Chemical Safety

Making chemicals safer

Industrial chemicals are everywhere in our world today. They are used to make virtually every material and are in tens of thousands of consumer products.

We now know some of these chemicals are accumulating in the bodies of people, as well as in animals, plants, land and water, across the globe. Yet we have barely begun to assess the safety of these ubiquitous chemicals.

The challenge: Most chemicals are presumed safe

We know enough about some chemicals to know they play a significant role in human disease and harm the environment. Yet, for the vast majority of industrial chemicals in use, government policy presumes they are safe even though they have not been tested.

To get a manufacturer to test a chemical, the government faces an onerous task: It must show evidence of potential harm or widespread exposure — something hard to do without the very kind of information testing would provide — a classic Catch 22! As a result, very few chemicals have been tested and companies have largely been free to produce and use such chemicals as they see fit.

Our nation's main chemicals statute, the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), has proven ineffective both in generating the information needed to find out whether chemicals are safe, and — even where such information is available — in acting to protect people and the environment from dangerous chemicals.

Solutions: What Environmental Defense is doing

Environmental Defense has been working on two major fronts to address these problems.  We:

• work at home and abroad to ensure dangerous chemicals are identified before widespread exposure occurs.
• advocate for better policies to identify and reduce the potential risks of industrial chemicals before they cause harm.

Posted: 09-Jan-2006; Updated: 07-Nov-2007