Toxic Sunday

I just contacted my Representative to urge them to be an original co-sponsor of the Toxic Chemicals Safety Act (H.R. 5820), requiring chemical manufacturers to prove that their products are safe before they reach our shelves.. I hope you’ll join me. I coordinated my message with Environmental Working Group Action Fund to maximize our impact. Click here to join in sending a message.

I support the Toxic Chemicals Safety Act because babies shouldn’t be born pre-polluted with nearly 300 industrial chemicals, many associated with a range of serious diseases and conditions from childhood cancer to autism, ADHD, learning deficits, infertility, and birth defects.

The government has almost no authority to protect people from even the most hazardous chemicals on the market. The Toxic Chemicals Safety Act will change that through an overhaul of the the Toxic Substances Control Act, which I helped administer for twenty years and is in drastic need of reform.

Here’s another problem with no solution offered by legislation so far. Green Building Council standards are being incorporated into federal, state and local laws through legislation, executive orders, resolutions, policies, loan-granting criteria and tax credits. Yet, LEED standards are clearly insufficient to protect human health (see LEED Certification Where Energy Efficiency Collides with Human Health, An Environmental and Human Health, Inc Report). The number of jurisdictions adopting these standards as law is growing, which will make them difficult if not impossible to change, unless federal law and regulation supersede the “green” standards with health-protective regulations.