Center for Health, Environment & Justice
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What Can We Learn From Pepsi Removing Aspartame?

A few weeks ago, Pepsi Co. announced that it would remove aspartame from its diet product lineup and replace it with sucralose. Previously, other companies followed similar decisions to phase out ingredients from their product lineups. General Mills announced that it would phase out the preservative butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) from their cereals, Kraft Inc. announced the removal of artificial dyes and preservatives form their Mac & Cheese products, and Chipotle stated that it would remove all genetically modified foods (GMO) from it’s products. The question for all this now becomes,

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May 8, 2015

St. Louis is Burning, and Moms are on the Move

“The truth is that nobody is really sure what is buried at the West Lake Landfill, or where — and that’s the problem.” – Ryan Schuessler, Al Jazeera News. A burning landfill, in proximity to a radioactive waste dump, in a neighborhood with a host of unexplained health problems ranging from appendix cancer to alopecia – all the elements of an environmental crisis in the making, and a health crisis already well underway. This is what some citizens of St. Louis have been coping with, and what has brought a

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May 7, 2015

Gina McCarthy Where Are You?

In my 35 years of working in the field, beginning with Love Canal, I have never seen such irresponsible behavior by EPA headquarters. Yes, there has been many cases where EPA did not act responsibly but this is by far the worst. In St. Louis, Missouri waste from the Manhattan Project has sat throughout the community for more than 20 years. The West Lake Superfund site contains tons of this highly radioactive wastes. Over 20 years not much has been done about cleaning up the wastes, except studies. Today, the

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May 4, 2015

Linking Adverse Health Effects and Chemical Exposures

One of the most common questions I get asked is about the health effects of toxic chemicals. Will the chemicals in the landfill harm my children? Will the emissions from the plant cause my family to get cancer? Did the chemicals off-gassing from the PVC flooring cause my son’s asthma? The questions continue every day from people across the country. Most of what we know about the toxicity of chemicals comes from animal studies and from studies of workers who manufacture the chemicals. From this experience, we’ve learned that dusty

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April 29, 2015

Deepwater Horizon, 5 Years Later

On April 20th 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing eleven workers and triggering the spill of nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The accident wreaked massive damage on marine and coastal ecosystems, caused myriad negative health effects in cleanup workers, and gutted the Gulf Coast economy. Five years later, it remains the largest offshore environmental disaster in the history of the United States. Environmental effects from the disaster linger and the debate around offshore drilling for oil continues. Meanwhile, Gulf Coast residents

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April 20, 2015

BTEX and Endocrine Disruption

A new study has revealed the possible association between BTEX compounds (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes) and endocrine disruption at levels way below the reference concentrations used by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). BTEX chemicals are volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that are used as solvents in consumer and industrial products, as gasoline additives, and as intermediates in the synthesis of organic compounds for many consumer products. As a result, they are prevalent in our environment, especially in indoor settings. The current scientific understanding of these chemicals is that they can

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April 20, 2015
Blog Roll
Greenpeace’s The Witness
Grist
Groovy Green
Healthy Child Healthy World
Inside Prevention
It’s Getting Hot in Here
Moms Rising
Pharos
Safe Mama
Safer Chemicals Healthy Families
The Soft Landing
Treehugger
Zero Waste World