Scripps Howard News Service, Ken Cook
Published February 3, 2006
The government and major chemical companies are spending millions of dollars these days to find out how a family of chemicals involved in the production of Teflon and thousands of other nonstick consumer products has managed to get into the blood of 95 percent of all Americans tested. Virtually every baby born in this country is contaminated, we've recently learned, while still in the womb.
But the mystery worth paying attention to is why so many obvious and important questions were not asked decades ago, before these chemicals became the foundation of a multi-billion dollar industry that employs tens of thousands of people and underpins such instantly recognized brands as Scotchgard, Teflon, Gore-Tex and Stainmaster, to name a prominent few.
Why didn't the government know this stuff was in everyone's blood, infants included, until recently? Why didn't federal scientists have detailed health studies in hand long ago about the potential of these chemicals to cause cancer or birth defects, or interfere with hormone systems? Why did it take so long for regulators to learn that some of these substances apparently never break down in the environment, or that once in people, linger in our blood for years?
Why didn't we know nonstick chemicals were contaminating everything from hamburgers and french fries to eagles and whales? Then there's the Watergate question. What did the companies who make the nonstick chemicals know about all of this, and when did they know it?
The reason we're stuck with so many unanswered questions about nonstick pollutants is the outdated law that regulates industrial chemicals. The Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, passed in 1976, and it's a genuine antique. It is the only major environmental law that has not had a major, modernizing overhaul since it was originally passed. Industry loves it, and from their standpoint, what's not to love? Chemical companies had a big hand writing it in ways that severely limit the EPA's ability to assess chemical safety or take firm regulatory action when problems arise.
For example, pesticides are required to undergo an extensive battery of health and safety tests before they can be brought to the market. Under reforms adopted in 1996, bug and weed killers must be proven safe for infants and children, who are more sensitive to many toxic substances than adults. Not so for chemicals used in manufacturing or consumer products, or discharged into air or drinking water from factories. By law, those substances are routinely and swiftly approved with minimal health or safety testing.
Both types of chemicals can end up in people, and do. But if safety concerns arise with a pesticide, the government can automatically require more health tests or initiate regulatory action. That's why so many pesticides have been banned for use on specific foods - or taken off the market altogether.
It's a different story with industrial chemicals like PFOA, used to manufacture Teflon. PFOA is toxic, extraordinarily persistent, and has built up in all of us. In the world of chemical risk, that's a toxicological trifecta of trouble. As the law stands, EPA had few options except to initiate elaborate consultations with the PFOA industry, a process that can go on for years. The agency had to negotiate with companies to obtain PFOA information the industry should have been required to supply in the first place. No wonder, environmentalists say, TSCA really stands for Toxic Substances Conversation Act.
The problems with PFOA are now so numerous and worrisome that this conversation has taken a serious turn. Last week, the EPA announced a voluntary stewardship program for the PFOA industry, which DuPont, to its credit, was the first to join. Companies who sign up must agree to slash emissions of the chemical and its toxic cousins, and the PFOA in products, by 95 percent by 2010, with "virtual elimination" of contamination sources by 2015. A few days later, an independent panel of scientists convened by the EPA advised the agency to consider PFOA a "likely human carcinogen" and to take a close look at other health risks the chemical might pose.
The answers and the action are coming far too late to prevent any problems that might be caused by the PFOA that is already ubiquitous in the environment and in people, and will remain there for decades to come. But it's not too late for Congress to modernize our antiquated system of regulation, so that society is starts asking the right questions about industrial chemicals before they end up in our blood.
(Ken Cook is president of the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit environmental research and watchdog organization in Washington, D.C.)
This piece ran in the Ft. Wayne Journal-Gazette (Ind.).
