it. Even before the study, six national grocery chains and nine major food processors had stopped accepting apples treated with Alar. Maine and Massachusetts banned it outright. But the NRDC study struck a chord because it made the public connect the dots between a chemical, Alar, and the potential for cancer in children who ate, of all things, applesauce.
Not long after the study was released, 60 Minutes ran a story on the report, and 40 million viewers simultaneously panicked. The outcry became so intense that Uniroyal was forced to pull the chemical off the market.
The Alar story broke full force just as Gordon was going on maternity leave, and for a young mother, the moment opened her to new ways of thinking about toxins and health. The NRDC had already begun working on ways to “detoxify our kids’ food supply,” Gordon said, but the more they pressed the idea of toxic produce as an environmental issue, the more parents seemed to tune out.
“We couldn’t get parents worked up about laws,” Gordon told me. “They just wanted to know what apples to buy.” By the time she got back to work, Gordon had decided to organize “an upset-parent population.” She and Meryl Streep, who had been an NRDC spokesperson during the Alar flap, cofounded an organization called Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet, in order to encourage consumer interest in organic food and sustainable agriculture. This led, in 1994, to the creation of a bimonthly consumer newsletter called the Green Guide, which became a website in 2002, aimed mostly at women between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five. The site became so popular that in 2007, Gordon sold the newsletter and the website to National Geographic, which launched the first issue of the magazine in the spring of 2008.
Just as Big Chemical has taken its cues from Big Tobacco, so have advocates of nontoxic consumer products taken their cues from the organic food movement: information is everything. What started out as an environmental standard, concerned with reducing the use of “toxic inputs” on farms, quickly evolved into a kind of seal of approval, a social standard. To Gordon, the “organic” label that now appears on everything from fresh lettuce to children’s cereal has created the ideal way to change consumer 'font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Charis",serif; color:black'>USDA ORGANIC seal has come to mean something beyond whether or not the farmer sprays his fields with 2,4-D. She’d like to see a similar shift on all products.
“When you’re a mom, you just don’t want to be constantly reminded of all the things that are bad for you and your babies,” Gordon said. “Nobody’s all that interested in saving the planet. All they care about is taking care of their kids. There are all these talking heads saying, ‘Yes, it’s a carcinogen [or] No, it’s not a carcinogen.’ The bad guys could tie the good guys up in endless arguments. The Green Guidestarted as me trying to be a smart mama and trying to help other people be smart mamas. We were just trying to cut through the noise to make smart choices. If you don’t know the impact of something, why not avoid it? If you’re at the store and you don’t know what’s in something, why take the risk?”
The magazine found its voice when consumers began wringing their hands over the safety of milk produced by cows treated with bovine growth hormone. Rather than join the debate, Gordon’s group published its “mother’s milk” list, simply showing parents a roster of dairies that refused to use growth hormones. It became the most popular thing the magazine had ever done.
In a column in the magazine’s inaugural issue called “Just Ask,” a mother wrote that she had read recent news stories about lead in children’s toys and wanted to know how safe it was for her twin three-year-olds to use “play” cosmetics. The magazine answered with brio, saying, “No mom wants an innocent game of dress-up to turn her children into guinea pigs for the cosmetics trade,” and recommended that she look for products with plant-based dyes and petroleum-free alternatives like beeswax, castor oil, or shea butter. Synthetic FD&C dyes and petroleum by-products are possible sources of lead, the column noted, and glitter sticks may also contain parabens and glycol ethers. It plugged the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics report on lead in lipstick and warned that nail products contain toluene, dibutyl phthalate, and formaldehyde, all three of which are on California’s list of chemicals known to cause cancer and/or reproductive disorders.
Gordon considers herself a part of the “third wave” of environmental work. The first wave, exemplified by the likes of John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, were “conservationists,” fighting to keep large parcels of land off-limits to human development. The second wave, heralded by the publication of Silent Spring and enforced with legislative breakthroughs like the formation of the EPA and the Clean Air Act, established benchmarks on industrial pollution. The third wave, Gordon says, is much more about the individual consumer, about trying to change corporate behavior not through politics, which industries control, but through consumer pressure. The key is getting consumers to think harder about what they buy.
“We can’t keep chasing the end-of-the-pipe polluter,” she said. “Waste is very expensive. We had the underlying theory that an informed consumer would make wise decisions. We’re looking much more closely at economical consumption and sustainable production. There are lots of parallels between the industrial polluter and the consumer of their products. It doesn’t take too large a group of consumers to get producers to change their products. This is much more efficient than trying to work the legislative process, which can take years.”
Indeed, as the editor of what is, ultimately, a consumer magazine, Gordon has to tread a fine line between cheering smart consumerism without cheering consumerism itself. The Green Guide calls itself “The Resource for Consuming Wisely,” which hardly sounds like a Marxist manifesto. The magazine is printed on Forest Stewardship Council certified paper, so its pulp comes from well-managed forests. Ten percent of its paper content comes from recycled postconsumer waste. Its ink has no heavy metals and is derived from soy, corn, and linseed.
Gordon knows that her audience—women of childbearing age—is a powerful group, comprising not only voters but also shoppers. And it is her bet that getting them to vote with their buying habits is the most efficient way to get companies to clean up their product lines.
“No retailer is ever going to try to fight mothers,” Gordon said. “It’s a real easy choice. It’s real easy to go shop down the street.”
This is a lesson Martin Wolf has taken to heart at Seventh Generation, and it a lesson that is even beginning to trickle down into university chemistry labs. Although few American universities currently require chemistry students to demonstrate knowledge of the health and environmental consequences of the chemicals they create, there is a burgeoning field of “green chemistry,” which seeks to reduce or eliminate the use of toxic synthetic chemicals.
“Of all the chemical products and processes currently in use, only 10 percent are benign and nontoxic; the other 90 percent have hazardous consequences,” says John Warner, the director of the world’s first green chemistry PhD program, at the University of Massachusetts–Lowell (and the coauthor, with Paul Anastas, of Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice). Of those toxic materials, Warner estimates that 25 percent could be replaced, right away, with safer alternatives.
And the other 75 percent?
“Today we do not have solutions to provide to industry,” Anastas says. “The current way we have chemistry set up does not even touch these needs. People say there’s nothing new to invent. This is a whole new area for innovation, for creativity, for cutting-edge technology. It’s a huge opportunity.”
In recent years, some industries have started to acknowledge this. In 1999, Baxter International, one of the largest makers of intravenous hospital products, agreed to stop using PVC in its products after a group of Catholic and labor union shareholders threatened to dump their shares of Baxter stock. More recently, the health care giant Kaiser Permanente, a company with $38 billion in annual revenue, put out a call for PVC-free products, and manufacturers perked up in a hurry. Kaiser now buys carpets made by Tandus, of Dalton, Georgia, which uses a nontoxic polymer called polyvinyl butyral, or PVB. It buys nontoxic intravenous bags from Baxter and gloves made with a latex substitute from Cardinal Health.
Since 1996, the EPA has been handing out Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards to companies that invent environmentally benign products. Recent winners have included the makers of soy-based toners for laser printers, formaldehyde-free plywood, and ingredients for paints that do not contain volatile organic compounds. In 2003, the award was won by William McDonough, who helped Shaw Industries, a rug-manufacturing company owned by Warren Buffett, figure out how to make carpets without the use of PVC. McDonough is something of a green-design visionary; he wants people to reimagine what it means to be a “consumer,” since everything we “consume” (except for a bit of water and food) is designed to be discarded. Changing the way products are designed, to make them both recyclable and chemically benign, will be one of the century’s great industrial challenges.
“In a world where designs are unintelligent and destructive, regulations can reduce immediate deleterious effects. But ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure,” McDonough writes in his book Cradle to Cradle. “In fact, it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an ‘acceptable’ rate. But as we shall see, good design can require no regulation at all.” McDonough’s book is printed on a substance made from PET, a nontoxic synthetic. Books, he notes, are made of a number of materials that can be toxic, including the ink and the glues used to bind them. If books were printed on PET, consumers could ship them back to the manufacturer to be melted down and made into new books. Patagonia, using a design McDonough developed, accepts old boxer shorts and long underwear for recycling into new fibers. The mailbox, in McDonough’s view, can become the new garbage can. “It means nothing has to be junked,” McDonough said. “It means life after life.”
Last year, in an effort to stem the tidal wave of discarded plastics, France put a tax on things like nonrecyclable utensils and plates, and may take similar actions on everything from televisions to refrigerators. In California, Hewlett-Packard recycles some 1.5 million pounds of electronics every month, an honorable act that nonetheless barely dents the two million tons of electronics that get dumped into American landfills every year.
DuPont is working to turn fermented corn sugar into a polymer that will replace petroleum products in paint. Cargill is making a compound from vegetable oil that may replace polyurethane foam in seat cushions. In Maine, a recent grant is helping the state’s distressed potato farmers in Aroostook County turn their crops into biodegradable plastic, a move that Mike Belliveau, one of the principals in the state’s body burden study, considers a good omen. “One advantage we have over the climate-change crowd is that the solutions to climate change require fundamental changes to the whole economy,” Belliveau told me. “At the moment, our economy is almost entirely based on the burning of fossil fuels. But our economy does not inherently require inherently dangerous chemicals. The coal, oil, and gas industries are resistant to climate-change legislation. On this issue, it’s really only the chemical industry.
“Most of the user industries,” Belliveau pointed out, “are already seeing the writing on the wall. Electronics and cosmetics industries are already looking into alternative materials. Apple and Dell are competing to see who can produce machines that are free of halogens like chlorine, bromine, and fluorine. There are probably five or ten thousand halogenated compounds out there. The DuPonts, the Dows—these companies are wedded to these compounds. If you ban one, they’ll put out five more. Most of these chemicals have never been tested for public health, and never will be, because there’s no testing required. But now leading-edge companies are saying we want to get out of halogens altogether. That’s a huge leap.”
And the truth is, just as toxins can accumulate and spread around the world, so, too, can information—and, occasionally, political action. The breast milk studies coming out of Sweden and Texas, for example, swirled around the globe and began catching the attention of lawmakers in Europe and—in some small pockets, at least—the United States. One person who took notice was a young state legislator from Maine named Hannah Pingree, who had recently been elected to represent the people living on a handful of islands off the Atlantic coast.
People in Maine tend to be self-sufficient and suspicious of “people from away.” Clothing runs to flannel shirts, wool sweaters, and Carhartt jackets. In a pub near Augusta one frozen January night, I fell into a conversation with a young state legislator with little good to say about a wealthy state to the south; he referred to it only as “Messy Two Shits.” Driving to the statehouse, I spotted a bumper sticker with a cartoon of a man pointing to a smear of lipstick on his hindquarters. These are the kinds of independent spirits Pingree represents.
Pingree grew up on an island called North Haven, a fishing community with 380 year-round residents. There is no bridge to the mainland, only a ferry that runs three times a day. There are no industrial polluters on North Haven, no chemical factories, no paper mills. She still lives there.
Around the time Sweden was banning flame retardants, Pingree began thinking about pushing the state to consider what she called “a more rational chemical policy” and to convince her fellow lawmakers to make Maine one of the first states in the country to ban the use of octa and penta. But the more she learned about toxic chemicals, the clearer it became that the issue went far beyond the banning of a couple of flame retardant chemicals.
It was about then that the body burden people called, asking her to take part. Pingree jumped at the chance.
Like Lauralee Raymond, Pingree felt sure her results would be pretty clean. She, too, was young, fit, and rural-born. She had recently gotten married and was beginning to think seriously about having a family. What was the worst that could happen? If her body turned out to be contaminated, she could use the information to push for stricter chemical regulations. But the more she thought about it, the more a creeping anxiety began doing battle with her political will. Why on earth, she wondered, did she want to learn this information? It was like visiting a palm reader: Do you really, in your heart of hearts, want to know all your hidden secrets? Nonetheless, she took a deep breath and donated samples of her blood, hair, and urine. And then she waited.
On a Sunday night in January, Pingree nervously dialed Dr. Rick Donahue, the study’s principal investigator.
The results hit her like a fist.
Here she was, in her early thirties, with the study’s second-highest levels of phthalates and mercury levels above the standard for protecting a developing fetus from “subtle but permanent brain damage.” Not only that, but she had traces of nineteen different flame retardants in her body. Nineteen.
“I was personally outraged by all this stuff,” Pingree told me. “It made me incredibly passionate about it from a policy point of view. I was very personally impacted. After I hung up the phone, I was no longer going to be a casual political supporter of a more rational chemical policy. I was now a convert who couldn’t stop talking about my results.”
The night she learned her results, Pingree sat down and drafted an email to every woman she knew.
“Hey, Ladies, I am participating in a study on toxics in the human body and was recently tested for a number of the major toxics,” she wrote. She described her high mercury levels, warned her friends that the neurotoxin was particularly dangerous for developing fetuses, and listed the fish—tuna, swordfish, king mackerel—that pregnant women ought to avoid eating. Especially for women living along the coast of Maine, contaminated seafood is a major concern.
Pingree also warned her friends about phthalates, which, she confessed, she had never heard of before the study. She had never been a big user of cosmetics, a fact she attributes to growing up with a mother who was “a big hippie.” Nonetheless, she listed the likely sources for her high phthalate exposure—perfume, nail polish, face cream, shampoo—as well as the plastics used in things like plastic water bottles and children’s toys. Check the labels on all personal care products, she recommended. If they list “fragrance,” chances are they contain phthalates. “Those you smear into your skin are obviously the worst.
“OK, I could go on and on about all the things I learned, but these things seemed like big ones for women,” she wrote. “We consume so much of this stuff without any notice. This is just the tip of the iceberg. This info is especially powerful to folks with infants, kids, and who are likely to have kids in the next few years. I tell you this because I care about you and want you and your family to be healthy. Keep in touch, Hannah.”
By now, the young legislator had become someone who could do more than write emails to her friends. At the tender age of thirty, she was now the state’s house majority leader. Suddenly, at least when it came to chemical exposure, she was in a position to make some real changes.
Over the years, the American government has come up with different methods to regulate toxic chemicals. Some have been quite effective, some less so. Many are shockingly out of date. Even the weakest are under constant pressure from industry, which sees in regulation an impediment to production and, therefore, profit. How we think about the relationship between business and the government we elect to oversee it has a great deal to do with the way we think about chemicals, our health, and our environment.
Although Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published to enormous acclaim in 1962, it wasn’t until 1976 that Congress enacted the Toxic Substances Control Act (commonly pronounced “Tosca”), giving the EPA oversight over the testing, risk assessment, and regulation of industrial chemicals. The intent was to control chemicals that present “an unreasonable risk of injury.”
Yet the policy has been badly broken from the beginning.
For starters, it grandfathered in some 62,000 chemicals already in wide commercial use. There were few questions asked, and no requirement that companies provide information about a chemical’s potential harm. Thirty years later, in 1997, the Environmental Defense Fund found that basic data was missing from 71 percent of the bestselling chemicals in the United States and that the EPA had not done even perfunctory screening, let alone in-depth toxicity reports. When the EPA did its own study, it found that only 7 percent of so-called high-production-volume chemicals had a full set of data on properties and effects. Today, 99 percent of chemicals in current use are still the ones that were grandfathered in back in 1976. And since then, the EPA has used its authority to require testing for fewer than 200 of those initial 62,000 chemicals.
For another thing, under TSCA, the burden of collecting data on a chemical’s dangers is left to the EPA, rather than the company that makes the substance. With limited government resources, of course, this work never approaches completion. Even the federal Government Accountability Office acknowledges that “the legal standards for demonstrating unreasonable risk are so high that they have generally discouraged EPA from using its authorities to ban or restrict the manufacture or use of existing chemicals.”
Finally, the EPA is hamstrung by a requirement that it not “impede unduly or create unnecessary economic barriers to technological innovation.” In other words, regulators are forbidden from acting unless they can demonstrate that restricting a chemical will benefit society more than it will hurt a business. Today, fully 85 percent of the chemicals for which companies file for EPA review contain virtually no health data. And even when companies do volunteer their research to the EPA, nine times out often they are marked “confidential.” In 1998, 40 percent of the substantial-risk notices filed by manufacturers asserted that the very identities of the chemicals were confidential. Lynn Goldman, who served as assistant administrator for toxic substances at the EPA from 1993 to 1998, told the journalist Mark Schapiro that she and her colleagues knew TSCA had no teeth. “There were thousands of chemicals out there, and we didn’t know what they were,” Goldman said. “We weren’t able to get the data, weren’t able to assess the risks, nothing.” Goldman recalled a party in Washington to commemorate TSCA’s twentieth anniversary. “Someone from the chemical industry got up to salute TSCA and said, ‘This is the perfect statute. I wish every law could be like TSCA.’ ”
So: companies like TSCA because the EPA doesn’t make them work too hard to prove a chemical’s safety. The government lives with TSCA because its own shrinking budget doesn’t allow agents the money to do their jobs effectively. Chemical regulation, in other words, has become a Catch-22: the EPA lacks the power to request data on chemicals in order to determine if they can cause harm, and it can’t make a risk assessment without these data. So no data are provided, no risk assessments are made, and chemicals keep flooding the market.
The upshot of all this is that companies want to maximize profit and are thus unlikely to broadcast that they are making chemicals or products that might be considered hazardous and, thus, attract government regulation, bad publicity, or litigation. Companies, in other words, have a clear incentive not to look for trouble. If there is no worrisome data about a chemical, there is no need to do a risk assessment. If there is no risk assessment, there is no need to report ominous findings.
Twenty years ago, as a young newspaper journalist, I used to tromp down to the local EPA office and comb through old metal cabinets full of manila files, looking for how many tons of toluene or heptachlor or heavy metals had been released into the environment by the industries around Atlanta. (This is the stuff a senior colleague called, collectively, Methyl Ethyl Badshit.) The files were only a couple years old at the time; Congress had established the Toxics Release Inventory program, known as the TRI, in 1986, just two years after the chemical disaster at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, that killed thousands of people as they slept in their homes.
Before TRI, no one—not workers, not ordinary citizens—had the right to know anything about the toxic chemicals that were pouring out of the nation’s factories. Chemical releases were considered “privileged information” or “trade secrets.” After Bhopal, some things began to change, including, it turns out, the willingness of women of childbearing age to stand up to the chemical industry. “We are not expendable,” said Rashida Bee, accepting the 2004 Goldman Environmental Prize for environmental justice work in Bhopal. “We are not flowers offered at the altar of profit and power. We are dancing flames committed to conquering darkness and to challenging those who threaten the planet and the magic and mystery of life.”
In the United States, TRI was established as part of an emergency-planning and right-to-know law that required companies to reveal which of about 650 chemicals they were releasing into the air and water, dumping into landfills, or burning in incinerators.
And what a lot they were—and are—pumping and dumping. In 2007, industries reporting to TRI claimed that they had released 4.1 billion pounds of toxic chemicals into the air and water in the past year. Since not all industries and facilities report to TRI, these numbers are surely a low estimate, especially since the Bush administration relaxed reporting regulations for smaller polluters, regulations that were reversed soon after President Obama took office.
In 2004, the numbers were similar. In that year, according to an analysis done by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, American companies, led by the chemical and paper industries, released more than 70 million pounds of recognized carcinogens into the air and water. That same year, companies released 96 million pounds of air and water emissions of chemicals linked to developmental problems such as birth defects and learning disabilities, almost 38 million pounds of chemicals linked to reproductive disorders, and more than 826 million pounds of suspected neurological toxins. And these, of course, are just the by-products of production. Many times more of these toxic chemicals went into consumer products and were sold to unsuspecting consumers—who ended up using and disposing of them with no regulation whatsoever.
It might not surprise you to learn that if you look at a map of the United States overlaid with the places that see the greatest quantity of toxic chemical releases, you’ll find them clumped in the poorest and most rural parts of the country, most of them in the South. Texas, South Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida—they all routinely rank highest for releases of carcinogens. In fact, in 2004 a quarter of all air and water releases occurred in just twenty counties, and four counties in Texas—Harris, Galveston, Brazoria, and Jefferson—ranked in the top five counties nationwide for most toxic emissions. Harris and Galveston combined for nearly 5 million pounds of releases alone, almost as much as the next eight counties combined. Two-thirds of the dioxins released came from two Dow Chemical plants in Freeport, Texas, and Plaquemine, Louisiana.
But it might surprise you to learn that the EPA has a full set of toxicity data on just 7 percent of these so-called high-volume industrial chemicals.
Ten years ago, the EPA estimated the cost of a full screening test for reproductive and developmental toxicity at about $205,000 per chemical. Chemical companies balk at this cost—despite the fact that in 2004, the chemical industry made a profit of $17 billion.
In 2006, the European Union decided to take a dramatically different approach to the regulation of toxic chemicals—though not without a fight, and not without a major push from the American chemical industry to keep things the way they’d always been. It adopted the so-called REACH legislation (for registration, evaluation, authorization, and restriction of chemical substances), which requires the registration of all chemicals produced or imported in volumes over one metric ton with the Helsinki-based European Chemicals Agency. It affects over 30,000 chemicals currently in use. Under the new law, chemicals known to cause cancer, alter genes, or affect fertility must be the first removed from the market, unless their makers can prove that they can be “adequately controlled.” Beyond assessing raw chemicals, REACH also regulates “downstream” manufacturers, forcing everyone from toy makers to manufacturers of plywood to find out and report on the chemicals in their products and what effects they have on health and the environment.
REACH also dramatically reduced the amount of information companies can consider a “trade secret” and got rid of the distinction between “grandfathered” and “new” chemicals; under the new policy, everything has to be registered. REACH also limits the use of chemicals shown to be unusually persistent, as well as those that bioaccumulate in the food chain or in people’s bodies. And companies that use these chemicals are now required to find alternatives, or at least begin researching them. The most troublesome chemicals must be registered first, but 32,000 are expected to be registered within eleven years.
Though critics of REACH complained that the new regulations would be too expensive, the European Union estimated that it would cost companies 2.3 billion euros over eleven years—about 0.04 percent of annual sales. Plus, public health analysts argued, these costs would be recouped many times over in reduced illnesses from chemical exposure—preventing 4,500 occupational cancer cases each year, for starters, and $69 billion in medical outlays over three decades. And this doesn’t even include the global markets created for nontoxic alternatives.
To give you an idea of how threatening the REACH legislation was to American chemical companies, consider this: American chemical companies, which once ran trade surpluses in Europe, now run a $28 billion deficit, a number that may well increase once American consumers can buy less toxic European goods. Europe’s GNP passed that of the United States in 2005, and the gap is growing. Europe is now the most important trading partner for every continent except Australia, and with this regulatory vision is setting standards once set by United States. At times, the diverging courses have seemed pronounced. In Europe, a crash in the market for chemicals like the phthalate DEHP convinced a major German producer, BASF, to cease production in 2005. At the same time, in the United States, ExxonMobil, the other major producer, said it was confident in “the safety of phthalates in their current applications” and would not stop making it.
Far from waiting on the sidelines to see what Europe would do with REACH, the American chemical industry, and its supporters in the Bush administration, fought hard to kill it. The tag-teaming was not surprising; a congressional report noted that the industry had given out more than $21 million in campaign contributions since the start of the 2000 election cycle, with 79 percent going to Republicans. President Bush was the top recipient. Greg Lebedev, the former chairman of the American Chemistry Council, explained how the lobbying worked in a 2004 speech. “We arranged for multiple elements of our government—the Department of Commerce, the U.S. Trade Representative, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of State—all to express the understandable reservations about this proposed rule and its trans-Atlantic implications. I only wish that we could exert so much influence every day.”
A Commerce Department memo warned that “hundreds of thousands of Americans could be thrown out of their jobs” if similar legislation were ever approved here. Secretary of State Colin Powell sent out a seven-page cable to U.S. embassies around the world, saying that REACH “could present obstacles to trade” and cost American chemical companies tens of billions in lost exports. The Bush administration dispatched emissaries to the newest E.U. members—Hungary, Poland, Estonia, and the Czech Republic, all of which were former Communist countries with much lower environmental standards than the rest of Europe—asking them not to support the plan. Robert Donkers, an E.U. official who helped oversee Europe’s chemical regulatory laws, came to the United States in 2003 to explain REACH, and was astonished at the aggressiveness of the American arm-twisting. Imagine, he said, if European companies tried as hard to intervene in American politics. “It wouldn’t be tolerated,” he said. “We wouldn’t last ten minutes.”
American public health groups, needless to say, were allowed no such influence on the Bush administration’s lobbying efforts. On November 11, 2002, more than fifty public health workers, labor unions, children’s health advocates, environmental organizations, and community groups wrote to Bush, urging the administration to stop undercutting European chemical reform. The administration’s lobbying “runs counter to the public interest and to the transparency that is critical to our democracy,” the letter said. Nearly a year later, another coalition of groups wrote Bush, requesting “that you instruct key officials within your administration to stop using federal funds to undermine this important proposed legislation, and seek ways to support progressive reform of chemicals policy that benefits public health.”
Neither group ever got a response.
Nonetheless, REACH was approved on December 13, 2006. Overnight, Europe strengthened the oversight of 32,000 chemicals in a $11 trillion market affecting 500 million consumers. And it started a wave that began moving across the Atlantic. It didn’t exactly crash in on Washington, D.C. But it did hit the coast of Maine.
When she first heard about REACH, Lauralee Raymond remembers, she thought, “Oh, my God! In the United States we are getting the leftovers. They are making two kinds of rubber ducks, one for Europe without phthalates, and one with phthalates, for us. We’re not a Third World country. How did this happen?”
Mike Belliveau, who directed the body burden study, saw the REACH legislation as an instructive lesson. Since American federal legislation has been so strongly controlled by the chemical industry, he figured, state and local health advocates would have to try new tactics. And nothing, it turns out, works better than getting people to pay attention to the chemicals contaminating their bodies.
“I’ve been doing environmental advocacy work for thirty years, both in California and here in New England, and this report got the greatest media response I’ve ever seen,” Belliveau said. “There has been a conscious shift over the last six or eight years to reframe this issue as a family health issue. If you poll on biodiversity, you get two to ten percent of people who say they are concerned. If you poll on chemicals found in food and water, you get eighty to ninety percent.”
He added, “If the first reaction of the public of a policy maker is ‘Oh, this is just another environmental issue,’ we’ll get marginalized. This is a much more populist approach. When mercury became an issue up here, we got public health people to appear before the environmental affairs committee. It wasn’t just about loons and fish, it was about newborn babies and brain damage.”
In other words, it’s all about getting women of childbearing age to start paying attention to toxic chemicals. Especially when one of these women already happens to know about her own toxic body burden—and happens to be the state speaker of the house.
The hallways outside Hannah Pingree’s office are lined with photographs of her predecessors going back 150 years. All but one are pictures of men, almost all of them bearded. To my eye, the beards, and the men wearing them, fell into three categories: Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, or John Brown. There was only one exception, Libby Mitchell, who was the first woman to hold the post, ten years ago. Hannah Pingree is the second. Suffice it to say that banning toxic chemicals was not on the agenda of most of her predecessors.
“The more I worked on these issues, the more outraged I got,” Pingree told me. “I want to have kids, I want to change my lifestyle, but the reality is, you can’t change your lifestyle enough to get rid of all this stuff. Here we have Europe banning this stuff, and in this country, the chemical industry is lobbying Congress to increase ‘safety standards’ in products like mattresses and electronics. It’s almost impossible for a very conscientious person to deal with.”
After successfully pushing through a ban on penta and octa a few years before, Pingree decided to try for an even bigger fish: deca, a flame retardant that the chemical industry has gone all out to defend. When California debated a similar bill, the chemical industry reportedly spent $10 million to kill it, and the bill failed by two votes.
But California is one place, and Maine is another. As word got around that Maine was considering the ban, dour-looking men in suits came from outside the state to attend committee hearings. The brominated flame retardant industry hired the giant public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and set to work convincing the people of Maine that its chemicals were necessary to save lives. “We can’t take a chance on fire safety,” one advertisement urged. In a statement, one manufacturer, the Chemtura Corporation, said that hundreds of studies have “concluded that DecaBDE was safe for continued use.”
“They ran twenty-seven full-page newspaper ads, they ran radio and television ads. This was an unprecedented campaign in Maine’s history,” Mike Belliveau told me. “And this was all before the bill was even voted on in committee. They were telling people that babies were going to be burning up in buildings.”
This, it turns out, did not sit well with certain Maine legislators.
“Mainers don’t like outsiders coming in and telling them what to do,” Pingree said. “This entire brominated flame retardant army started showing up. They produce this stuff by the barrel, and here they are coming and telling us why all this stuff is safe, that all these studies were false. Maine was very frustrating for them, and it’s very frustrating for outside lobbyists in general. We have very small districts, very clean elections. No one is being paid a lot to be here. As a legislator, you do not want to be seen voting for the chemical industry over a lot of young mothers.
“It was amazing, watching how much effort they put into defeating us,” Pingree added. “The brominated industry must have spent at least a million bucks on television advertising, telling people to call their legislators and vote against it. They had full-page ads in all the papers. They hired all these lobbyists. Even so, we passed it almost unanimously in the house and senate. It was one of the biggest PR campaigns I’ve seen run, and it had almost no impact.
“They really overstepped in Maine,” she remarked. “We had the firefighters on our side, and because of the industry’s ad campaign, everyone in the state knew about it. There were something like two thousand bills before the legislature that year, and all these ads brought our bill right up to the top.”
When the day came for a vote, supporters of the bill filled the chamber: pregnant women, farmers, doctors. The International Association of Fire Fighters was on board, Pingree said, because when PBDEs burn, they are highly toxic, and firemen can face acute exposure. On the other side were five people: four who worked in the chemical flame retardant industry and one man who, Pingree said, was “a burn victim who had been paid by the chemical industry to come to Maine and testify against our bill.”
In May 2007, Pingree’s bill, An Act to Protect Pregnant Women and Children from Toxic Chemicals Released into the Home, made Maine the second state in the country to ban deca, passing the law just a few months after a similar measure was approved in Washington State. The bill, which passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, banned the use of the toxic flame retardant deca in mattresses and upholstered furniture as of January 1, 2008, and phased out its use in televisions and other plastic-cased electronics by January 1, 2010. Suddenly, Hannah Pingree—“Toxic Hannah,” as she had become affectionately known—was the face of a new generation fighting toxic chemicals. After CBS News came to town to do a story on her bill, Pingree started getting calls from people all over the country; they’d ask her questions like what kind of car seat to buy for their children.
But she wasn’t done. In late February 2008, when Maine’s state legislators filed past the state capitol’s Hall of Flags, they were greeted by a giant rubber duck. This was not your ordinary rubber duck. Its head nearly touched the room’s ceiling, which is thirty feet high.
Tired of going after individual chemicals, Hannah Pingree had decided to follow the lead of Europe’s REACH legislation and pursue a broader, more comprehensive toxics policy. The bill would go far beyond the banning of individual chemicals and, instead, establish a database of several thousand chemicals of “high concern.” It would then create a list of “high-priority” chemicals that would merit immediate regulation. Importantly, the law followed the European standard of proving “exposure” rather than “risk”: if a chemical is detected in people, or in wildlife, or is made in sufficiently high volume, businesses are required to disclose its presence in their products, what the purpose of the chemical is, what the chances are that the chemical will be released, and whether there are safer alternatives available “at a comparable cost.” If reasonable alternatives are available, the state can ban the products that contain it.
The bill was supported by the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, and the Maine Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. It was opposed by the American Chemistry Council. “States are ill-equipped, under-funded, and do not have the skill set, at this time, to take on this complicated and difficult endeavor,” a spokeswoman for the industry group said.
During the hearing, Matt Prindiville, a policy analyst with the Natural Resources Council of Maine, told legislators that recent news stories about lead-contaminated toys arriving from China offered the barest glimmer of how many toxins consumers—and their children—are exposed to every day.
“Most of you may know that it’s already illegal to paint a toy with lead paint, but did you know that it’s perfectly legal to put lead into plastic toys as a stabilizer?” Prindiville said. “When we participated in toy testing, we found that the highest lead concentrations were not in painted wooden toys like Thomas the Tank Engine. They were in vinyl backpacks and lunch boxes and soft vinyl toys marketed to toddlers. And that’s just lead. We’ve known lead’s bad for kids for a long time. We took it out of gas, paint, and other products, but it’s still coming back to haunt our children. The scarier fact is that 90 percent of the chemicals in products marketed to our kids have never been adequately tested for health and safety. What’s worse is that we know some of them are linked to learning disabilities, cancer, and other health risks and that we’re finding them in our bodies and in our children’s bodies.”
Prindiville held up a pair of rubber ducks: one made of PVC plastic containing phthalates, the other made of natural latex. “Which one do you want your toddler sucking on?” he asked. “My daughter was born in June of last year. She’s nine months old and loves to put things in her mouth. She chews on anything and everything. She’s like a puppy. If I were to go to the store to buy a rubber ducky for my kid, there is no way of knowing which one to buy. This one doesn’t say, ‘WARNING: I have hormone-disrupting phthalates in me.’ This one doesn’t say, ‘I don’t have any toxic chemicals. I’m perfectly safe to bring home.’ Sure, you can find out the unit price. You can find out where it’s made. It’ll tell you that it comes in red, yellow, and green. It’ll tell you that it’s made out of PVC, but it won’t tell you if it has phthalates in it, or bisphenol A or lead.
“All we’re saying is that Maine people have the right to safe products for their kids and Maine DEP has the responsibility to identify those products that are out there that have safer alternatives to toxic chemicals, like this rubber duck. My nine-month-old daughter and all the other kids in Maine today, all the pregnant women and families, the only way for us to get kid-safe products is to flock together and call on our elected officials, and say, ‘You can’t duck this issue anymore.’ ”
Bad puns aside, Prindiville and his allies carried the day. Suddenly Maine not only had the country’s most comprehensive laws on toxic chemicals, it had pushed the entire conversation on toxics in a new direction. Not only had a state acted more stringently than the federal government, it had adopted a European-style policy that gives the benefit of the doubt to public health rather than the chemical industry. It had pushed the burden of proving a chemical’s safety onto the shoulders of manufacturers.
“What’s important is that the safety system has been badly broken,” Mike Belliveau told me. “Industry is really good at defending individual products. If you attack deca, they’ll show you loads of studies saying it’s not bad for you. If you attack phthalates, they’ll roll out all their experts, the whole product-defense campaign. But when you’re not proposing to ban BPA or phthalates, but trying to overhaul the whole system, the industry is at a loss. The individual chemical people—the bromated people, the BPA people—they’re at a loss. All they can say is ‘The federal law is okay as it is.’ And that law’s a joke. TSCA hasn’t been updated in thirty years. It’s completely absurd.”
The Pingree family, at least, is nudging the federal government to follow Maine’s example. Hannah’s mother, Chellie, Maine’s first-term congresswoman, recently introduced legislation to ban deca nationally. Soon after she called a press conference to announce the bill, the chemical industry announced that it would voluntarily stop producing deca within three years. Pingree vowed to push ahead with her bill, to make sure that the industry “doesn’t start using another chemical that is just as dangerous.”
There are other positive signs at the federal level. A couple of years ago, researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences began revamping the federal government’s National Toxicology Program, which sets standards for how chemicals are tested. Over about seven years, they hope to develop a series of lab tests that will ultimately screen some 100,000 industrial compounds, individually and in mixtures, for biochemical markers such as effects on specific genes. The chemicals will then be ranked by mechanism of action and suspected toxicity and assigned priorities for further study. “It’s taken us twenty-five years and $2 billion to study 900 chemicals,” Dr. Christopher Portier told The Wall Street Journal. “If this works, we can study 15,000 in a year.”
None of this can come too soon. If we had acted on what we knew to be true about the dangers of industrial chemicals, we could have prevented a million and a half deaths, writes Devra Davis, the director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. “There is no one who deals with the disease now who doubts that we need to open a new front. To reduce the burden of cancer today, we must prevent it from arising in the first place. No matter how efficient we become at treating cancer, we have to tackle those things that cause the disease to occur or recur.”
To heal our poisoned bodies and to alter our poisoned landscape, we must first of all begin to see things more clearly. We must become more mindful. Spraying synthetic chemicals on our lawns, in this way of thinking, is mindless; planting native species is mindful. The same approach applies to choosing a mattress, toys for our children, a glass of water, a bag of grapes. Once we have access to information, once we begin paying attention, we develop a fuller, more personal connection to the actions we take. Once we have information, we have no choice but to choose between continuing to delude ourselves and changing the way we live our lives. We can’t unlearn what we have learned.
There is an important difference between innocence and naïveté: the first implies a lack of knowledge, the second a lack of responsibility. Thought of on a grander scale, this is the difference between looking for cures to problems and looking to prevent problems in the first place. It’s not as if this has to be so complicated, after all; people managed to live pretty well before synthetic chemicals were introduced, and no doubt we will continue to live pretty well long after they are gone. The question is how long this transition will take.