Forty-two billion pounds of chemicals enter American commerce daily — enough chemicals to fill up 623,000 tanker trucks every day, a string of trucks that could straddle the U.S. twice if placed end to end. The EPA has required testing on fewer than 200 of those substances.
Over the past decade, the chemical industry has been either the second or third biggest lobbying force on Capitol Hill, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Between 1996 and 2006, the industry made $35 million in contributions to federal election campaigns, and spent between $2 million and $5 million each year on lobbying in Washington (not including the significant amount of lobbying by the industry in state capitals).
The EU has begun screening tens of thousands of chemicals for their toxic properties — most of which are being sold in products in the United States. They estimate this will save $60 billion in health care costs over the next 30 years.
November 2007
Exposed
The global power struggle over poisonous products
By Mark Schapiro
America used to lead the world in protecting its citizens from environmental harm. No longer. Decades of chemical industry lobbying in Washington have eroded the government’s power to regulate toxic substances. Now, other countries are banning chemicals that Americans still use — forcing industry to create two product lines: hazard-free items for the European Union and toxin-filled versions of the same products for the U.S. and developing countries. In his new book, Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power, investigative journalist Mark Schapiro explores how this deadly discrepancy in health standards is shifting global economic power, placing Brussels — not Washington — in the driver’s seat. The following is an excerpt from Chapter 7: “Chemical Revolutions.”
One drizzly fall morning in Brussels, I followed a troupe of women on a visit to the European Parliament. They were a motley gathering of three generations from thirteen families — grandmothers, mothers and daughters — selected by the World Wildlife Fund International to have their blood tested for 107 different chemicals. They came to the Parliament, much like Americans go to Congress, to demand that their representatives act on the chemical risks that they confront every day.
Unlike machines, we humans are blessed with considerable power to influence the terms of our mortality. We introduce variation and toy with one or another of the factors that can speed the course of the inevitable. Smoke? Drink? Fly in an airplane? Drive a car? Run across the railroad tracks as a train approaches? It’s called risk. We calculate the odds and make a deal with fate. We have, in short, information as to the consequences of these actions, and we decide. The women in the Parliament that day wanted to increase their odds against hidden chemical risks.
All of the women looked vigorous and healthy, except for the intravenous stands rattling alongside them. Carrying these props of illness, the women passed through the Parliament like some specter of mortality from the world outside — which of course was the point. From each intravenous stand dangled a plasma bag filled with the blood from their bodies. Or it was meant to look like blood anyway. The World Wildlife Fund had chosen to test three generations because, according to the group’s bio monitoring coordinator, Karl Wagner, “there’s nothing more powerful than the family.”
Blood doesn’t lie. The largest number of chemicals — sixty-three — was found in the group of grandmothers. Given the length of time they had to accumulate exposure over the course of a lifetime, that perhaps was not surprising. The surprise, however, was that the next highest level was among their grandchildren, aged eleven to twenty, who were discovered to have accumulated fifty-nine different toxic chemicals in their short lifetimes. The biggest chemical load had skipped a generation — their mothers had forty-nine. Many of the chemicals were known by authorities in Europe and the United States to be possible contributors to cancer, neurological dysfunction, and possibly disruptive effects on the reproductive systems of the women still of childbearing age. Offspring of the women who came of age during the birth of the environmental movement — when awareness of unseen toxic triggers was just beginning — were showing exposure to a greater number of chemicals than their mothers.
The nature and amount of the chemicals found in the daughters was different from those found in their grandmothers. The former had more brominated flame retardants (PBDEs), the potential neurotoxin used to coat many electronic and other devices, and more of the plastic additive bisphenol A, suspected of mimicking estrogen and being carcinogenic. Wagner said the abundance of those substances was clearly a symptom of the modern proliferation of plastic. The grandmothers had more residues of pesticides and old industrial chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls, which continue to show up in people, wildlife, and soil years after they were banned in Europe (and the United States) for their carcinogenic and neurotoxic effects. Clearly, chemicals were finding their generational niche.
Afterward, I sat down with Eleonora Bruno, a nineteen-year-old Italian. She’d come to Brussels from Bari, Italy, along with her mother and grandmother. The twenty-four chemicals she had discovered in her blood included PBDEs, PCBs, organochlorine pesticides like DDT and a derivative of lindane, a pesticide which Mexico had put on a list of environmental war criminals. Others she discovered: a family of perfluorinated chemicals that are used as stain and water repellents for clothing and furniture and in nonstick cookware, and are known carcinogens; and artificial musk aromas contained in perfumes and soaps made from a synthetic substance called galaxolide, that scientists claim can reduce the ability of the body to expel other toxins.
Ms. Bruno had spoken with her doctor back in Italy about her chemical burden, and the doctor had shared her concerns of declining fertility rates among many women she was seeing, and their possible links to chemical exposure. Later I called Ms. Bruno’s doctor, Donatella Caserta, who is director of the physiology and pathology unit at the Center for Human Reproduction at the University of Rome; she had volunteered to consult with the World Wildlife Fund in Italy. Dr. Caserta told me that it is difficult to predict what precise effects those chemicals might have on Ms. Bruno or anybody else carrying such a toxic burden (meaning, most of us). But what is clear is that chemicals interact with the body in multifarious ways: Some have similar molecular structures to the body’s own hormones and insinuate themselves directly into the endocrine system; they mimic the body’s own natural chemical messengers. Others lodge in the hospitable environment of fatty tissue; petrochemicals — that is, those made from a petroleum base — penetrate the oil-based membranes of the cells. However their mode of entry, once in the body they may wreak their destructive powers, often in concert with other synthetic substances, decades from now. Or they may not. There is much we still don’t know about how chemicals work in the body, but scientists have been able to identify their potentially toxic effects, and symptoms that would be consistent with those effects.
Caserta oversees a research division at the hospital that investigates how chemicals act in the bodies of young adults. “What we know,” she said, “is that we’re seeing chemicals that are not an integral part of our body. We know we are seeing higher rates of infertility, lower sperm counts, reproductive-system distortions. We know that there is evidence suggesting chemicals can act as endocrine disrupters. We know that the amount of these types of chemicals is rising in the blood. What we need to know now is what the real action these substances are having on the human body.”
What has been discovered in the blood of Europeans has its almost perfect echo in what is also being discovered in Americans. Shortly after the women’s visit to Brussels, the Center for Disease Control’s National Survey on Family Growth concluded that the fastest growing segment of the population with “impaired fecundity”— i.e., infertility, an inability to conceive of or carry a child — is women under the age of twenty-five, Eleonora Bruno’s age group. Many scientists speculated that the infertility spike could be due, at least partly, to the abundance of chemicals to which the group is exposed: neither genetics nor lifestyle is enough on its own to explain the jump. The CDC itself had released findings in 2005 from a comprehensive survey of Americans dispersed across the population who were registering the presence of at least 148 chemicals in their blood, a similar chemical mix to that which had been found in the blood of Europeans.
In 2005 and 2006 it seemed as if an iridescent light was shining from all those hidden ingredients now circulating in our veins. The Environmental Working Group conducted tests on the umbilical cords of ten infants and discovered the presence of likely carcinogenic, endocrine-disrupting, and neurotoxic chemicals that passed from mothers to their developing fetuses through the placenta. Among them were the perfluorinated substances used in nonstick cookware and plastic packaging, and those PBDE flame retardants that Europe had proposed banning at the POPS conference. Greenpeace UK released a study showing chemicals in the umbilical cord blood of European infants, many of the same chemicals that had been seen in American infants; Italian politicians agreed to have their blood monitored by scientists associated with Greenpeace Italy; citizens of Washington State were found by the Toxic Free Legacy Coalition to have levels of chemical residue approaching and/or exceeding levels that the EPA terms “safe.” The veteran journalist Bill Moyers had samples taken for a documentary, Trade Secrets, and discovered 84 chemical substances in his blood, including dioxins, PCBs, and the endocrine-disrupting phthalate DEHP. I myself had a strand of hair analyzed for mercury, at a booth sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health during a conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists — and discovered it was on the low end of high concern.
It was a season for getting acquainted with our bodies’ synthetic cocktail, and the evidence in our blood tells the story: we are marinating in a chemical soup. Chemicals, it turns out, are being tested — on us, in real time. Bio-monitoring enables us to understand how we are the “blind” in this grand experiment, an experiment in which there is no comparative “control.” And while exposure levels are essentially the same on both sides of the Atlantic, there is far more than an ocean of difference in the response.
Mark Schapiro is editorial director of the Center for Investigative Reporting. His new book, Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power (Chelsea Green) is currently available in bookstores. For more information, including an interactive world tour map of the discrepancies in toxic chemical regulation, visit the Center for Investigative Reporting’s website.
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