If the average American knew just how unregulated the chemical industry is in this country, there would be an epidemic of adult-onset thumb-sucking as people crawled under their beds with an organic cotton blankie and refused to come out.
If I told you about a nation that, in an effort to cater to business interests, sacrifices common sense and consumer safety on the alter on the free market in the process of “regulating” an industry that can potentially kill their customers, you would think it insane. But that is precisely the way our country regulates the chemical industry: exactly backwards.
Since the passage of the benign-sounding Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, banning and/or restricting chemicals is extremely difficult. That law, the nations chemical policy, grandfathered in about 62,000 chemicals and compounds that were in commercial use at that time. Chemicals developed after the law went into effect did not have to undergo safety testing. Instead of oversight, chemical companies were entrusted with the task of self regulating. They were asked – but not mandated – to report toxicity information to the government, and the government would decide if further testing would be necessary.
In the 34 years since Gerald Ford signed the bill into law, the EPA has required additional studies for a mere 200 chemical compounds that are components of consumer products – a tiny fraction of the 80,000 chemicals in use in this country – and the government has had little or no information on most of those chemicals. Manufacturers are ‘required’ to report to the feds any new chemical they intend to market – but the TSCA of 1976 exempts from public disclosure any information that could harm their bottom line.
The act is so pro-business and anti consumer that only five chemicals have been banned since the TSCA became law.
The barriers to regulating the chemical industry are so high that the EPA has been unable to ban asbestos, even though we know that asbestos is a carcinogen, and has been banned in more than 30 countries. Instead of regulating, the EPA is hogtied, forced to rely on the chemical industry to voluntarily stop producing and using suspect chemicals.
If you have been operating under the assumption that the chemicals you buy to unclog your drain, scrub your tub, clean your counters, etc have been tested for safety, you are woefully mistaken.
In this country, regulation happens after the fact, and as they made their way to the exits the Bushies made it just a little worse, tilting the playing field even further in the favor of business and against the rest of the country, scrambling to put in place rules to further hinder the efforts of the EPA to regulate chemical substances. The rules the Bushies crammed through, of course, had the unqualified support from business groups, who argued that assessing risk of chemical substances should be done by analysis of “industry to industry evidence” of the effects of chemical exposure to employees during their working lives. The net effect was to make regulation of chemicals even more difficult, and put stumbling blocks in the path of worker protections.
I told you it’s nuts the way safety has been suborned to capitalism. Do you believe me yet?
The nation’s chemical policy was crafted nearly 34 years ago, and placed such an emphasis on secrecy, ostensibly to protect trade secrets in an extremely competitive industry, that consumers have no rights to know what we are exposed to. Those of us who are critical of the policy argue that the secrecy has gotten out of control, to the point that it is impossible for regulators to regulate chemicals and avoid potential dangers, or even allow consumers to know what substances they may have been exposed to or make informed decisions about what they might want to avoid.
Fortunately, President Obama and his EPA chief, Lisa Jackson, are trying to do something about it.
Government officials, scientists and environmental groups say that manufacturers have exploited weaknesses in the law to claim secrecy for an ever-increasing number of chemicals. In the past several years, 95 percent of the notices for new chemicals sent to the government requested some secrecy, according to the Government Accountability Office. About 700 chemicals are introduced annually.
Some companies have successfully argued that the federal government should not only keep the names of their chemicals secret but also hide from public view the identities and addresses of the manufacturers.
“Even acknowledging what chemical is used or what is made at what facility could convey important information to competitors, and they can start to put the pieces together,” said Mike Walls, vice president of the American Chemistry Council.
Although a number of the roughly 17,000 secret chemicals may be harmless, manufacturers have reported in mandatory notices to the government that many pose a “substantial risk” to public health or the environment. In March, for example, more than half of the 65 “substantial risk” reports filed with the Environmental Protection Agency involved secret chemicals.
“You have thousands of chemicals that potentially present risks to health and the environment,” said Richard Wiles, senior vice president of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization that documented the extent of the secret chemicals through public-records requests from the EPA. “It’s impossible to run an effective regulatory program when so many of these chemicals are secret.”
Of the secret chemicals, 151 are made in quantities of more than 1 million tons a year and 10 are used specifically in children’s products, according to the EPA.
The identities of the chemicals are known to a handful of EPA employees who are legally barred from sharing that information with other federal officials, state health and environmental regulators, foreign governments, emergency responders and the public.
This is rather a big deal to me. Healthcare workers have been known to fall ill after treating patients who have been exposed to chemical spills, only to have the manufacturers refuse to reveal all of the ingredients in a compound they were exposed to because the information is ‘proprietary.’
“I’d really like to know what went wrong,” said Cathy Behr, a Colorado nurse who was poisoned by a patient who presented in her ER with chemical exposure. Behr nearly died as a result. She recovered, minimal thanks to the chemical manufacturer, since it only released the information it was required to release and kept its chemical formula secret. Behr, 57, still has respiratory problems, and a grudge. “As citizens in a democracy, we ought to know what’s happening around us.”
Yes, we should. Congress will rewrite our nation’s chemical policy this year. Make sure your elected representatives know that you want some of that transparency and openness we have been hearing so much about applied to it.
