Center for Health, Environment & Justice : Building strong, healthy, and safe communities

Big news! Cancer cluster case goes to trial this week – 31 cancer cases near a polyvinyl chloride plant owned by Dow.

Another study showing effects of manganese on children’s IQ.

Exxon Mobile & Dow are opposing life-saving environmental regulations.  I think we all saw that one coming.

I just attended a meeting in North Carolina with local leaders. At this meeting, leaders talked about how corporations across the state and country have found a new way to make profits at the expense of the earth and the public’s health. Incinerating our resources, under the banner of creating energy, they believe that turning chicken poop and trees into energy will make America energy independent and help with climate change – now there is a reach.

This is yet another bad idea by those who care only about profits. Chicken poop can be used by farmers and clear cutting trees is just plain dumb. In case you question the profit accusation, think about this: the corporations are calling this incineration technology the answer or “Saudi Arabia” for North Carolina economic woes. Really?

The incinerator companies list tree and forest wastes, chicken poop, tires, garbage and more as their fuel for generating energy. I’m confused by the bio-mass terminology when they are incinerating tires and plastics.

Incineration is a dinosaur technology which is why thousands have been closed due to pollution and other issues. Dioxin is of most concern as one of the most toxic chemicals ever studied and is a direct result of incinerating tires, plastics and even trees and poop.

Corporations pushing incineration also highlight the ash which they say can be spread on farm land – just like the poop. However, the incinerator’s ash has toxic chemicals and heavy metals like lead in it that will contaminate the farmers land and the food you and I eat.

Of course many of these companies are looking for subsidies from government under new energy sources. Where government has already invested funds like recycling and forest protection will be undercut by these new energy opportunists. In addition, wildlife, fish and people’s health will be adversely impacted by the pollution as will the local economies where they are located because green clean businesses don’t want to operate by a polluter.

Someone should approach these incinerator facilities and suggest they look at solar as an opportunity instead. Solar energy doesn’t pollute the air where solar farms are located.

It seems that sometimes I can’t turn around without hearing another story about lead popping up in some children’s PVC product.    Plastics make it possible, right?

Last week, CNN reported that new testing by Consumer Reports magazine found elevated levels of lead in children’s vinyl rain coats.

Jeeeeeeez, what will it take for the chemical industry to get its act together?

Just a few weeks before that, thanks to new testing by the Center for Environmental Health, last month the California Attorney General’s office filed a major lawsuit against manufacturers of children’s PVC bouncy houses.  Testing found  very high levels of lead – as high as 29,000 ppm.  The federal limit on lead in children’s products is 90pp for painted surfaces and 300ppm for all other parts.   You do the math.

So what’s a little lead? Well of course scientists have been sounding the alarm on lead for decades, which is why we got it out of gasoline a generation ago.  Even the smallest amount effects a child’s ability to learn.  Children are more vulnerable than adults to lead.  Lead impacts brain development, causing learning and developmental problems including decreased IQ scores, shorter attention spans, and delayed learning.  When children are exposed to lead, the developmental and nervous system consequences are irreversible.  Nationwide 310,000 children already have lead levels of concern.

But yet it continues to turn up in all sorts of PVC products.  It’s been found in PVC:

• Children’s toys
• Baby bibs
• Garden hoses
• Lunch boxes
• Children’s bouncy houses
• Christmas trees (!)
• Christmas lights
• Window blinds
• Cables
• Breast milk coolers
• Key rings
• Pencil cases
• Placemats
• Purses
• Rain hats
• Shower curtains
• Umbrellas

And the list go’s on and on and on.

Here in the U.S. – the CPSC first learned about the problems of lead back in 1996 when unexplainable high blood lead levels were found in children in Arizona, North Carolina, and Virginia.  Vinyl miniblinds were identified as the common source of lead dust.  A study by the CPSC found the light degraded the blinds and caused the formation of toxic lead dust which was then apparently ingested by the children.

To help keep your family safe, here’s a few great resources for avoiding lead in your children’s products:

• Check out our Back to School Guide to PVC-Free School Supplies
• Check out HealthyStuff.org – where you can find out where lead’s hiding in all sorts of products.
• The Center for Environmental Health has lots of great tips for testing your children’s products for lead.

Bryan Freund compares his fragile condition to having “a time bomb in your head. You just don’t know when it’s going to go off.”

Freund, 49, has brain cancer, which he blames on careless practices at a chemical plant just north of his home. He’s among 17 current or former residents of the village of McCullom Lake, Ill., who have developed the disease since 1993; 10 have died. The plant, operated by Rohm and Haas, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Co., is at the root of a potentially groundbreaking lawsuit scheduled for trial Sept. 20 in Philadelphia…

The lawsuits allege that a Rohm and Haas adhesives and sealants plant in Ringwood, Illinois, about a mile upstream and upwind of McCullom Lake, contaminated the air and groundwater with a compound called vinyl chloride, among other carcinogens. State data confirm that the brain cancer rate in and around the village from 1986 to 2006 was markedly higher than the rates for the rest of Illinois or McHenry County…

To be sure, proving a link between chemical exposure and cancer is difficult, especially in the courtroom, where many millions of dollars are at stake. Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, have concluded that there is insufficient evidence to connect vinyl chloride to brain cancer…

The issue is the strength of the association between vinyl chloride — an ingredient in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic and a byproduct of some chemical processes — and brain cancer. Experts for Rohm and Haas argue that the link is tenuous at best and concede only that vinyl chloride in high doses can cause a rare liver cancer called angiosarcoma.

But Freiwald believes he can prove that an industry-funded study on which the company is expected to rely is flawed. His investigation indicates that the study of more than 10,000 workers at vinyl chloride plants, begun in 1973 and updated most recently by epidemiologist Kenneth Mundt in the 1990s, failed to include as many as two dozen fatal cases of brain cancer.

Americans are being asked to comment on Draft Reports from the federal “National Conversation on Public Health and Chemical Exposures” by Monday, September 20th.  You can access them at www.resolv.org/nationalconversation

Six work group reports are posted on Chemical Emergencies, Education, Monitoring, Policies, Science and Communities as they relate to preventing and addressing toxic exposures.  Over 100 organizations participated in the National Conversation coordinated by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to develop an action agenda for strengthening the nation’s approach to protecting the public’s health from harmful chemical exposures.