Every day I flip through about 180 RSS feeds, catching up on green news, business news, green business news, and, of course, The Onion. And every once in a while I come across a matched set of stories that either contradict each other, spell out a trend in the works, or perfectly illustrate a bigger-picture idea.
Today, I was fortunate enough to find not just one set, but two sets, and both aligned on the same topic. It's like the Internet was doing my job for me ...
It started out with the announcement that the EPA is
banning the pesticide carbofuran in food uses. Carbofuran is a highly toxic insecticide, and
according to the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA), one of the richest sources of information on all types of toxic chemicals, carbofuran is:
... acutely toxic to humans, and one granule of the product can kill a bird. Of all pesticides currently in use, carbofuran is one of the most highly toxic to birds. EPA's own estimates conclude that up to two million birds were killed each year by carbofuran before it was banned for all but emergency uses.
So, kudos to the EPA for finally banning it, even though the agency originally announced their intention
nearly a year ago, that's just the pace at which government moves sometimes.
The carbofuran ban is good news, of course, but what caught my eye was a
story from the Charleston, W. Va., Gazette, which leads off by saying "A U.S. ban on the use of carbofuran in food won't affect production of the pesticide at the Institute chemical plant because most of the product is shipped overseas, officials said Tuesday."
The article quotes James Fitzwater, a spokesman for FMC Corporation, the company that makes carbofuran under the trade name Furadan, as saying of the new EPA rules, "It's going to have no impact on the manufacture of this product. We have a very small market in the United States."
So despite known health issues and a ban on its use domestically, the U.S. is still OK with allowing the manufacture of carbofuran for export to other, less precautionary locales. It reminds me of the flip side of a theory in Mark Schapiro's book "
Exposed," in which, as a result of our lax chemical policies, the U.S. becomes a dumping ground for chemicals too toxic for use elsewhere. In the carbofuran instance, if not in many others, it seems we're a little bit ahead of some other countries.
The second story that caught my eye today had to do with PFOA, aka perfluorooctanoic acid, aka Teflon. The chemical is in the spotlight because researchers have published an article
in the journal Environmental Science and Technology looking at concentrations of PFOA in 23 public water systems in New Jersey. The researchers found that PFOA was present in 15 of 23 water systems (65 percent) they studied, and that five of those systems contained PFOA at levels high enough to cause potential health problems -- even though the level they set was significantly lower than the levels allowed by the EPA.
In a great overview of the research in Science News, Janet Raloff
writes that concentrations in human blood tend to be as much as 100 times higher than in water supplies, in part because "the nonstick agent itself sticks around a very, very long time -- potentially forever."
The PFOA news was followed by a short piece
from Newsday that "A lawsuit against DuPont Co. claiming its nonstick Teflon cookware coating could pose health risks to users has been dropped.... The case was dropped because if failed to convince the court it deserved class-action status."
What's the connection between these two stories? Other than they both deal with companies manufacturing hazardous chemicals -- which it's certainly in their legal right to do -- the stories highlight a weakness in our chemical policies. The way the U.S. has historically approached chemical regulations is a sort of "innocent until proven guilty" method, which as we see with the case of carbofuran, can take a year or longer to put in place even after being found guilty.
An alternative theory, one that has been adopted in some form or other by entities ranging from the
United Nations to the
city of San Francisco to personal care company
The Body Shop, is the Precautionary Principle, which in a nutshell reverses the equation: chemicals that could potentially harm people, animals, plants or the environment should not be put to use until they've been proven to be safe.
Much like trying to put the genie back in the bottle, reversing the course on what chemicals are allowed to be put to use in factories, on farms, and in products is going to be a tall order: As we found in our State of Green Business report this February, there are
more than 85,000 chemicals approved for use in the U.S. alone, with little to no safety testing applied before they reach the market.
And while I'm loath to look for progress simply for the sake of ending on a happy note, there have recently (in EPA terms, at least) been signs of progress on chemicals from the government. In 2007, the EPA unveiled its
ToxCast program, which aims to analyze chemicals in bulk to determine if categories of chemicals can be declared safe or unsafe en masse. It's still a far cry from the precautionary principle, but it's a step in the right direction.
