This week, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) National Drinking Water Advisory Council met for a three-day meeting (July 21-23) reviewing the new drinking water strategy proposed by EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson.

EPA’s visionary plan includes four principles to provide greater protection of drinking water:

• Address contaminants as groups rather than one at a time so that enhancement of drinking water protection can be achieved cost-effectively.
• Foster development of new drinking water technologies to address health risks posed by a broad array of contaminants.
• Use the authority of multiple statutes to protect drinking water.
• Partner with states to share more complete data from monitoring of public water systems (PWS).

EWG applauds the renewed focus on drinking water quality under the new administration and the agency’s plans to explore various pathways for protecting our water supplies from pollution.

The advisory council discussions tackled a broad range of water topics, with a special focus on using EPA’s authority under several existing environmental statutes – the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and the Clean Water Act (CWA). The goal is to prevent pollutant runoff into source waters as well as to minimize or eliminate contaminant discharges from agricultural, industrial and urban sources.

EWG’s National Tapwater Quality Database is a Model

EWG research on tap water quality, presented in our National Drinking Water database, has been instrumental in driving forward the national debate on safe drinking water policy. EWG assembled an unprecedented database of 20 million drinking water quality tests performed by water utilities since 2004. Our analysis revealed a total of 316 contaminants in water supplied to 256 million Americans in 48,000 communities in 45 states. Among the contaminants were 202 chemicals that are not subject to any government regulation or safety standards for drinking water.

The National Drinking Water database developed by EWG presents a working model for making information about tap water quality accessible to everyone – state and federal drinking water authorities, the general public, water utilities and researchers. We eagerly support the fourth principle in the EPA new water strategy that would lead to sharing water quality monitoring data from public water systems. Typically, this information is maintained by state water offices, which collect the results from the utilities to enforce state and federal water quality standards.

Moving forward – or back?

Throughout most of the 20^th century, Americans enjoyed a record of improvement in drinking water quality and safety. But with a growing population, urban sprawl and intensive, expanding agricultural activities, source water quality has been negatively affected, threatening to reverse great public health gains made with the historical development of treatment facilities for drinking water and wastewater. Tap water quality cannot be taken for granted. More and more water utilities are having to turn to water sources compromised by various forms of pollution as water scarcity becomes a fact of our daily lives. Unless source water protection becomes a priority for government, businesses, communities and individuals, tap water safety around the country would suffer.

Join EPA’s Web Dialogue about Water Quality on July 28^th & 29^th

Like air quality, drinking water quality is an environmental issue that affects every single person in the country. We are all stakeholders in the government’s decisions that determine water policy. To encourage public participation in the development of its new strategy for addressing drinking water contaminants, the EPA is hosting a web dialogue on July 28 and 29 titled “Drinking Water Strategy:  A New Framework for Addressing Contaminants as Groups.” The dialogue is free and open to the public. You can register here.

Please spread the word by sharing this announcement with others. We encourage Enviroblog readers to join in the dialogue, offer your opinions, share your insights and make the voice of your community heard in this important national conversation.

After all, tap water is something that we depend on every single day.

By Dave Andrews, Ph.D., EWG senior scientist, and Nils Bruzelius, executive editor

It took almost a month. After weeks of complaints that BP and its supplier were stonewalling requests for a complete ingredients list for the dispersants being dumped on the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Environmental Protection Agency posted the information with no fanfare on its website Wednesday (June 9). A slightly different version of the list appeared on the website of Nalco Energy Services, which makes the stuff.

There were no great surprises, but releasing the information when you’re a million gallons into the game made a mockery of any effort to research and evaluate safer alternatives, efficacy and long term effects. Instead of more comprehensive premarket safety testing, the experiment is being run on a monumental scale in the Gulf of Mexico. Now all we can do is wait and see what the long-term impact will be on marine life, the larger environment and on people who come in contact with the contaminated waters.

Greenwire, Energy and Environment Daily’s online environmental news outlet, reported that two of the hazardous ingredients in Nalco’s Corexit 9500 formula had been disclosed previously. A third one disclosed Wednesday turns out to be dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate, a detergent, which appears on both lists under a different name.

Nalco had earlier placed the ingredients in Corexit 9500 under a cloak of “confidential business information” or CBI, which under current law barred EPA from releasing the details on the grounds that they would give away a valuable trade secret to the company’s competitors.

But as Greenwire noted, the mere listing of the ingredients didn’t include one piece of potentially important information: how much of each one is contained in the Corexit 9500 formula. It quoted Nalco spokesman Charlie Pajor as saying:

“Having the full ingredients out there is only part of the information that someone wanting to copy the product would need.”

That was an interesting admission in light of the chemical industry’s insistence that it needs the right to claim CBI, which keeps the public from learning the chemical identity of 17,000 chemicals on EPA’s inventory, in order to protect manufacturers’ trade secrets. It makes you wonder whether disclosure of these chemical identities, which is vitally important to cleanup workers in the Gulf — and to emergency responders, research scientists and the public – is really such a threat to these companies’ intellectual property, and their profits.

The release of the Corexit ingredients came on the same day that The Associated Press published a nice bit of reporting on BP’s 2009 response plan for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill, documenting that the plan was “riddled with omissions and glaring errors.”

As a prime example, BP listed Professor Peter Lutz of the University of Miami as a wildlife specialist whom the company could consult if the worst happened. There’s just one little problem, AP reported. Lutz died four years ago. And he hadn’t been in Miami for 16 years before that.

BP’s 582-page regional spill plan and its 52-page site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig also had wrong names and phone numbers for other specialists and listed marine mammal stranding network offices that are no longer functioning, AP reported. Not to mention:

” There are other wildly false assumptions in the documents. BP’s proposed method to calculate spill volume judging by the darkness of the oil sheen is way off. The internationally accepted formula would produce estimates 100 times higher.”

Nice work, AP!

Over the past decade, dozens of imports from China and other countries have been recalled because they were laced with lead, cadmium and other clearly hazardous chemicals.

Today, federal and state regulators are focusing on the subtler dangers of other chemicals in common consumer goods. As Congress debates how to reform the 33-year-old federal law on toxic chemicals controls, it’s crucial that the resulting law empower regulators to bar contaminant-laden imported products as well as those made in the U.S. Otherwise, the deck will be stacked against some American manufacturers and in favor of their overseas competitors who ignore concerns about the substances in question.

Take the case of polybrominated diphenylethers (PBDEs), a family of toxic chemicals used since the 1970’s as fire retardants in foam and plastics. Over the past decade, PBDEs have been found in many Americans’ bodies and even in polar bears. Researchers have reported that a single day’s exposure to these chemicals can cause permanent brain damage in laboratory animals.

The Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 (TSCA) grandfathered PBDEs. Since then, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), frustrated in its efforts to regulate dangerous PBDEs out of use, has negotiated voluntary phase-out agreements with U.S. manufacturers for all 3 formulations – penta-, octa- and decaBDE. The first two mixtures are no longer manufactured in the U.S. or imported here. The form known as deca- is in a three-year phase-out that began last December.

However, because the law makes no mention of controlling risky chemicals by means of voluntary legal pacts as opposed to regulations, which carry the force of law, EPA appears to have no authority to bar finished products containing PBDEs from being imported into the U.S. These chemicals and products incorporating them are still being made in China and other foreign countries. Furniture imports, for instance, can legally contain these hazardous chemicals.

Another notorious example: perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), also known as “C8,” a toxic synthetic used to manufacture Teflon and other non-stick coatings. When overheated, non-stick pans can release fumes containing PFOA and other perfluorocarbons (PFCs). Pollution from factories handling PFOA has proved a major health concern in affected communities. Because of widespread use of Teflon-coated cookware and fabrics, nearly all Americans tested by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have measureable PFOA and other PFCs in their bodies.

In 2006, EPA and eight major companies in the industry agreed to eliminate factory emissions and product content of PFOA and related PFCs by 2015. But foreign-made cookware with non-stick coatings and other non-stick products are readily available in American stores. There is no way to know whether these products contain PFOA. And there appears to be little EPA could do, because the PFOA almost certainly comes from foreign companies that have not agreed to the phase-out.

In short, the current situation is dangerous for American consumers and unfair to American companies and workers.

A bill now being drafted by key House leaders Henry Waxman, D-CA, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Bobby Rush, D-IL, consumer protection subcommittee chairman, would clarify EPA’s powers to restrict chemicals in imported finished goods.

This would improve U.S. manufacturers’ competitive position in the global marketplace. In the fierce competition for retail sales, Chinese companies and other foreign manufacturers would no longer enjoy an advantage over U.S. companies that try to do the right thing.

We believe this proposed reform is long overdue. American manufacturers shouldn’t be subject to more constraints than foreign companies. Foreign imports shouldn’t be riskier than U.S.-made products. Consumers want good values, but they also expect American store shelves to be filled with safe goods.

After spending nearly a decade on the sidelines as public concern grew over contamination of U.S. drinking water, the Environmental Protection Agency has rolled out plans to step up and streamline its efforts to make sure that tap water is safe.

EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson outlined the new approach on March 22 before a conference of metropolitan water suppliers in Washington, DC, saying the agency will not seek new regulations but will use “our existing regulations more efficiently and more effectively.” The four key components of the EPA strategy are to:

• assess and regulate contaminants in related groups rather than one-by-one;
• promote development of new and better water treatment technologies;
• expand use of powers already granted under several federal statutes, including pesticide and chemicals regulation laws, to protect drinking water; and
• build partnerships with state and local authorities, which directly monitor and regulate drinking water quality, and collect data from them on an ongoing basis.

The agency also said it will beginning the process of setting stricter safety standards for four well-known carcinogens that turn up widely in drinking water.

“It’s an approach that works within existing law and capitalizes on the idea of new innovations,” Jackson told members of the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies.

Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), welcomed the EPA initiative but emphasized that federal law still falls well short of what’s needed to guarantee that drinking water is safe, especially for children. Late last year EWG released an unprecedented database of 20 million municipal water testing results it had assembled. That data showed that since 2004, the drinking water of 256 million Americans in 48,000 communities had contained measurable amounts of known contaminants. The EWG database found that a total of 316 separate contaminants had been detected during routine water testing in 45 states, among them 202 that are not currently subject to any regulation or safety standards

“It’s been a long time coming, but it’s good to see Administrator Jackson once again taking action to redress a decade of regulatory neglect,” Cook said. EPA last issued new rules for drinking water quality in 2001, when it set a standard for arsenic contamination after a long-drawn-out regulatory process.

The fundamental problem, said Richard Wiles, EWG Senior Vice President for Policy and Communications, is that the Safe Drinking Water Act compromises on safety by requiring regulators to adjust their safety standards based on the costs and availability of existing water treatment technologies.

“The law requires the EPA to work backwards to find a level of contamination that the agency doesn’t necessarily think is safe, but that instead is feasible to achieve,” said Wiles said. “This is the core issue that needs to be addressed.

EWG officials, however, praised the EPA’s decision to regulate pollutants in groups, replacing the current system of evaluating them one-by-one in what is often a costly and years-long process.

Ken Cook also took note of the agency’s new commitment to address the neglected problem of source water protection – ensuring that chemicals do not foul aquifers, rivers and lakes. EWG’s report last year noted that utilities spend more than $4 billion a year on chemicals used to treat drinking water, 20 times more than the federal government spends on preventing drinking water pollution.

“The costs of providing safe drinking water would be far lower if we could just keep toxic chemicals out of water supplies in the first place,” said Cook. “We hope that the administration, EPA and Congress will focus on that part of the problem even as EPA steps up its regulatory efforts.”

EPA’s Jackson said that the agency would use its powers under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) and the Toxic Substances Control Act, in addition to the Clean Drinking Water Act, in its effort to better protect water quality “and provide relevant health effects and exposure data.” She noted that EPA regulators enforcing all three laws had tended to work “in silos,” rather than sharing data and collaborating in areas where their efforts overlap.

The four cancer-causing chemicals targeted by EPA for tougher regulation are:

• tetrachloroethylene
• trichloroethylene
• acrylamide
• epichlorohydrin

The first two are industrial solvents widely used in the automotive industry, metalworking, rubber processing, some textile manufacturing. Tetrachloroethylene is also used in dry cleaning. Both tetrachloroethylene and trichloroethylene are already subject to federal water quality standards. EWG’s database showed that tens of millions of people in 27 states have been supplied at some point with water that contained the chemical at levels above the legal limit, and in 40 states at levels that exceeded recommended health guidelines. Trichloroethylene was found above the enforceable limit in 18 states and above recommended health guidelines in 39 states. Both substances are suspected carcinogens and have been shown to cause a wide variety of other serious health effects.

Ironically, acrylamide and epichlorohydrin are deliberately added to some drinking water supplies as part of the water treatment process. The EPA said it would collaborate with universities and the private sector to try to develop better treatment processes that rely less on these and other toxic substances.

The EPA said it would begin the process of setting new standards for the two industrial chemicals “within the next year.” Revising the standards for acrylamide and epichlorohydrin “will follow later.” Meanwhile, the agency said it is continuing an ongoing process to update or set drinking water standards for 14 other contaminants, including lead, copper, chromium, fluoride, arsenic, the pesticide atrazine and perchlorate, an ingredient in rocket fuel and explosives. Some advocates have criticized the slow pace of EPA’s work on revising these standards.

The Water Administrators Association said in a statement that it “is encouraged to learn about the new strategies to protect drinking water announced by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson at our Water Policy Conference. We look forward to working with EPA on the details of these principles to develop new technologies and more complete monitoring data that can make drinking water protection more effective and cost-efficient.”

In 2004, in a study that was not comprehensive or scientifically rigorous, the EPA said that hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) of coalbed methane wells to extract embedded natural gas deposits “poses little or no threat” to drinking water supplies.The study included no testing, however. It examined only drilling of coalbed methane wells even though fracking is used in virtually all natural gas and oil wells. Coalbed methane wells are a small percentage of the total. An EPA whistleblower later denounced the study for its shoddy science and industry-influenced review panel.

Since then, natural gas companies have embarked on massive drilling projects from coast to coast, peppering the landscape with toxic waste pits and derricks and promising an vast new supply of domestic, relatively low-carbon energy.

Drillers have recently targeted the Marcellus Shale, a vast formation that lies below a wide swath of the Northeast from upstate New York to West Virginia, some of it overlapping watersheds that supply drinking water to tens of millions of people in New York City, Philadelphia and other major metropolitan areas.

Despite industry assurances that the process is no threat to drinking water supplies, a growing number of people from Pennsylvania to Colorado have reported that their well water became undrinkable – and in some cases flammable – after gas drillers used fracking in the vicinity. The technology involves injecting a potent concoction of water, sand and toxic chemicals into wells at high pressure to open up fissures and release the trapped gas.

Gasland, a documentary film by Pennsylvanian Josh Fox that was featured this week at Washington’s Environmental Film Festival, documented multiple cases of water contamination linked to fracking. Last year, the independent journalism website Pro Publica reported that it found more than 1,000 similar cases of contamination.

Last year, major drilling companies repeatedly rebuffed requests from Environmental Working Group (EWG) for details of the chemicals used in fracking. In February, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) asked eight leading drilling companies for similar data and disclosed that two of them had fracked with diesel, a toxic substance that requires a permit under federal law. It is unclear whether the companies obtained the necessary permits. The House of Representatives inserted language in the 2010 federal budget urging the EPA to study fracking’s potential risks.

The EPA said it was “in the very early stages” of designing its research program and gave no timetable for its completion. It said in a statement that it would seek input from all stakeholders and its own Science Advisory Board in shaping the study.

EWG’s Richard Wiles, senior vice president for policy and communications, applauded EPA’s announcement but said much more definitive actions are necessary to protect water supplies until the questions about fracking’s risks have been answered.

“It’s crazy to drill tens of thousands of wells in watersheds serving millions of people until we know whether these irreplaceable aquifers are in danger,” Wiles said. “We just have to say NO to drilling in these areas until we have all the facts, and right now we just have no idea what the consequences could be.”

He also called on Congress to repeal the exemptions that oil and gas companies have from most major federal environmental laws and regulations, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. Those provisions specifically exempt fracturing from federal oversight unless it involves diesel.

“This technology works by injecting into the ground a scary mix of chemicals that include known carcinogens and neurotoxins in combinations that industry has tried to keep secret,” Wiles said. “We can’t just blithely assume that this is going to be risk-free. We’ve got to stop drilling in areas where water supplies could be in danger until we have the answers.”

Responding to the EPA’s announcement, the American Petroleum Institute, a leading industry trade group, said in a statement posted on its website that, “We expect the study to confirm what 60 years of experience and investigation have already demonstrated: that hydraulic fracturing is a safe and well understood technology for producing oil and natural gas.”

Gas from shale deposits currently provides 20 percent of the US natural gas supply and will account for 50 percent by 2035, according to estimates issued this month by IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates Inc., an energy consulting firm.

The US Environmental Protection Agency put out the word yesterday (March 15) that people who want to see its public inventory of industrial chemicals will no longer have to shell out their own money to get it. It’s a small but meaningful step on a longer and contentious road to give the public, first responders, workers and business people full access to information about the possible risks of substances that are all around us.

In recent meetings with EPA officials and Congressional aides, Environmental Working Group (EWG) Senior Scientist Dave Andrews, Ph.D., and others have pointed out that it didn’t make sense to force people to pay for information filed with EPA on the 84,000 registered chemicals. That inventory was established so that people who handle industrial chemicals, or live in communities where these synthetics were made or fabricated into other products, like cleaners and cookware, could find out whether accidental releases posed a health threat.

But even though the list was public information, to get it you had to pay $190 for a CD or $360 a year for a subscription to the semi-annual updates.

The inventory is available for free on EPA’s website and on Data.gov.

Now it’s up to EPA and Congress to confront the bigger issue — industry’s overuse of a loophole in the law that allows chemical makers to keep crucial information about many industrial chemicals out of the public eye entirely. In a report last December called “Off the Books: Industry’s Secret Chemicals,” Andrews documented that 17,000 of the substances on the EPA inventory are cloaked under claims of “confidential business information” (CBI).

For those 17,000 chemicals, EPA is not allowed to disclose information as basic as the identity of the product or information about its health hazards. Companies must submit that information to the agency, but EPA cannot even share it with first responders called to accidents or disasters that might expose them to unknown toxic substances. Over the last three decades, industry has stamped secrecy claims on two-thirds of all newly introduced chemicals.

EPA, which until recently rarely challenged industry’s secrecy claims, has announced that it will begin to take a closer look. In particular, it will not allow industry to withhold information indicating that a chemical poses a risk to health or the environment if that chemical is already listed on the public inventory.

That’s progress, too, but it still leaves a gaping hole in the system that’s supposed to shield us from toxic risks. EWG urges EPA to continue its efforts to curb abuse of confidentiality claims and calls on Congress to move quickly to replace the 30-year old Toxic Substances Control Act with an updated and effective Kid Safe Chemicals Act.

In a segment called Chemicals, innocent or guilty, Gupta, a physician and CNN’s chief medical correspondent,  said that Lautenberg’s aim is “changing the paradigm from innocent until proven guilty to guilty until proven innocent, in the sense that [a chemical] has to be tested before it can actually come to market.”

Click to see the video

“Pesticides are already treated that way,” Gupta said.  “Pharmaceuticals, already treated that way.  And at least with respect to kids, they want to make sure that any new potential exposures out there are tested for health effects before they ever come to market.”

Gupta reported that Lisa Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, had told him the administration expected to support Lautenberg’s Kid-Safe bill.   Gupta, a physician, said that although the chemical industry was engaging in “pushback,” that Lautenberg’s measure “seems to have some momentum, at least with regard to kids.”

Gupta plans an in-depth look at the dangers of environmental pollution in a documentary, Toxic Towns USA, to debut at 8 p.m. April 24, Earth Day.   The documentary focuses on the struggles of a Louisiana town surrounded by chemical plants and examines what many believe are outdated laws that make new chemicals ‘innocent until proven guilty.’”

Here’s the story. When a chemical manufacturer finds out that one of its products “presents a substantial risk of injury to health or the environment,”  the company is required under federal law to give that information immediately to the US Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA, in turn, makes it public – sort of. Companies file these reports regularly, and they like to claim that ALL their health and safety studies pointing to chemical hazards are publicly available.

Except that (are you sitting down?) until now, companies have routinely been allowed to keep secret the actual identity of the dangerous chemical. The only exception: a handful EPA officials get to know the dangerous substance’s name. This big fat loophole has been drilled, not surprisingly, under the rubric of “confidential business information.” Or “CBI.”

In other words, you could be staring at a study showing that a chemical has very nasty effects, but you’d be completely blocked from finding out what that chemical is. You’d be allowed to find out only the class of chemicals to which the mystery stuff belongs. That makes the information pretty useless.

And here’s the best, or worst, part. EPA has allowed companies to keep the name of the harmful chemical secret even if its name and chemical identity are already public information — listed on EPA’s public inventory of some 65,000 registered chemicals. And no one, no one, has been checking to see if industry efforts to cloak its health and safety data under the veil of CBI involves chemicals on the public list. (Don’t forget that there are about 17,000 other chemicals whose identity is kept completely secret under the hopelessly inadequate Toxic Substances Control Act, which is often known by its acronym, TSCA, pronounced “tosca.”)

EPA and the chemical companies have been doing business this way for years, but the agency announced on Thursday (Jan. 21) that that’s about to change. It issued a public notice that, starting immediately, it plans to check all CBI claims attached to the “substantial risk” notices and to reject the secrecy claims when the chemical is on the public inventory.

“It’s about time,” said Richard Wiles, senior vice president for policy and communications at Environmental Working Group, which recently issued a report on industry’s blatant misuse of “CBI” to keep crucial information about potentially harmful chemicals from the public. “It’s outrageous that industry has been able to deliberately hide the information that lets people know which of the chemicals they’re exposed are dangerous.”

EWG Senior Scientist David Andrews, who researched companies’ use of CBI claims to eviscerate the law’s disclosure requirements, noted that in the first nine months of 2009, half of industry’s risk notices to EPA were filed under CBI claims that kept the identity of the chemical hidden from the public. “It’s incredible that we’ve had a government oversight program that doesn’t even cross-check if a chemical suspected of presenting a significant risk should be publicly named,” Andrews said. “It is dangerous for everyone. Reforms that lead to greater transparency are welcome, but this recent EPA action is a baby step, and we need to move by leaps and bounds to curb the overuse of confidentiality.”

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.”

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??