You stand in line with your latte, your tube of toothpaste or your cart of groceries, you hand over your cash or credit card to the cashier, and he hands you back the receipt. You check that the amount looks right, then stuff it in your pocket or purse. Maybe you pull it out later to make a record of your purchase and then toss it in the wastebasket or slip it into a file. And then — you forget about it.

You should give that little scrap of paper a second thought.

This spring, researchers at Environmental Working Group collected 36 samples of cash register receipts from fast food restaurants, big retailers, grocery stores, gas stations and post offices in seven states and the District of Columbia and had them tested by a renowned lab.  The lab found that 40 percent had high levels of the endocrine-disrupting chemical BPA, which has been the target of nationwide efforts to ban it in food and beverage containers, especially those used by babies and children. Animal tests show that BPA, a plastics hardener that is also a synthetic estrogen, can cause reproductive and behavioral abnormalities and lower intellectual ability, as well as setting the stage for cancers, obesity, diabetes, asthma and heart disease.

The tainted receipts tested by EWG came from a variety of well-known outlets including McDonald’s, KFC, CVS, Walmart, Safeway and Whole Foods.

The tests also showed that the BPA on the receipts could easily rub off onto the hands of anyone who handles them. That’s a potential worry for shoppers but even more so for the tens of thousands of store and restaurant workers who handled hundreds of receipts daily. Federal data analyzed by EWG shows that retail workers carry an average of 30 percent more BPA in their bodies than other adults.

As Jane Houlihan, EWG’s Senior Vice-President for Research, put it:

“A typical employee at any large retailer who runs the register could handle hundreds of the contaminated receipts in a single day at work. While we do not know exactly what this means for people’s health, it’s just one more path of exposure to this chemical that seems to bombard every single person.”

The source of the BPA is the paper used in these cash registers. This “thermal paper” is coated with a dye and a second chemical, which is often BPA. When a cash register imprints on the paper, its heats brings out the black lettering, avoiding the need to have ink in the printer.

EWG’s testing found amounts of EPA on receipts that were 250 to 1,000 times greater than in the more widely discussed sources of BPA exposure, especially canned foods, baby bottles and infant formula. Because the BPA in food is completely ingested, this remains by far the most worrisome route of exposure. It is unclear how much of the BPA that rubs off on skin gets into the bloodstream, but it’s likely to be a fraction of the total BPA on the paper.

What is clear, however, is that it wouldn’t be hard to get rid of the BPA in thermal paper. In fact, a number of the outlets sampled by EWG issued receipts that had no BPA or only trace amounts. They included such well-known companies as Target, Starbucks and Bank of America ATMs. And some big chains used BPA-laced paper in some outlets but not others. If they can get along without BPA-laden paper, there’s no reason everyone can’t.

For that matter, the leading U.S. maker of thermal paper, Appleton Papers Inc., no longer incorporates BPA in its products. Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has launched a program to evaluate the safety and availability of alternatives to BPA in thermal paper. (LINK)

EWG president and co-founder Ken Cook has written to the top executives of major retailers whose outlets issued BPA-laden receipts that figured in our study, urging them to switch to BPA-free alternatives for the sake of their employees and customers.

In the meantime, EWG has some advice for consumers:

• Don’t let infants or children handle receipts.
• Avoid paper receipts entirely when electronic or email alternatives are available.
• If you save receipts, keep them in a separate envelope.
• After handling receipts, be sure to wash your hands thoroughly before preparing and eating food (and that’s a good practice even when you haven’t handled receipts).
• Don’t use alcohol-based hand cleaners after handling receipts; they can increase absorption of BPA through the skin.
• Don’t recycle receipts and other thermal paper. BPA residues will contaminate recycled paper.

(By the way, it’s easy to check whether a receipt is printed on thermal paper. Just rub it with a coin. The heat of the friction will discolor thermal paper, but not conventional paper.)

*so long as they don’t have to show anything

By Leeann Brown, Press Associate, and Nils Bruzelius, Executive Editor

Who says you can never find a cop when you need one?

When Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s CNN film crew was in Mossville, Louisiana, recently filming footage of 14 chemical plants that local activists blame for making area residents sick, none of the plant managers would appear on camera, and several directed CNN to speak with a local industry representative instead.

Dr. Gupta tried to get a look at the plants anyway. But when his unmarked CNN vehicle pulled into one plant’s parking lot, with EWG President Ken Cook along as a guest, it wasn’t minutes before a local police cruiser drove in and asked them what they were doing. Not long after that, when the CNN van parked on the grounds of a nearby fast food restaurant, another cruiser showed up and parked close by — and the officer didn’t seem to be there for coffee or anything else.

It’s not that the chemical makers had anything to hide, of course. Their designated spokesman, Larry DeRoussel, executive director of the Lake Area Industry Alliance, was quite willing to speak on camera. The plants, he said:

“… have no ill effects on the local community. There’s no connection between those health issues and the plants. And the plants have been there for many, many years.”

DeRoussel couldn’t or wouldn’t account for some things though – dioxin levels three times above the national average, unanswered complaints about contamination spewing beyond the plants’ “fence line” and documented safety incidents in Mossville’s history.

Gupta also sought an interview with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality in Baton Rouge to discuss the concerns of Mossville citizens and address the issue of unanswered questions. But when the TV correspondent asked to have two of the Mossville activists sit in (not even participate) on the interview, he was turned down. Who knows what those two middle-aged ladies might have been capable of?

The explanation from the DEQ:

“If we open it up to others who are interested, then it would have to be opened up to industry folks as well and they would probably want to have their lawyers represented as well. And we haven’t set that up. And we have — you know, our scientists who want to provide you information in an interview type of atmosphere.”

Their taxes pay his salary, but that’s no reason for this “public servant” to let the people of Mossville in the door, right?

Unfortunately, they’re accustomed by now to not having their questions answered. The plants in their town have a history of hiding evidence and facts from the public.

That’s why Sanjay Gupta’s two-part series, titled Toxic America, was so important. The two hour-long shows did a thorough job of exploring the threat of toxic contamination of the environment and our bodies, and the need for reform of the outdated and ineffective Toxic Substances Control Act.

It was fortunate for the Mossville plants that their own security and the local cops were there to shield them from those pesky camera crews. Don’t you hate it when all the facts come out?

“Blowout preventer” is on its way toward joining the ranks of all-star oxymorons.

Everyone knows by now that the blowout preventer at the Deepwater Horizon drilling site deep in the Gulf of Mexico prevented exactly nothing. Seven weeks after this “fail-safe” system failed, the nation’s worst environmental disaster just keeps getting worse and worse.

Then last Thursday, another blowout preventer, this one on dry land, failed to do its job at a natural gas well in northwestern Pennsylvania, allowing natural gas and polluted wastewater to erupt from a nearly-finished well for 16 hours. The well is one of hundreds being drilled from New York state to West Virginia in order to extract gas embedded in the Marcellus Shale formation deep underground.

And then just this morning (Monday, June 7) a natural gas well being drilled in West Virginia erupted in a gout of flame 70 feet high and was burning out of control. No word yet on whether its blowout preventer also failed, but don’t bet against it.

It’s beginning to look like a trend.

So just how often does it happen that blowout preventers don’t?

Christian Science Monitor reporter Mark Clayton unearthed on Sunday a 2009 reliability study that found that the massive devices, which are a stacks of supposedly redundant rams and valves designed to halt a blowout before it gets going, had failed 62 times during three years of testing in the Gulf of Mexico. The 62 failures were much less than 1 percent of the nearly 90,000 tests conducted, but we’ve seen what just a single failure can do. Authors of the study, paid for by industry with input from the U.S. Minerals Management Service, used the results to recommend less frequent safety testing of the devices. They said that would save companies $193 million a year.

Shall we compare that number to the ever-escalating cost of the Gulf disaster?

It turns out that this isn’t the first time that the devices’ reliability has been questioned. The Associated Press reported last month on records from the Minerals Management Service, which showed that blowout preventers had failed or been a factor in at least 14 accidents, mostly since 2005.

By the way, guess what didn’t work in 1979 when the Ixtoc oil well blew out off Mexico’s coast, triggering a nine-month spill that is still the largest in history? You guessed it.

It does make you wonder what sources BP President Tony Hayward was using when he said of the Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer, “It’s unprecedented for it to fail.”

Something to think about when energy companies call for less regulation and less oversight as they sink untold numbers of new gas wells up and down the East Coast and contemplate a resumption, someday, of offshore drilling as well.

British Petroleum, Inc. has dumped more than 400,000 gallons of chemical oil dispersants into the Gulf of Mexico near the site of the undersea gusher caused by the April 20 blowout at BP’s exploration well, which set fire to the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and killed 11 workers.

By next week, that figure could double, at least. On Tuesday, Lamar McKay, president and chairman of BP America, Inc., told a Senate panel that its supplier, Nalco Energy Services of Sugar Land, Texas, can deliver as much as 75,000 gallons of dispersants a day for the massive environmental clean-up.

This much is well accepted: dispersants don’t make all that streaming oil vanish. As the science journal Nature reported, “they help large globs of oil ‘disperse’ into smaller pieces — hence their name — which are easier for sea-living microbes to break down.”

“Their use is a trade-off decision,” Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said during a telephone press conference earlier this week.

The important question, which has gone unanswered, is, are we minimizing the damage to our planet by using these dispersants, or are we adding to the mess?

It is inexcusable that we do not know the answer to this question and have decided to make the Gulf of Mexico an enormous floating science experiment. After all, we’ve been dealing with oil spills from the moment we started pumping oil. According to a 2005 National Research Council report titled, Oil Spill Dispersants: Efficacy and Effects, 3 million gallons of oil and refined petroleum are spilled annually in around U.S. waters, mostly in smaller batches.

The dispersants going into the Gulf have been around for decades. According to the NRC report, COREXIT EC9527A came on the market in the 1980s. COREXIT 9500 was introduced in the 1990′s. Both are made by Nalco and have been approved by the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Coast Guard for spraying on the ocean surface. (EPA has authorized limited tests of dispersants near the source of the leak, 5,000 feet below the waves, but has not given a green light to use them in volume.)

No one pretends that these or any other dispersants are environmentally neutral. “Dispersants are not the silver bullet,” EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said.

Jackson has defended the use of the chemicals on grounds they are far less toxic than petroleum and degrade much more rapidly.

That’s not much of a recommendation.

So, what is this stuff? There’s a lot the public is not permitted to know about these concoctions. The EPA has published some information about them on a list of dispersants and other agents that were okayed for use in the clean-up of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But a number of ingredients are listed as “confidential” or “proprietary,” and their proportions in the mix are not disclosed.

Information provided by Nalco to EPA and the federal/BP task force on its website, known as the Deepwater Horizon Response, says that COREXIT EC9527A, contains three chemicals considered hazardous:

• 2-Butoxyethanol
• Organic sulfonic acid salt
• Propylene glycol

From what we can discern, the active molecule that does the dispersing is “organic sulfonic acid salt,” a generic term for class of chemicals. Its precise chemical name is apparently proprietary. We think that once a company, or the government, or both, decides to cover the sea with this molecule, it’s time to tell us what exactly it is.

The company’s disclosure statement says, “No toxicity studies have been conducted on this product.” It also says, “Based on our hazard characterization, the potential environmental hazard is: Moderate Based on our recommended product application and the product’s characteristics, the potential environmental exposure is: Low.” But how the company has reached that conclusion isn’t clear.

Corexit 9500, the newer formulation, is made without 2-butoxyethanol. According to the NRC report, Nalco developed Corexit 9500 because it discovered that “prolonged exposure to Corexit 9527 caused adverse health effects in some responders. These effects were attributed to its glycol ether solvent (2-butoxyethanol).”

Jackson told reporters that EPA permitted BP to spray the older product, Corexit EC9527A, in the early days of the spill until sufficient quantities of 9500 could be located. She described Corexit 9500 as “more effective and more environmentally friendly.”

However, it’s disquieting that the “material safety data sheet” for Corexit 9500 warns: “Do not contaminate surface water.” Also, the document says, “Component substances have a potential to bioconcentrate.”

Energy and Enviroment Daily’s Greenwire, a leading online environmental news outlet, reported this week that Corexit may not be the best option. “Other U.S. EPA-approved alternatives have been shown to be far less toxic and, in some cases, nearly twice as effective,” Greenwire reported, adding that Nalco was once part of Exxon Mobil and still has interlocking leadership with Exxon Mobil and BP. BP spokesman Jon Pack was quoted as saying that BP was not considering or testing other products because stopping the leak and containing the loose oil “has to be our primary focus right now.”

It’s been well established that until this mother-of-all-oil-spills, BP had not developed a thoroughly researched plan for managing this sort of crisis. It didn’t know all it should about dispersants. It had to scramble to obtain sufficient supply. It may not have picked the best product for this gargantuan job. With advance planning, it might have availed itself of better options.

Most importantly, since spills are a constant threat, the oil industry should have financed far more research into dispersants. We the taxpayers seem to be shouldering the financial burden of much of that research. And yet we’re in the dark about the precise make-up and behavior of dispersants and other chemical agents that are used in very high volumes.

How many gallons of secret chemicals, exactly, will wind up being sprayed across the Gulf?

“I think it’s fair to say that when it comes to this volume, we’re in uncharted waters,” EPA’s Jackson said.

Jackson, to her credit, is blunt and doesn’t dissemble. Still, that’s not an answer Americans might have expected to hear in the 21st Century. At the moment, what we know about dispersants seems to be as murky as the Gulf’s troubled waters.

Here’s sobering news: any one of us, anywhere on the planet, lugs hundreds of industrial chemicals around in our bodies – and they are up to no good.

If you want to know what industrial chemical compounds Michael Lerner or his wife Sharyle Patton carry around in their bodies, just go to this Environmental Working Group website. Lerner and Patton are both active in environmental health, the field that studies how the chemical byproducts of industry and commerce impact the human body.

Lerner, it seems, lugs around relatively high levels of methylmercury, inorganic arsenic, and polycholorinated biphenols (better-known as PCBs). These are but a few of the 102 industrial chemicals (of the 214 assayed by measuring metabolites) in his blood and urine.

Patton’s body, in addition to these, also has relatively high levels of chlorinated dioxins and organochlorine pesticide residues, plus a generous helping of others that did not show up in her husband’s tests.

Medical databases link (at various levels of certainty), each of these compounds with a distinct set of illnesses. Environmental Working Group has done several body burden studies of its own and shown that babies come into the world contaminated with a complex mixture of chemicals, many of them known to be toxins or carcinogens.

For instance, inorganic arsenic is a known carcinogen. BPA, found in plastics, dental sealants and the linings of tin cans, is a chemical suspected in certain birth defects and developmental delays in children, some cancers, and disturbances in endocrine and hormone function.

Both chlorinated dioxins and PCBs come to us mainly in fatty meats, dairy products and fish. Like BPA, they may link to defects and delays in children and to cancers, as well as to malfunctions of the nervous and immune systems.

The pesticide residues enter our bodies via the foods they are used on, as well as in drinking water; they are associated with a similar roll call of disorders.

Stepping back and looking at the entire list of 214 industrial chemicals this assay finds in our bodies creates the creepy feeling that nothing is safe: toxins waft our way in house dust or thin air, in water and soil, or off-gas from a long litany of objects — from paint and carpeting to computer consoles and furniture.

The body is an ecosystem of sorts, an exquisitely coordinated mass of disparate units functioning within a whole. And like any ecosystem, the body can be invaded by foreign substances that muck up the works. Quantifying how many such invaders our bodies harbor has been the quest of studies on bio-accumulation such as the one Lerner and Patton participated in to assay this biological build-up over a lifetime.

Bio-accumulation has become its own corner of medical science, with studies suggesting that virtually everyone alive on this planet harbors a stew of toxic substances. This shift from measuring pollutants in our water, air or soil to studying what has melded into our biology has led to related shifts in thinking about medical etiology and chemical risk.

One medical model for these chemical invasions holds that ill effects can emerge slowly, over decades, from cumulative chemical exposures at doses so low they are measured in parts per million. For instance, an emerging consensus in oncology holds that a person’s lifetime exposure to many tiny amounts of cancer-causing agents can be just as toxic as a few big doses of carcinogens.

This model of causation rejects seeking a single smoking gun – some substance that in itself fosters cancer – but rather looks to a person’s lifetime, cumulative exposure to a wide range of chemicals that trigger cell mutation. This continual barrage of mutagens can finally overwhelm the immune system’s ability to kill off mutant cells, and so resist cancer.  Our risk of cancer, in this view, reflects the sum total of day-to-day doses of carcinogenic molecules shed into our air, food and water.

Dr. Martha Herbert, a pediatric neurologist at Harvard Medical School, points to the tens of thousands of manufactured compounds that now pepper the nature world in some three billion potential combinations, and the fact that no one knows all the ways these chemical concoctions might impact us. One of the greatest human dangers from this slew of molecules, Dr. Herbert reasons, comes when a child’s fast-growing organs, budding central nervous system and hummingbird-like rapid metabolism gets exposed to – and voraciously incorporates — small amounts of foreign molecules, doing biological damage that may not surface for years.

The brain has a special vulnerability to interference from invading chemicals because of all organs, it utilizes the widest variety of molecules to transmit the chemical messages that coordinate our mental life and biological functions. This very design means there are that many more ways molecules from outside the body can disrupt these processes if they happen to interact with any of countless chemical reactions in the brain.

That’s why little doses can matter a lot.

[Adapted from Daniel Goleman, Ecological Intelligence: The Hidden Impacts of What We Buy. Daniel Goleman blogs at www.DanielGoleman.info, and his conversations with experts on ecological transparency can be heard at: www.morethansound.net]

Previous posts in this series:

What Toxicology Doesn’t Measure – And What We Can Do

What We Don’t Know About the Toxic Stuff Around Us

Next week:  What’s Really in Your Shampoo, and Why You Should Find Out

Consider a box of microwaveable, butter-flavored popcorn. The label assures buyers it has zero grams of trans-fat and “zero mg cholesterol.” But the ingredients list fails to mention that the savory butter taste and mouth-watering aroma comes courtesy of diacetyl, a flavoring long known by pulmonary specialists to cause “bronchiolitis obliterans,” a disease that causes the small airways in the lungs become to become swollen, scarred and, eventually, obliterated.

Victims can breathe in deeply but have severe difficulty exhaling. More commonly known as “popcorn worker’s lung,” the disease has sometimes led to the death of those who labor in popcorn factories or plants that make candy and pastries, even dog food, where diacetyl gets used as a flavoring.

The canary in the coal mine for the rest of us was Wayne Watson of Centennial, Colo. When Watson was diagnosed with popcorn worker’s lung, his physicians alerted federal agencies to say the threat had leaped beyond factory walls to consumers’ homes.  The resulting public alarm swiftly led the largest U.S. makers of microwave popcorn to announce they were pulling diacetyl from their mix of ingredients.

In nature, diacetyl occurs in butter, cheese and some fruits at low levels that pose no danger. The popcorn companies were breaking no law by using diacetyl; the Food and Drug Administration approved its use. And Wayne Watson had put himself at unusual risk; he dubbed himself “Mr. Popcorn” because he devoured two or three bags every day for ten years.

He especially loved to fill his lungs with a deep inhalation of the buttery cloud of aroma released the moment he ripped open a freshly popped bag – in other words, the strongest dose possible. That was a recipe for medical disaster.

When heated, diacetyl becomes a vapor, the form that poses a danger to lungs. If breathed in over long periods, concentrated doses of this very vapor leads to popcorn worker’s lung. When his doctor went to Mr. Watson’s house and measured levels of diacetyl in the air right after he made popcorn, they were found to be as high as those in a popcorn factory.

So should we all shun diacetyl-laced popcorn? Maybe, maybe not. As one report of the case put it, “There are no warnings from federal regulators, nor is there medical advice on how consumers” should treat the news. And that’s the quandary. The standards that the FDA, food industries and even physicians use for determining consumer safety do not always match the recommendations of scientists who study the health impacts of the multitude of chemicals we encounter.

No one knows how many chemicals with potential dangers lurk in the everyday objects we use and foods we eat. Informed estimates put the number of man-made chemical compounds floating about as high as 80,000 to 100,000. Of the ten thousand or so chemicals used in industrial amounts — yearly volumes greater than ten tons — only a fraction have ever been tested for toxicity in adults, let alone in fetuses or infants.

As for the potential harm from the chemicals in what we buy, use and own, many dangers are suspected but most all are “unproven,” in the sense of getting consensus on the verdict. Apart from a relatively small sub-class of chemicals, like concentrated doses of vaporized diacetyl, the chain of causality from chemical X to disease Y in most every case has yet to be investigated, let alone established.

In some cases science can identify certain ill effects from specific toxins and suggest a pathway consistent with those medical outcomes. But most of the apprehension centers on the simple fact that all synthetic chemicals are not natural elements in the body, and at a high enough level or in various combinations, their presence can do us harm.

Science cannot predict what specific effects these exposures will have in a given person; the body’s biological maze is simply too complex. Each industrial chemical engages our tissues in multiple ways. Some imitate the molecular structure of the body’s own hormones, ending up lodged in the endocrine system; others mimic the chemical messengers that keep cells in the brain and body working smoothly together. Some are readily absorbed in body fat, while still others – particularly the large number made from petroleum – readily slip through the oil-based membranes that surround cells (and these petroleum-based chemicals harbor carcinogenic benzene rings).

That’s one reason I love Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database: It levels the playing field.

[Adapted from Daniel Goleman, Ecological Intelligence: The Hidden Impacts of What We Buy. Daniel Goleman blogs at www.DanielGoleman.info, and his conversations with experts on ecological transparency can be heard at: www.morethansound.net]

Previous post in this series: What Toxicology Doesn’t Measure – And What We Can Do

Next week:  Our Bodies’ Chemical Burden: Little Doses Matter a Lot
Read about Dan Goleman in The Boston Globe – they call him “The Guru of Green.”

First in a series of guest blogs by best-selling author Daniel Goleman

I’ve got some bad news. Toxicology seems to have a blind spot when it comes to the stew of chemicals we breathe, drink or otherwise absorb over the course of life.

Currently federal standards for determining toxicity are based on whether single exposures to a specific chemical cause a given medical problem. But growing bodies of medical evidence suggest that the cumulative tiny doses of chemicals we encounter over our lifetime can add up to disease.

For instance, Deborah Cory-Slechta, a toxicologist at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, found that exposing lab animals to two common pesticides, paraquat and maneb, caused degeneration in the dopamine circuits that underlie Parkinson’s disease in humans. The damage only occurred if the exposure to one of the compounds was repeated (in this case, in the womb and again in adulthood), or to both pesticides in combination. Paraquat and maneb are quite distinct molecules, but the mixture or number or exposures produced the signature damage for Parkinson’s.

Such findings – and there are dozens of others like these – create a challenge for toxicology: an exposure just once to one of these chemicals resulted in no discernible damage.  And up to this point that method – assessing the damage from exposure to a single chemical or class of chemicals for a limited time – has been the gold standard in tests of a chemical’s toxicity, our early warning system for protection.

But that method tells us nothing about how a given chemical might cause damage if we are exposed to it in combination with others, or over a lifespan. The reality is that we all are exposed to a mix of countless chemicals continually, a predicament for which toxicologists have as yet no assessment method.

Here is the toxicologist’s dilemma: The standard methods for assessing safe levels of exposure to a chemical fail to address the environmental realities. Interactions among synthetic chemicals lodged in our bodies defy basic assumptions underlying toxicology risk analysis.

Standard tests assess whether a compound kills cells. But very low doses may fail to kill cells while nevertheless damaging the cells’ ability to function properly. Worse, a single-chemical, one-time exposure in healthy adults tells us nothing about how a substance might affect children, the chronically ill or the aged — groups with greater susceptibility to harmful chemical impacts. And what happens when we breathe polluted air, a mixture of countless varieties of ultra-fine particles whose chemical composition varies from place to place and day to day?

Cory-Slechta says neurotoxicology should adopt a “multi-hit” model, in which insults to different target sites — either over time from one molecule or all at once from many — harm a biological system. That would be in keeping with toxicology’s main mission, safeguarding human health.

So what are we to do in the meantime?

Try the precautionary principle: Find out what’s actually in all the stuff we eat, put on our bodies or otherwise are exposed to, and avoid the bad ones. Use Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database, for example, to learn the truth about the chemicals in personal care products.

If each of us did three things, it could actually get companies to get rid of all those toxic chemicals:

1. Know the true ecological impacts of what we buy.
2. Favor improvements.
3. Tell everyone we know.

Those three steps, if taken by enough shoppers, would shift the market share of products enough to get the attention of companies. The more we make it pay to drop toxic chemicals from products, the more efforts corporations will put into developing safer alternatives and giving their business to suppliers who innovate to find safer ingredients.

Economists call this a “virtuous cycle,” where sound information in the marketplace lets shoppers be smarter about their choices. That, in turn, creates a bottom-line incentive for companies to do the right thing. Let’s make virtue pay.

[Adapted from Daniel Goleman, Ecological Intelligence: The Hidden Impacts of What We Buy. Daniel Goleman blogs at www.DanielGoleman.info, and his conversations with experts on ecological transparency can be heard at: www.morethansound.net]

Next Monday: What We Don’t Know About the Toxic Stuff Around Us

It’s not news that getting anything substantive through Congress these days is like pushing very big rocks uphill, even when there is remarkable consensus on the topic.

That’s why a broad array of organizations that care about people’s health came together this week to thank Administrator Lisa Jackson of the Environmental Protection Agency for her principled and vigorous efforts to advance comprehensive reform of our broken system for regulating hazardous chemicals. In a letter dated March 10, they wrote:

We welcome the core principles you announced on September 29, 2009 in San Francisco that outlined the Obama Administration’s plan to overhaul the nation’s chemical regulatory program and give EPA greater authority to protect the public. Our organizations and supporters applaud the Administration’s intention to transform our country’s chemical regulatory system and decision to make TSCA reform a top priority.

The letter’s signers, who represent millions of members and supporters, have been urging members of Congress in hearings and through personal contact to introduce and take prompt action on a bill to correct the well-known failings of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act.

Environmental Working Group, which led the effort to recognize Administrator Jackson’s initiative and commitment to reform, has long advocated for a thorough rewriting of the outdated law. In particular, EWG is urging adoption of a risk-based approach that gives priority to controlling all substances known to contaminate human bodies, particularly those chemicals detected in umbilical cord blood of newborn infants – the most vulnerable members of society.

So thank you, Lisa Jackson. We’ll help in every way we can.

The full text of the letter and list of signers follows.

*                *              *

Allergy Kids • American Academy of Environmental Medicine • Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses • Autism One • Autism Society of Illinois • Autism Society of Western New York • Breast Cancer Network of Western New York • Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future • Citizens for Environmental Justice • Community Against Pollution • Deep South Center for Environmental Justice • Deirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology • Developmental Delay Resources • Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism • Environmental Working Group • First Signs, Inc. • Iowa Breast Cancer Edu-action • National Autism Association • Oregon Environmental Council • Plains Justice • Schafer Autism Report • The Rachel Carson Homestead Association • The United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation • US Autism & Asperger Association

The Honorable Lisa P. Jackson
Administrator
United States Environmental Protection Agency
Ariel Rios Building, Room 300
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20460

March 10, 2010

Dear Administrator Jackson:

We, the undersigned organizations, sincerely thank you for your announced commitment to reforming the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Collectively, our groups represent millions of members, supporters and activists.

As you are aware, studies examining umbilical cord blood show American infants are being born with hundreds of industrial chemicals, pesticides and other pollutants already in their bodies. Some of these chemicals have been linked to a variety of adverse health effects including asthma, allergies, childhood cancer, obesity, infertility, birth defects and neurological disorders. These children are living proof that the current law is failing our country’s most vulnerable.

In January 2009, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified TSCA as a government program in urgent need of reform and placed it on its “High Risk” list. The GAO report recommended the EPA be given more authority to obtain information critical to assessing the risks chemicals pose to human health and found:

• TSCA’s regulatory structure impedes EPA’s efforts to control toxic chemicals.
• EPA lacks sufficient data on potential health and environment risks of toxic chemicals.
• Under current law, chemicals are considered safe until proven otherwise.

Recognizing the consequences of this regulatory failure, government leaders, health professionals, children’s health experts, environmental, consumer advocacy groups and faith-based organizations are supporting congressional efforts to reform TSCA.

We welcome the core principles you announced on September 29, 2009 in San Francisco that outlined the Obama Administration’s plan to overhaul the nation’s chemical regulatory program and give EPA greater authority to protect the public.

Our organizations and supporters applaud the Administration’s intention to transform our country’s chemical regulatory system and decision to make TSCA reform a top priority.

We appreciate and look forward to your continued leadership as we embark on passing historic legislation aimed at providing greater protection for all Americans in the near future and for generations to come.

If you have any questions about this letter, please contact Jason Rano with Environmental Working Group at 202.667.6982.

Respectfully,

Allergy Kids
American Academy of Environmental Medicine
Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses
Autism One
Autism Society of Illinois
Autism Society of Western New York
Breast Cancer Network of Western New York
Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future
Citizens for Environmental Justice
Community Against Pollution
Deep South Center for Environmental Justice
Deirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology
Developmental Delay Resources
Doug Flutie Jr. Foundation for Autism
Environmental Working Group
First Signs, Inc.
Iowa Breast Cancer Edu-action
National Autism Association
Oregon Environmental Council
Plains Justice
Schafer Autism Report
The Rachel Carson Homestead Association
The United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation
US Autism & Asperger Association

And of course, Coke is touting its “Bottle of the Future”  — the PlantBottle, whose cachet is its 30 percent plant-based material content. (If you dig deep into the Coca-Cola website , you’ll find that the company has yet to confirm “preliminary research” suggesting that the PlantBottle’s carbon footprint is any lower than PET (polyethylene terephthalate)  polyester, the usual material for  Coca-Cola and other plastic drink bottles.  But both Pet and PB bottles are recyclable, Coke says.)

Still, Advertising Age’s headline — Coca-Cola Goes Completely Green at Olympics – is a bit too sweeping.   Coca-Cola’s soft drink cans are still lined with an epoxy resin containing bisphenol A (BPA), a petrochemical derivative and synthetic estrogen which readily leaches into food and drink.  On its website,   Coca-Cola defends this practice by asserting that “BPA is used to make the linings of cans to prevent spoilage and protect foods and beverages from direct contact with the can.”

The company adds that the U.S. and other industrialized nations believe that “the level of exposure to BPA that results from consuming canned foods and beverages poses no risk to the health of consumers.”

Well, not so much.  This was an accurate reflection of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s attitude under the regulation-averse Bush administration.

But things have changed.  Last month, reacting to a cascade of research studies linking BPA to serious health conditions, senior FDA leaders appointed by President Obama issued a strong warning to the public to avoid the chemical.  FDA officials announced a series of investigations of BPA safety, meanwhile committing the agency, on its own and in conjunction with Canadian counterparts, to “support” food processing industry efforts to find a suitable replacement for BPA in can linings, particularly for canned infant formula.

Right now,  the Japanese canning industry voluntarily uses non-BPA can linings, but nearly all other major canners in industrialized nations use epoxy resin with BPA.  Scientists and policy-makers worldwide are stepping up research into BPA and into alternatives for cans.   Later this year, the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations are planning to convene an international “Expert Consultation on BPA.”

Ironically, while hanging tough on BPA in cans, Coca-Cola  doesn’t mind using the BPA controversy to market its  lines of bottled drinks:  its website assures consumers that “BPA is not used in the manufacture of the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic water and soft drink bottles used by The Coca-Cola Company.”

PepsiCo, another global giant that makes Pepsi-Cola, Gatorade, Aquafina, Tropicana and hundreds more beverages, takes a similar tack.  PepsiCo is courting   environmentalists and other advocates of corporate responsibility with its ambitious Refresh Project, which promises to dedicate $20 million to good causes.

Like rival Coca-Cola, Pepsi is keenly aware of environmentalists’ campaigns against the burgeoning plastic bottle glut.  Pepsi promises to develop “sustainable packaging strategies” by encouraging recycling and coming up with“biodegradable and compostable packaging solutions.”

Pepsi also says it is “eliminating environmentally sensitive materials and processes from our packaging.”

So – what’s in those Pepsi bottles?   The company says “the vast majority of Pepsi’s plastic bottles are made from PET (polyethylene terephthalate). A few of our products are packaged in a plastic called High Density Polyethylene (HDPE), which is a multi-layered material. Please be assured that all of these plastics do not contain BPA and are perfectly safe for consumption.”

Well then – what’s in the cans?  Pepsi is  silent on that question.  At least Coca-Cola’s website acknowledges the BPA controversy and takes a position.  Pepsi’s position is ostrich.  On Feb. 3, we emailed and telephoned Pepsi customer service and media relations to ask if Pepsi had managed to come with a non-BPA can lining.

So far – nothing.  Pepsi hasn’t returned our calls.  We can only assume this means Pepsi, like Coke and most other canners outside Japan, uses BPA-based epoxy resin.

Obviously major corporations have become convinced that going green is good for their customers, the planet and their bottom lines.   Fine, but a little healthy skepticism is always in order.  As long as the stuff in the cans is contaminated with a troubling industrial chemical like BPA, thinking people won’t consider it truly green.

It’s good to see the issue of reforming toxic chemicals regulation getting widespread coverage in a variety of media. Just this week (Jan. 11), Scientific American magazine published on its website a good account by author Lizzie Grossman of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) year-end decision to create a list of “chemicals of concern” that could result in new controls over four classes of substances that turn up in a wide variety of consumer products.

Grossman, author of Chasing Molecules, an engrossing exploration of the risks posed by many synthetic chemicals and the potential of “green chemistry” to find safer alternatives, writes that EPA’s action marks “the first time … the EPA has made such a move” since the Toxic Substances Control Act was passed in 1976.

EWG certainly applauds the decisive action by EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson — even as we continue to press for Congressional action to rewrite TSCA, The 1976 act, Grossman points out, “has proved a cumbersome instrument for regulating hazardous chemicals.”