Momentum builds for tighter regulation of industrial chemicals

Amid growing concerns about the health effects of chemical exposure, the Obama administration has laid out a plan to strengthen federal regulation of the chemical industry.

In a Sept. 29 speech at the California Commonwealth Club, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Director Lisa Jackson called the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act an “inadequate tool” and presented a set of guidelines that she said should steer efforts to improve regulation of chemicals.

New chemical regulations could have special meaning in Michigan. Midland-based Dow Chemical (NYSE:DOW), the nation’s largest chemical company, is in negotiations with EPA officials over how to handle the company’s widespread contamination of the state’s largest watershed with industrial chemicals. In the Midland area, and in other industrial and post-industrial sites around the state, people are burdened with historic chemical contamination in the environment as they also encounter new chemicals in everyday items.

Unlike pharmaceutical chemicals, which are often only available by prescription and only after they are evaluated for safety by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and manufacturers are required to divulge information about possible side effects, industrial chemicals — found in plastics, food packaging, cleaning products, building materials, furniture, medical supplies and a host of consumer products — are generally not reviewed for safety by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“[W]e need to review all chemicals against safety standards that are based solely on considerations of risk — not economics or other factors ,” Jackson said, “[A]nd we must set these standards at levels that are protective of human health and the environment.

Although more than 80,000 chemicals have been manufactured, since the 1976 enactment of the Toxic Substances Control Act, EPA has only declared five unsafe.

Jackson said that the TSCA — which puts the burden of proving that a chemical is harmful on the EPA, and requires the agency to enact regulations “least burdensome” to industry — makes it is exceedingly difficult for the EPA to block unsafe chemicals.

In 1989 the agency banned asbestos, known to cause lung cancer, but a court recently overturned EPA’s rule on asbestos “because it had failed to clear the many hurdles for action under TSCA,” Jackson said.

Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that chemical exposure is a factor in a host of increasingly prevalent diseases.

“Every few weeks, we read about new potential threats,” Jackson said, “Bisphenol A, or BPA — a chemical that can affect brain development and has been linked to obesity and cancer — is in baby bottles; phthalate esters — which have been said to affect reproductive development — are in our medical devices; we see lead in toys; dioxins in fish; and the list goes on.”

In the absence of effective federal regulation, some states, such as California have enacted chemical regulations of their own. The Michigan House of Representatives has also passed several bills designed to limit chemical exposure.

And the European Union, a major market for chemicals, has regulations far more strict than those in the U.S.

Jackson said that the chemical industry will benefit from consistent standards of for chemical regulation.

“We are very pleased with what Ms. Jackson said,” registered nurse and environmental health activist Charlotte Brody said during a conference call last week. “It is a new experience to have an Environmental Protection Agency and even the American Chemistry Council acknowledge that the chemical management system is profoundly broken and needs to be modernized. It was exciting to have Lisa Jackson speaking from the same set of talking points that we have been using for years.”

Brody, along with representatives of the American Nurses Association, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Clean Water Action have released the results of a collaborative project in which blood and urine from participating nurses and doctors — including two from Michigan — was screened for chemicals known to be associated with disease.

The project sampled for Bisphenol A, Mercury, Perfluorinated compounds, Phthalates, Polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and Triclosan — chemicals recognized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as associated with health problems.

The group found that all 20 participants had at least five of the six kinds of chemicals and 13 of the participants had all six.

“We are all walking around exposed,“ said Bobbi Chase Wilding, one of the authors of the report. “We need to take this upstream and manage chemical regulation. There is no shopping list that we can give people that will allow them to avoid contamination.”

The coalition urged EPA to use biomonitoring data as a guide in prioritizing its investigation of chemical safety.

In their report the group notes that Canada and the European Union have more health protective chemical regulations and provide universal health care.

“The lessons learned by observing these models may be that when governments are shouldering the responsibility and paying for health coverage of their citizens, they are less prone to allow chemical companies to expose us.”