by Carolyn Raffensperger
Director, Science & Environmental Health Network
So much of our history during the rapid evolution of the chemical industry feels like a timeline of descansos, those roadside crosses and wreaths that commemorate traffic deaths. The markers of loss and death from chemicals take the form of elegiac books, heroic struggles, catastrophes, and prosaic legislation. You know these markers — Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Lois Gibbs’s work at Love Canal, Bhopal, the Exxon Valdez spill, and the policy responses to them: the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Toxic Substances Control Act, Superfund, and more.
The policies were based on certain assumptions about the science of toxic chemicals that have turned out to be false–for example, that the dose makes the poison or that we can always measure and manage risk. The work of Theo Colborn and others has demonstrated that many chemicals act as endocrine disruptors or neurotoxins and that timing of exposure can be more important than the size of the dose.
Policy makers have also assumed that the role of law is to protect the economy so that the economy could protect everything else. That is, the market should be able to handle environmental problems through accurate pricing mechanisms; a growth economy is essential for national wellbeing; and future generations will always be richer than preceding generations. These assumptions are now coming under fire as well.
The Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 is the law that covers production and distribution of industrial chemicals. This law was passed to ensure that chemicals sold and used in the United States do not pose an unreasonable risk to human health and the environment.
Thirty years after the passage of TSCA we can declare it a failure. Before TSCA, industry was using about 62,000 chemicals. TSCA grandfathered in these chemicals, giving them a pass by not requiring testing for their environmental or human health affects. Those grandfathered, untested chemicals still constitute 92 percent of the chemicals produced today at more than a million pounds per year.
Manufacturers of new chemicals don’t have to provide toxicological data before they are marketed unless EPA requires it. This means that the burden is on the public and our public agencies to show significant risk before chemicals can be regulated. But they can’t demonstrate risk without data that they don’t have. Thus we have added about 20,000 new chemicals to the roster in the last 30 years, many dramatically lacking in safety data.
SEHN and many of our nonprofit colleagues have been working to envision and enact policies that are based on different presumptions, such as:
Exposures to chemicals are cumulative and their effects cannot be validly identified chemical by chemical.
The responsibility for testing and disclosing data must be on industry rather than the public or its agencies. This means we must reverse the burden of proof.
Preventing harm rather than managing risk is the only just way of dealing with problems.
Searching for and choosing better alternatives through Green Chemistry is a key method for preventing harm.
The economy does not reflect the true costs of bad policy. The costs of damage have the perverse consequence of adding to the GNP rather than showing up as true costs. Moreover, the environmental damage falls disproportionately on poor people and communities that have already suffered too much.
Ten years ago SEHN convened the Wingspread conference on the precautionary principle as a way of addressing the shortcomings of environmental law and policy. We, along with many colleagues, are now taking the next steps to carry out the precautionary principle and guarantee a healthy planet for future generations. You will read about two efforts in this newsletter: the first, SEHN’s comments on the Kid Safe Chemicals Act of 2008, outlines how we see the strengths and weaknesses of a current effort by Congress to update TSCA; and the second, an update on our True Cost Clearinghouse, gives economic ammunition to communities calling for precautionary action. In the decades to come, may we erect markers of chemical policy success rather than descansos of loss.
