Consumers' use of pharmaceuticals, personal care products polluting rivers and oceans with toxic chemicals

Our water supply is becoming increasingly contaminated -- and not just by big factories dumping pollutants into the rivers. It is consumers, often unwittingly, who are poisoning rivers and oceans by sending potentially toxic chemicals down the drain. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has stated its researchers have found pharmaceuticals and personal care products -- or PPCPs -- in nearly every water supply they have tested.

The issue is not new. In the United Kingdom, the dangers of PPCPs were first recognized in the 1970s. In the U.S., however, it was another twenty years before the scientific community began to take notice, largely in response to the efforts of one scientist, Christian Daughton. Chief of the environmental chemistry branch of the EPA's Environmental Sciences Division, Daughton began reporting on the dangers of PPCPs in the water supply during the mid-1990s.

In 1999, Daughton co-wrote, with Thomas A. Ternes of the Institute for Water Research and Water Technology in Germany, the first comprehensive article on PPCPs in the U.S. water supply. The article "Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products in the Environment: Agents of Subtle Change?" appeared in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

This landmark article discussed how "priority pollutants," such as agrochemicals, were "only one piece of the larger puzzle" of human-made environmental risk factors. Daughton and Ternes wrote:

"One large class of chemicals receiving comparatively little attention comprises the pharmaceuticals and active ingredients in personal care products (PPCPs), which are used in large amounts throughout the world; quantities of many are on par with agrochemicals. Escalating introduction to the marketplace of new pharmaceuticals is adding exponentially to the already large array of chemical classes, each with distinct modes of biochemical action, many of which are poorly understood."

The authors went on to write that exposure to PPCPs, especially for aquatic organisms, may be more chronic than exposure to pesticides and other industrial chemicals "because PPCPS are constantly infused into the environment wherever humans live or visit." Daughton and Ternes warned in 1999 that prolonged exposure "could lead to cumulative, insidious, adverse impacts" that may not appear until it is too late to intervene.

Compact fluorescent light bulbs contaminate the environment with 30,000 pounds of mercury each year

A compact fluorescent light is a type of energy-saving bulb that fits into a standard light bulb socket or plugs into a small lighting fixture, and right now, compact fluorescents seem to be gaining in popularity. But did you know they can also be toxic to your home and the environment?

Fluorescent lights are filled with a gas containing low-pressure mercury vapor and argon, or sometimes even krypton. The inner surface of the bulb is coated with a fluorescent coating made of varying blends of metallic and rare earth phosphor salts. Fluorescent light bulbs are more energy efficient than incandescent light bulbs of an equivalent brightness, and the efficiency of fluorescent lighting owes much to low-pressure mercury photon discharges. But fluorescents don't produce a steady light, and they burn out more quickly when cycled frequently; they also contain items such as fluorine, neon, and lead powder as well as mercury.

Measuring the environmental impact of mercury use in a particular product is more complicated than you might think. Mercury is an essential element in millions of fluorescent lamps throughout the world, and as those lamps are thrown into landfill, the mercury can escape and contribute to air and water pollution. (It can easily leach into groundwater supplies.)

According to www.lightbulbrecycling.com, each year an estimated 600 million fluorescent lamps are disposed of in U.S. landfills, amounting to 30,000 pounds of mercury waste. Astonishingly, that's almost half the amount of mercury emitted into the atmosphere by coal-fired power plants each year. It only takes 4mg of mercury to contaminate up to 7,000 gallons of freshwater, meaning that the 30,000 pounds of mercury thrown away in compact fluorescent light bulbs each year is enough to pollute nearly every lake, pond, river and stream in North America (not to mention the oceans).

84% of sunscreen products are harmful to health, says alarming EWG study

For 29 years, the FDA has refused to publish safety standards for sunscreen products. That's nearly three decades of keeping the public in the dark about the extremely harmful, cancer-causing chemicals found in sunscreen products. Any idea why the Food and Drug Administration has taken so long to set safety standards for a product used by over 100 million Americans? If you guessed, "Because the greedy corporations selling the toxic sunscreen products don't want the FDA to study the safety of their products," give yourself golden star sticker. You got it! The FDA has no interest in protecting the public from cancer-causing personal care products, and that simple fact is made abundantly clear by the FDA's 29-year delay to establish basic safety guidelines.

As is increasingly the case, non-profit groups are now doing the job the FDA should be doing but refuses to do. In this case, the Environmental Working Group (www.EWG.org), one of my top recommended non-profit organizations, has compiled a list of 700 name-brand sunscreens along with the toxic chemicals they contain. You'll find the list at http://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/

As the EWG reports, many sunscreen products contain cancer-causing chemicals that get absorbed right through the skin:

Some sunscreens absorb into the blood and raise safety concerns. Our review of the technical literature shows that some sunscreen ingredients absorb into the blood, and some are linked to toxic effects. Some release skin-damaging free radicals in sunlight, some act like estrogen and could disrupt hormone systems, several are strongly linked to allergic reactions, and still others may build up in the body or the environment. FDA has not established rigorous safety standards for sunscreen ingredients.

After 29 years of debate, the government has failed to set mandatory sunscreen safety standards. Companies are free to make their own decisions on everything from advertising claims to product quality. In lieu of setting final standards, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advises people to stay out of the sun from 10 am to 4 pm. FDA now stands in direct violation a Congressional mandate requiring the agency to finalize sunscreen safety standards by May 2006, flouting not only Congress but also consumers, who are reliant on sunscreen to protect their health.

Bisphenol A chemical commonly found in canned soup and food storage plastics

Before you decide to chew on the cap of your water bottle because you're nervous, make sure the plastic you are chewing on isn't full of carcinogens and chemicals -- even though lobbyists for the plastics industry argue that any traces of the toxic substance bisphenol A are low and therefore, insubstantial.

Bisphenol A, or BPA, is found most commonly in polycarbonate plastics. According to the Bisphenol-A.org website, "Bisphenol A is an industrial chemical used primarily to make polycarbonate plastic and epoxy resins, both of which are used in countless applications that make our lives easier, healthier and safer, each and every day."

But the Environmental Working Group states, "BPA is an ingredient in plastics and the epoxy resins that line food cans. Low doses of BPA lead to a range of health problems, including birth defects of the male and female reproductive systems in laboratory animals. Despite the growing evidence of risk to human health, there are no limits on the amount of BPA allowed in canned food.

The tests found that pregnant women and infants who eat even a single serving of some canned foods are exposed to unsafe doses of BPA. Of the foods [recently tested for BPA contamination] -- which included many of the canned foods eaten most often by women of childbearing age -- BPA levels were highest in canned pasta and soup. Canned infant formula also had high levels. Just one to three servings of food with these BPA levels could expose a pregnant woman or infant to harmful doses of the chemical."

The Environmental Working Group is a nonprofit organization that uses the power of information to protect public health and the environment. They recently completed a study of the toxic chemical and its presence in name-brand canned goods, finding that 50% of those canned goods contained bisphenol A. To make matters worse, the FDA states about 20 percent of the U.S. diet comes from this form of food packaging. Even so, there are no current government safety standards that regulate how much BPA is allowed in canned foods. The burden of proof lies with government and lobbyists, who say the doses found in canned goods and plastics are very low. But what dose of this toxic chemical is really safe? No one seems to know.

Common crop herbicide Atrazine linked to reproductive mutations in amphibians

Pollutants such as pesticides and toxins damage the ecosystem and cause a variety of damaging ailments in humans. One particular herbicide, Atrazine, has now been found to turn male frogs into hermaphrodites, rendering them impotent by causing their gonads to produce eggs.

A subject of great scientific and political controversy, Atrazine was first introduced in 1958 and today is one of the most widely used herbicides in the world. It is a potential carcinogen and has a half-life in soil of anywhere from 15 to 100 days. This time allows for Atrazine biodegration, during which the chemical is dechlorinated until it produces a an end product of cyanuric acid, a toxic compound.

Atrazine is also used throughout the world in the production of maize, sorghum, sugar cane, pineapples, chemical fallows, grassland, macadamia nuts, conifers forestry, roses and grassland. Its most common application is for use in conservation tillage systems to prevent soil erosion and runoff, and to prevent weeds from growing in major crops. As a result, a good deal of the Atrazine applied to crops is washed into rivers, streams, lakes and municipal drinking water supplies.

Half a million loads of laundry will now be chemical free thanks to availability of eco-friendly "soap nuts" laundry detergent

(NewsTarget) American consumers are increasingly aware that plastics contain bisphenol-A, air fresheners contain phthalates, and antibacterial soaps contain a chemical called Triclosan, but few people realize that laundry detergent products often contain synthetic chemicals that pose a hazard to human health as well as the environment. Consumer health website NewsTarget has now teamed up with Maggie's Soap Nuts to acquire enough natural, eco-friendly laundry detergent to wash 500,000 loads of laundry in an environmentally friendly way, and it is distributing the product to readers in an effort to replace chemical laundry detergents with a safer, more natural alternative.

The solution to toxic laundry detergents? Soap nuts! Grown by Mother Nature and harvested from the sapindus mukorrosi tree, soap nuts contain a natural laundry soap in the skin of their shells. When washed with water, they release their natural saponins which act as surfactants, helping water bind with dirt and grime, lifting particles away from clothing in the same way that laundry detergent does, but without resorting to the use of synthetic chemicals.

A previously-published article on NewsTarget describes these soap nuts (also called "soap berries") in more detail: http://www.newstarget.com/021875.html

Soap nuts replace all commercial laundry detergents with a 100% natural laundry soap grown by Mother Nature. They contain absolutely no synthetic chemicals or additives, and they're sustainably harvested in countries like Indonesia, India and Taiwan. The soap contained in the shell of the soap berry is highly concentrated: Just two or three soap nut shells cleans an entire load of laundry. The saponins also naturally exhibit antibacterial and antifungal properties, leading to fresh, clean smelling clothes without the need for artificial fragrance chemicals.

Biofuels worse for the environment than fossil fuels, study warns

(NewsTarget) Far from being a solution to the global ecological crisis induced by fossil fuels, biofuels may "offer a cure that is worse than the disease they seek to cure," a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has concluded.

"When acidification, fertilizer use, biodiversity loss and toxicity of agricultural pesticides are taken into account, the overall environmental impacts of ethanol and biodiesel can very easily exceed those of petrol and mineral diesel," the report read.

A biofuel is any fuel made directly from a biological source (as opposed to fossil fuels, which are made from long-since-deceased organisms that have undergone radical chemical changes), including sugars, oilseeds or grains.

The OECD warned that beyond their ecological costs, biofuels force food production to compete with fuel production over the world's dwindling and limited supply of arable land. For all these reasons, the report said that "the current push to expand the use of biofuels is creating unsustainable tensions that will disrupt markets without generating significant environmental benefits."

The report speculated that the European Union and the United States may be offering market incentives for biofuel production less out of ecological concern and more as "an easy way to support domestic agriculture against the backdrop of international negotiations to liberalize agricultural trade" by eliminating subsidies.

Instead of supporting biofuels expansion, the OECD report urged governments to "cease to create new mandates for biofuels and investigate ways to phase them out." It encouraged a focus on decreasing use of fossil fuels rather than replacing them with "alternative" fuels.

"A liter of gasoline or diesel conserved because a person walks, rides a bicycles, carpools or tunes up his or her vehicle's engine more often is a full liter of gasoline or diesel saved at a much lower cost to the economy than subsidizing inefficient new sources of supply," the report said.