Sunday, Apr 14, 2013 4:59 PM UTC
Common household products like detergent may
contain untested and potentially dangerous chemicals, a report finds
By Katie Mcdonough
Current
law regulating industrial chemicals commonly used in household products
rarely requires companies to provide the federal government with
adequate information about their safety, a new report finds.
“Regulators,
doctors, environmentalists and the chemical industry agree that the
country’s main chemical safety law, the Toxic Substances Control Act,
needs fixing,” Ian Urbina
wrote in The New York Times on Sunday.
According to the
report in the Times:
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.
The
“safe until proven dangerous” system of vetting chemicals used in
household products is a departure from how pharmaceutical and pesticide
companies are mandated to safety-test their products. And critics of
current lax regulations see both industry standards as a model for
chemical reform:
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.
But a competing bill being introduced by
Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) may siphon support for the Safe Chemicals
Act, potentially derailing the process altogether.
While many states currently have their own standards regulating chemical safety, but, as Urbina
notes, in the absence of federal standards “For now, consumers and companies looking for safer products are largely on their own.”
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