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?

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

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

That’s why the Environmental Working Group, which enthusiastically supported the bill in 2008, is getting involved again. On Monday (Jan. 11), EWG wrote to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection to applaud Maine’s leadership on the issue and to urge state officials to frame the regulations in ways that will fulfill the act’s promise. You can read the full letter here.

EWG thinks the Maine DEP is taking exactly the right approach in writing a broad definition of “children’s products” to include “any chemical of high concern” that “will likely result in a child or a fetus being exposed to that chemical.” Our letter noted that biomonitoring studies led by EWG have found 100’s of industrial chemicals, pollutants and pesticides in umbilical cord blood from American babies and that some toxic chemicals have been found at higher levels in toddlers than in their mothers. That’s because little kids tend to put their hands and objects in their mouths.

We also urged the Maine DEP to publish on its website a list of its priority chemicals – the ones that raise the greatest concerns – and the products that contain them. The law as passed has a loophole that limits the ability of state officials to restrict the use of hazardous chemicals unless it can identify a safe and cost-effective alternative. That provision gives companies an incentive to defend their existing and potentially dangerous products rather than developing safer alternatives.

Among other things, EWG also urged Maine regulators to make the rules apply to anyone up to age 18, to protect teens against chemicals that may disrupt or alter puberty.  As well, EWG proposed  a petition process so that citizens can request the listing of new priority chemicals or suggest safer alternatives. EWG also thinks Maine should take steps to curb companies to keep information about their products away from the public under the secrecy cloak of “confidential business information.”

Of course, it’s crucial for the Congress to follow Maine’s lead and pass a national KidSafe bill to reform chemical regulation and protect all American children from toxic chemicals. As the letter said:

“A federal bill would tackle the problem of children’s exposures more comprehensively and produce new information about the safety of the thousands of untested chemicals used in consumer products.”

EWG’s letter was signed by President Ken Cook, Senior V-P for Research Jane Houlihan and Senior Analyst Sonya Lunder.

Sure, it’s an act, but it beats watching a bunch of suits standing at a lectern in the Congressional press gallery. In a video he posted recently on YouTube, Rep. Steve Israel gets down and dirty – actually, he gets down and cleans. Wearing a yellow tie and the sleeves of his blue shirt rolled up, the Long Island congressman grabs a rag and a spray bottle and makes like he’s cleaning around a sink “after a tough day of legislating.”

Then he launches into a pitch for the bill he introduced last year to require makers of household cleaners and other produces to disclose their ingredients on the labels – something that few currently do.

Steve Israel will be trying to get action on his bill, the Household Product Labeling Act (H.R. 3057), when Congress gets back to work. And we at EWG will be rooting for him because, as he says at the end of the one-minute video, “It’s time for big chemical companies to come clean.”

EWG staffers put our heads together to come up with this list of bad news environmental stories over the last decade that people might have missed. But there were plenty of big stories that hardly anyone could have missed, such as climate change. What’s on your list of the biggest environmental stories of the last 10 years?

1. Secret Gas Drilling Chemical Almost Kills Colorado nurse
Doctors ran into a medical mystery — and a stone wall from industry — when they tried to find what was in a gas drilling chemical that nearly killed a Colorado nurse. Aren’t you glad that Congress exempted these “fracking” chemicals from regulation under the Safe Water Drinking Act?

2. Intersex Fish Turn Up All Over
Are you a boy or are you a girl? That’s the question that scientists are asking as they study the organs of supposedly male fish from coast to coast and find eggs in many of them. The chief suspects: endocrine-disrupting pollutants that even in tiny amounts can mimic hormones and affect sexual development.

3. Prescription Drugs in Your Drinking Water
Take a swallow and call me in the morning. Antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones – they’ve all turned up in tests of drinking water around the country. Could there be health risks from decades of drinking water laced with combinations of potent drugs?

4. And Rocket Fuel, Too
Perchlorate — the stuff is used in rocket fuel and explosives and turns up not just in water but also in milk, lettuce, other foods – and in our bodies. It’s been linked to thyroid problems in pregnant women, newborns and infants. The EPA is reconsidering its earlier decision not to regulate it in water. Stand by.

5. Ethanol — Bad for Your Health, Too
There are a lot of reasons to question the drive for biofuels, especially corn-based ethanol, but there has been much less attention paid to what it means for air pollution and health. For people who like to breathe clean air, the balance doesn’t look promising.

6. Non-stick, No-Stain and No-Good
They were the miracle products that were supposed to make life easier – keeping spills from staining our couches and making it easy to clean our pots without scrubbing — until it all went sour. Chemicals in the original Teflon and now off-the-market Scotchgard were linked to cancer and developmental problems. They have a way of polluting everything and they refuse to go away.

7. Monsanto owns corn (and soybeans, too)
80% of the corn and 95% percent of the soybeans grown in America contain genes inserted by Monsanto scientists, and the company writes tough – and secret – licensing agreements to maintain control and lock out competitors. Now the Justice Department and some states are thinking these practices might violate anti-trust laws. Turnips, anyone?

8. Occupational Hazard: Microwave Popcorn
This fun food turned to be no fun for people who make it. A strange lung malady that sickened workers in plants that make microwave popcorn was traced to a widely used butter flavoring. And one popcorn-crazy consumer was felled, too. It took a while, but OSHA finally took a look, and the stuff is being phased out.

9. Dead (Zone) on Arrival
In the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere, vast expanses of ocean have been turned into biological deserts as fertilizer runoff from farms washes downstream and nourish runaway algae growth, which deplete most of the oxygen when the tiny organisms die and decompose. The Gulf dead zone has more than doubled in size since the 1980s – accelerated by the boom in crops grown to make biofuels. In 2009, it was smaller than predicted, but more intense, in 2009.

10. The (Not So) Great Pacific Trash Gyre
It’s hard to spot from the water or even from space, but an estimated 3.5 million tons of mostly plastic trash from all over the world floats just below the surface of the Pacific, swirling slowly around in an area of circular currents twice the size of Texas. It’s devastating to birds and sea creatures that think the plastic bits are food. It’s time to stop adding to the mess – and then see if there’s any way to clean it up.

What stories top your list of the decade’s biggest environmental news??

The voluntary agreement would end production, importation and sales of Deca for most uses except for transportation and military needs by December 2012 and for remaining uses by the end of 2013.

Companies involved in the deal are the two U.S. manufacturers of Deca – Albemarle Corporation of Baton Rouge and Chemtura Corporation of Middlebury, CT – and ICL Industrial Products of Israel, the largest U.S importer of Deca.

Japan’s Tosoh Corporation is the only Deca manufacturer not part of the arrangement with EPA.

Steve Owens, EPA assistant administrator for the Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances, said:

“Though DecaBDE has been used as a flame retardant for years, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has long been concerned about its impact on human health and the environment.”

The deal came just two days after Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) introduced a bill to force a Deca phase-out. Pingree’s Decabromine Elimination and Control Act of 200 (H.R. 4394) would ban Deca in all products, including those designed for children, by the end of 2013. The bill mirrors Maine’s state-wide Deca phase-out, passed in 2007.

EPA’s Owens said that EPA had determined that DECA poses significant risks to human health. “Studies have shown that decaBDE persists in the environment, potentially causes cancer and may impact brain function,” he said.

In the environment, Owens said, “DecaBDE … can degrade to more toxic chemicals that are frequently found in the environment and are hazardous to wildlife.”

Children appear to absorb higher levels of the chemical. In 2008, pioneering research by Environmental Working Group produced the first-ever detection of Deca in the blood of American children. The children in the study had higher blood concentrations of Deca than their mothers.

The EPA-industry agreement doesn’t limit Deca imports by Tosoh or any other manufacturer. It also allows Deca to be imported in finished products. Pingree’s bill, if enacted would end these uses and ensure that substitutes for Deca are thoroughly tested and are safe. Most important, action by Congress would give the phase-out the force of law.

Later this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will cast the issue of pollution and health into sharp focus with the release of the fourth and most ambitious edition of the National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals.

212 Chemicals in 8,000 Americans

The CDC biomonitoring report, expected to report finding 212 contaminants in the blood and urine of 8,000 Americans, will constitute the most extensive assessment of the American body burden ever conducted by the federal government.

The latest CDC survey will include, for the first time, analysis of umbilical cord blood.  CDC has tested 500 mother/infant pairs, an effort that may offer important new insights into the extent to which fetuses are being polluted by pregnant women’s environmental chemical exposures.

CDC follows EWG model

Until now, the CDC’s surveys have concentrated on adults and older children.  To fill the research gap, since 2005,  Environmental Working Group has  commissioned laboratories to search for several hundred possible pollutants in newborns.  On Dec. 2, EWG released test results showing that 232 contaminants, including the plastic chemical bisphenol A, had been found in the cord blood of 10 minority infants born in 2007 and 2008.

Direct evidence of contamination

Biomonitoring techniques pioneered by CDC, academic scientists and groups like EWG are considered the gold standard of the environmental health field, because they eliminate the guesswork when scientists and regulators need to know which contaminants are actually getting into people and should be given top priority for pollution controls.

Want to know more?    This in-depth story by Harvey Black, a Madison, WI,  journalist specializing in environmental health, explains what biomonitoring has accomplished and where it’s headed.

New frontiers – and limitations – in testing
people’s bodies for chemicals

By Harvey Black
Environmental Health News
December 2, 2009

For scientists, it’s a treasure trove of data, one that might help unravel some of the world’s most enduring medical mysteries.

New horizons in biomonitoring – which measures chemicals that people carry in their bodies – are identifying environmental exposures that may play a role in health problems, including cancer, neurological disorders and diabetes.

At their fingertips, researchers already have precise measurements of nearly 150 chemicals in several thousand American adults and children. Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing to release even more extensive data, and expand its reach by testing 500 umbilical cords, which will allow scientists to determine which chemicals babies are exposed to in the womb.

Biomonitoring “is a game changer in environmental health,” said Thomas Burke, professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University and head of a National Research Council panel that examined its potential.

We didn’t have this lens 20 years ago,” he said. “Not very long ago in my career in New Jersey, when we were trying to figure out if there were health effects from hazardous waste sites, we had very limited measures of who’s exposed and to what they are exposed. This is a tremendous breakthrough. It could redirect environmental policy.”

Read the full article on biomonitoring at this link.