Researchers at the two California universities say spotty regulatory oversight of toxic chemicals cost the state $2.6 billion in direct and indirect costs in 2004. The state’s Environmental Protection Agency (Sacramento) commissioned the report, which was written by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles.
The report is expected to be part of a renewed push by some California lawmakers to pass legislation for a chemical testing law that would
EPA launched a program last week for voluntary reporting of engineered nanomaterials. The Nanoscale Materials Stewardship Program (NMSP) requests that firms submit information to the agency within six months. “The program calls on manufacturers, importers, processors, and users of engineered nanoscale materials to report to EPA key information about these materials within six months,” EPA says. The agency says it will also work with firms to develop test data for assessing the “hazards, exposures, and risks of nanoscale materials.”
DuPont says it has already submitted the information to EPA. ACC says it endorses the program.
Environmental groups say, however, that NMSP will not be enough to address potential environmental health and safety issues that could arise from increased use of nanomaterials, however. Congress mandated late last year that EPA and the National Academies of Sciences (Washington) jointly develop a program (CW, Jan. 21, p. 31). Environmental Defense (ED; New York) says that EPA will not require firms to submit all of their data and does not ask them to justify why certain data was not submitted. The absence of those details “invites selective reporting and also means that EPA will not know the actual extent of the information that is either available to companies or not known to them,” ED says. —ks
require reporting on the sale of high production volume chemicals and reducing some uses of the most toxic chemicals, sources say.
ACC executives have said that working against this and similar efforts in other states is one of its top priorities. One reason is that the California legislation, if passed, would establish the first U.S. state program that closely follows the European Union’s Registration, Evaluation, and Authorisation of Chemicals (Reach) testing law.
The researchers say the report is the first to calculate the price of health costs associated with poor government oversight of hazardous substances. “In 2004, more than 200,000 California workers were diagnosed with deadly,
chronic diseases—such as cancer or emphysema—attributable to chemical exposures in the workplace. Another 4,400 died as a result of those diseases,” the report says. “The findings, based upon well-established methodology for analyzing economic impact, indicate that those diseases resulted in $1.4 billion in both direct medical costs and indirect costs that include lost wages and benefits,” it says. “An additional $1.2 billion in direct and indirect costs is attributed to 240,000 cases of preventable childhood diseases in California related to environmental exposure to chemical substances,” the report says.
The report recommends: passing new laws to gather data on risks associated with toxic substances; giving lawmakers more authority to restrict hazardous substances; and investing in the design of chemicals, materials, and manufacturing processes that are inherently safer for humans. —Kara SiSSell
heAlth effeCts
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC; Cincinnati) have found that “ drastically higher” levels of bisphenol A (BPA) were released from polycarbonate (PC) bottles that have been exposed to boiling water. The results could have implications for common uses, including sterilizing baby bottles with boiling water, and adding hot beverages to PC bottles for outdoor activities, say the researchers, who published their study in a recent issue of the journal Toxicology Letters.
“Previous studies have shown that if you repeatedly scrub, dish wash, and boil polycarbonate baby bottles, they release BPA,” says Scott Belcher, associate professor of pharmacology at UC and lead researcher of the study. “But we wanted to know if ‘normal’ use caused increased release from something that we all use, and to identify what was the most important factor that impacts release,” Belcher says.
The UC research team found that the rate of release of BPA from new and used bottles was the same and ranged from 0.2-0.8 nanograms/hour. After “brief” exposure to boiling water, this increased to 8-32 nanograms/hour.
BPA has come under increasing scrutiny due to studies showing that the chemical could cause reproductive or developmental harm.
It’s hot: Boiling water speeds up BPA release.
ACC says that these concerns are unfounded and that BPA is one of the “most extensively tested materials in use today.” The council says that government bodies have reviewed BPA at levels reported in this study and have concluded that “these trace levels are not a risk to human health.”
A panel convened by the National Institute’s of Health toxicology program recently released a report saying that there is “minimal concern” that BPA exposure could cause reproductive health problems in humans (CW, Dec. 12, 2007, p. 31). The panel says there may be “some concern,” however, regarding possible adverse effects on human neural and behavioral functions. —Michelle Bryner
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