MANY Americans assume that the chemicals
in their shampoos, detergents and other consumer products have been
thoroughly tested and proved to be safe.
This assumption is wrong.
Unlike pharmaceuticals or pesticides,
industrial chemicals do not have to be tested before they are put on
the market. Under the law regulating chemicals, producers are only
rarely required to provide the federal government with the
information necessary to assess safety.
Regulators, doctors, environmentalists and
the chemical industry agree that the country’s main chemical safety
law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, needs fixing. It is the only
major environmental statute whose core provisions have not been
reauthorized or substantively updated since its adoption in the
1970s. They do not agree, however, on who should have to prove that
a chemical is safe.
Currently this burden rests almost
entirely on the federal government. Companies have to alert the
Environmental Protection Agency before manufacturing or importing
new chemicals. But then it is the E.P.A.’s job to review academic or
industry data, or use computer modeling, to determine whether a new
chemical poses risks. Companies are not required to provide any
safety data when they notify the agency about a new chemical, and
they rarely do it voluntarily, although the E.P.A. can later request
data if it can show there is a potential risk. If the E.P.A. does
not take steps to block the new chemical within 90 days or suspend
review until a company provides any requested data, the chemical is
by default given a green light.
The law puts federal authorities in a
bind. “It’s the worst kind of Catch-22,” said
Dr. Richard
Denison, senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
“Under this law, the E.P.A. can’t even require testing to determine
whether a risk exists without first showing a risk is likely.”
As a result, the overwhelming majority of
chemicals in use today have never been independently tested for
safety.
In its history, the E.P.A. has mandated
safety testing for only a small percentage of the 85,000 industrial
chemicals available for use today. And once chemicals are in use,
the burden on the E.P.A. is so high that it has succeeded in banning
or restricting only five substances, and often only in specific
applications: polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, hexavalent
chromium, asbestos and chlorofluorocarbons.
Part of the growing pressure to update
federal rules on chemical safety comes from advances in the science
of biomonitoring, which tells us more about the chemicals to which
we are exposed daily, like the bisphenol A (BPA) in can linings and
hard plastics, the flame retardants in couches, the stain-resistant
coatings on textiles and the nonylphenols in detergents, shampoos
and paints. Hazardous chemicals have become so ubiquitous that
scientists now talk about babies being born pre-polluted, sometimes
with hundreds of synthetic chemicals showing up in their blood.
It often takes a crisis to draw attention
to how little the government knows about industrial chemicals in
circulation. After the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010,
at least two million gallons of chemical dispersants were spread to
break up the slick. But federal officials could not say they were
safe because minimal testing had been done.
The current presumption that chemicals are
“safe until proven dangerous” stands in marked contrast to how
pharmaceuticals and pesticide companies are handled. Companies
making these products have to generate extensive data demonstrating
the safety of pharmaceuticals or pesticides before they are sold.
This was not always the case.
Pharmaceutical companies used to be able to sell drugs with minimal
prior testing, but that changed after a drug called Thalidomide,
given in the 1950s to pregnant women for morning sickness, was found
to cause severe birth defects the public outcry helped push the
medical field to take a precautionary approach to introducing new
drugs.
Federal reform of the toxic substances act may
be coming. Last week, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New
Jersey, and Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York,
introduced a bill called the Safe Chemicals Act of 2013, which would
require the chemical industry to demonstrate that a chemical is safe in
order for it to be sold. The bill, which has more than 25 Democratic
co-sponsors, would put limits on trade secret practices and requires
industry to reduce use of the chemicals designated by the E.P.A. as
being of “greatest concern” because they are most toxic.
The bill has strong support from
environmentalists but opposition from the chemical industry. It has some
similarities to rules that went into effect in the European Union in
2007.
Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana,
is expected to introduce a competing bill that is likely to win the
support of the chemical industry. While details about the bill are
sparse, it aims to be less of a burden on industry. It would probably
not require prior testing on many chemicals, and it would demand less
data of companies than would Mr. Lautenberg’s bill.
The competing bills may end up splitting the
Senate down party lines, which could doom reform altogether.
In the absence of federal action, more than 20
states have created their own toxic-substances programs to police
chemical safety. Many business owners say this trend is creating a
confusing patchwork. Health and environmental advocates counter that,
pending effective federal reform, these programs are better than nothing
at all.
For now, consumers and companies looking for
safer products are largely on their own.
Ian Urbina is an investigative reporter for The New
York Times.