Topping the News
Earth Justice Report on Lawsuit
Earthjustice Wants Companies to List Chemicals in Household Cleaners
The advocacy organization will file a lawsuit to require companies to disclose their ingredients
CLEAN AND SAFE?: A lawsuit pending in New York State would require the makers of cleaning products to reveal their chemical contents.
Examine a bottle of Palmolive dishwasher soap or Tide laundry detergent and try to figure out what chemicals they use to break down grease or produce suds. Stuck? You're not alone. Those chemicals aren't listed.
That concerns some consumers, public health advocates and scientists, who say some of these chemicals may be bad for human health and the environment. "I want a clean home but I'm worried about the toxic health impacts of the cleaners," says Barbara Weir of East Islip, N.Y., a consumer who spoke on a conference call organized by environmental advocates Earthjustice. "I think consumers have a right to know what they're buying."
This week, a group of those concerned citizens and advocates, led by Earth Justice, is filing a lawsuit in New York State to force major U.S. manufacturers—Church & Dwight, Colgate–Palmolive and Proctor & Gamble as well as England-based Reckitt Benckiser Group—to disclose ingredients in their household cleaning products. "Consumers deserve to know whether the products they use to wash their dishes, launder their clothes or clean their homes are harmful to themselves or their environment," says Keri Powell, an attorney at Earthjustice.
The lawsuit revolves around a law passed in 1971—but rarely enforced, says Earthjustice—that gives the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) the power to force manufacturers to disclose the ingredients of their products as well as any health or safety studies. And, should the DEC commissioner feel it is warranted, it also allows the state to ban the use of certain chemicals—a power that was last invoked back in 1985 to ban the solvent nitroacetic acid, or NTA, that was shown to cause cancer in lab animals, according to program associate Saima Anjam of Environmental Advocates of New York.
Several companies—method, Prestige Brands, Seventh Generation, Sunshine Makers and Weiman Products—filed reports with the DEC to comply with the law when contacted by Earthjustice last September. Sunshine Makers, for example, detailed the ingredients of their "Simple Green" product line. Their All-Purpose Cleaner contains 2-butoxyethanol, a solvent which has been shown to reduce fertility in female lab mice and damaged human red blood cells at high levels in vitro.
But the companies named in the suit—whose plaintiffs also include the Sierra Club and the American Lung Association—either refused to submit such a report or did not respond at all. "We can't comment on pending litigation," Kate DiCarlo, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble, told ScientificAmerican.com.
The 1971 law made New York a trendsetter as there is no equivalent in other states or at the federal level, according to Ben Dunham, an associate legislative counsel at Earthjustice. "The federal system to regulate toxic chemicals is just in shambles," he says, noting that the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 failed to allow the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate asbestos, despite proof that it is harmful. A law introduced in the House in 2008, known as the Kid-Safe Chemicals Act, would attempt to put the burden of proving a given chemical is safe on manufacturers rather than on the EPA to prove it is unsafe; it will likely be reintroduced this year in Congress.
The chemical industry has launched a voluntary effort to address these issues but "a voluntary program doesn't give you that confidence that the information is going to be accurate," says Tom Neltner, co-chair of the Sierra Club's Toxics Committee. Companies sell at least $14 billion worth of such cleaners, according to Euromonitor International.
An additional problem: Even if you know what's in your cleaner, you may not know whether it's safe or not. "One of the problems that none of this is addressing is that there are more than 100,000 chemicals in commerce and maybe 900 evaluations of chemicals for cancer-risk," says chemist Monona Rossol, industrial hygienist for Arts, Crafts and Theater Safety, a nonprofit that advises on chemical safety for theaters and artists. "For the majority of chemicals, there just isn't any data."
Some studies have shown that certain glycol ethers can irritate the lungs—exacerbating asthma—and, at higher exposure levels, damage red blood cells or reduce sperm count. Chlorine compounds in cleaning products have also been found to exacerbate asthma, whereas certain surfactants—such as nonylphenol ethoxylates—have been shown to grow breast cancer cells in the lab as well as interfere with the reproductive organs of aquatic species from frogs to fish. But, says physician Ted Schettler, science director for the Science & Environmental Health Network, an organization founded by environmental groups to assess health impacts: "We have no idea how those lab results translate to public health impacts."
Continue to Page 6 Cancer Causing Toxins
Wowgreen Non Toxic Cleaners Join Today
Earth Justice Blog
Mar 09, 2010 12:53PM
Jessica Knoblauch on Mar 09, 2010 12:36PM
The Fastest Die-Off In Human History?
It's hard to imagine that the earth is now experiencing a mass extinction like no other in human history.
Online news organization Mother Nature Network recently published an eye-opening graphic that maps out the top 20 countries with the most endangered species. Ecuador tops both the endangered animal and plant species lists, harboring 2,211 endangered animal species alone, while the U.S. comes in second with more than 1,000 endangered mammals, birds and reptiles.
Terry Winckler on Mar 08, 2010 01:47PM
Earthjustice Remembers Dr. Ed Wayburn - A Conservation Titan
Former Earthjustice Executive Director Buck Parker offers these thoughts on Dr. Ed Wayburn:
Earthjustice notes with sadness the passing of Dr. Ed Wayburn at age 103 on Friday, March 5. We were privileged to work with Dr. Wayburn during his decades of leadership of the Sierra Club and of many national conservation campaigns to establish and protect national parks, wilderness areas, and the magnificent landscapes of Alaska.
He was also a key supporter for creating Earthjustice, originally the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, and maintained a life-long interest in the organization and its work. The efforts of Ed and his late wife Peggy inspired the work of thousands of citizen activists, including many Earthjustice staff, board and supporters, in protecting our public lands and resources.
For more information about Dr. Wayburn and his monumental contribution to the American conservation movement please visit the web site of the Sierra Club.
Raviya Ismail on Mar 08, 2010 12:37PM
Supreme Court Decision Keeps Strict Industrial Pollution Limits
You know when you're hiking up a mountain and you think you've reached the summit, only to turn the corner with the realization that you have further to climb? Well, Earthjustice and other clean air advocates have finally reached the summit, putting an end to litigation involving a loophole that gave industrial facilities a free pass to ignore pollution limits whenever plants start up, shut Supreme down or malfunction.
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the American Chemistry Council (and others) a request to review the case, which Earthjustice won in December 2008.
The Supreme Court's decision is huge for us, but it's folks on the ground (the ones that live near these plants and their skyrocketing emissions) that are cheering the loudest -- people like Jesse Marquez: who lives three miles from a Wilmington, California Tesoro Energy Corp's refinery which caught fire last September because of a malfunction. Jesse was at the scene, taking pictures and recalling the terrible mixture of crude oil and diesel fuel filling the air for 6 hours.
That same month, Tesoro CEO Bruce Smith traveled to DC to lobby Congress to protest emissions reductions.
Shirley Hao on Mar 05, 2010 05:45PM
Monday Reads: The Lights Out Edition
For many of us, the lights never truly go out. (Speaking literally, of course. Metaphorically? Now that’s a topic for another post.)
Long after we’ve switched off our lights and settled down to sleep, the soft glow of street lamps continues to spill out into the night. Traffic lights tirelessly cycle red, green, yellow, while electronic billboards advertise to the heavens. Even in our homes, that microwave clock keeps shining, holding total darkness at bay.
Light pollution may often be relegated to a lower tier of concern than, say, air or water pollution. After all, a little light drowning out the stars might be hard to match up against pea soup smog, or an oil-slicked waterway.
Although it may seem to simply be an astronomer’s annoyance, our 24-hour, man-made lightshow has created larger problems. Last week, Earthjustice put one brightly lit luxury Hawaiian resort on notice: follow the law, or we’ll see you in court.
Terry Winckler on Mar 04, 2010 01:17PM
Why Cold Facts Are Winning Against Climate Change Science
In a very clever riff on climate change deniers, author Bill McKibben compares their tactics to those used by defense lawyers to get O.J. Simpson off the hook: bury the smoking gun facts in a haystack of trivial facts and then focus on the trivia. After awhile, trivia becomes truth and the suspect walks free in blood-stained shoes.
Example: the brutal East Coast winter. For deniers, this proves their main point, that the earth isn't getting warmer, it's getting colder and flatter. As Americans shiver in their doubts, says McKibben, the deniers move in with an "enormously clever, and enormously effective" campaign against climate science.
You gotta read McKibben's full treatise on the denier movement. As he puts it, "It's worth trying to understand how they've done it."