Environmental Health

What's New

Progress! On September 29th, Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law two historic peices of legislation creating the "Green Chemistry Initiative" to regulate toxic chemicals in consumer products. Click here to read our release.

Victory! In August 2008, President Bush signed into law a major toy safety bill authored by Senator Diane Feinstein. The law bans toxic phthalates in toys, an issue championed by Environment California. In late July, the Senate and House passed the Consumer Product Safety Commission Reform Act, which, in addition to banning phthalates from children's products, also bans lead from toys. Phthalates make plastic toys and teethers soft and flexible, but have been linked to a number of serious health problems including breast cancer. Read more about Pthalates and Environment California's work banning it from children's products.

Summary

The Chemicals Problem

There are currently over 80,000 chemicals on the market in the U.S., the vast majority of which lack even basic information on health effects and toxicity. We do know that at least 1,400 chemicals have known or probable links to cancer, birth defects, reproductive impacts, and other health problems such as learning disabilities. While the incidence of these diseases has been increasing for decades, a whole host of other obstacles to healthy development have also been on the rise, including premature birth, low birth weight, early puberty and childhood obesity. Recent science indicates that these problems, too, very well may be related to chemical exposure. While millions of affected children and their families cope with the reality of these conditions right now, we also must consider the profound future implications of a drop in average IQ or a decrease in the average age of sexual maturation.

Critical Solutions

What is needed is nothing short of a complete overhaul of current toxics policy, replacing ineffective laws with policies that relieve the public's burden to prove harm after the fact and shift it onto the chemical industry to demonstrate lack of harm before use is allowed. We will not have won until we achieve a common-sense chemical policy that puts the public's health and safety above the perceived right of the chemical industry to put toxic chemicals into our environment. Critical to achieving our long-term goal is winning victories along the way-short-range goals that alleviate a present toxic threat and highlight the need for comprehensive reform. Thus, while we continue to define the contours of what a radical shift in toxics policy would look like in California and in the U.S., we will advocate for immediate action against chemicals we already know threaten harm, focusing on the most vulnerable populations first—our children. More.