Better living with chemicals

By Libby

I have new posts up at Newshoggers on FEMA failures and Bush's thwarted hideaway in Paraguay but BJ catches a much more important story.

For some odd reason, the EU seems to think that the people who make chemicals and intend to introduce them into the marketplace should have to prove they are safe first!

The new laws in the European Union require companies to demonstrate that a chemical is safe before it enters commerce -- the opposite of policies in the United States, where regulators must prove that a chemical is harmful before it can be restricted or removed from the market.

Just pause and think about that for a bit. In the US, companies can produce and market whatever chemical cocktail they can come up with, and it is the responsibility of the government to prove whether or not it's harmful before it can be restricted or removed. (And let's not forget the Bush administration's attempt to ensure that companies whose products it's tame regulatory bodies have "approved" can no longer be sued if those products do damage.)

I knew the EPA had lax standards but I had no idea they were this dangerously deficient. This is result of the decades long, unholy alliance between the chemical corporations and our government.

In more than 30 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has required additional studies for about 200 chemicals, a fraction of the 80,000 chemicals that are part of the U.S. market. The government has had little or no information about the health hazards or risks of most of those chemicals.

The EPA has banned only five chemicals since 1976. The hurdles are so high for the agency that it has been unable to ban asbestos, which is widely acknowledged as a likely carcinogen and is barred in more than 30 countries. Instead, the EPA relies on industry to voluntarily cease production of suspect chemicals.

Frightening. We all know how good the mega-corps are about voluntarily policing themselves. However, as BJ points out, with the EU and Canada reversing the criteria for acceptance into their markets, we're likely to benefit from their commonsense approach in the long run. In the short term it's up to us to build awareness of the danger in order to create a public will to address and deal with it.