U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

If you really want to protect the environment, it's not enough just to care about it; you need to learn and really understand something in order to protect it. That's the lesson that Dr. Paul Anastas' father taught him after bulldozers had destroyed the wetlands down the hill from his childhood home, turning what was once a place for adventure and natural beauty into parking lots and an office park. Paul clearly took this early lesson to heart. Widely known as the "Father of Green Chemistry," he has devoted his career to learning about how to create a more sustainable society. For him, this…
The latest news from the Gulf of Mexico offers both relief (the "top kill" approach to ending the oil spill may be working) and dismay (the amount of oil pouring into the water is now thought to be closer to 20,000 barrels a day rather than the 5,000 barrels that BP has insisted on for weeks.) In other words - at worst case - the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the spill amount may be closer to 39 million gallons of oil so far, rather than the 11 million previously suspected. Now, I've spent the last week or so focusing on the chemical dispersants used to break down the oil,…
So, yesterday, a friend of mine suggested that BP should stand for Barren Planet rather than British Petroleum. And today The New York Times reported that despite all the evidence that BP's favorite dispersant (yes, Corexit) is more poisonous and less effective than others on the market, and despite the fact that the EPA order the company to find an alternative by, um, yesterday, the company was still dumping the same old, same old chemical compounds into the Gulf of Mexico. Despite the fact that there are 11 other approved dispersants on the EPA list. Talk about warning…
The standard toxicity test for chemical compounds is called the LD50. LD stands for Lethal Dose and 50 indicates 50 percent. In other words, LD50 means the lowest dose at which a material kills half of the test subjects. The results are usually given in milligrams of compound per kilograms of body weight. Many of these tests are conducted on laboratory rats. To give you a few rat results: the LD50 of table sugar (sucrose) is 29,700 mg/kg. For table salt (sodium chloride, NaCl) it's 3,000 mg/kg. Really poisonous substances, though, measure in the single digits: Sodium cyanide (…
Today, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would require BP to use a less toxic (and more effective) chemical dispersant than the brand used so far. I wish, I wish, I'm always wishing for these actions to sparkle with government intelligence and initiative. But it's obvious that the EPA was responding to pressure created by media reports, starting with a first class piece of research from Greenwire and by resulting Congressional inquiries. In fact, the EPA appears to have stood passively by while BP dumped more than half a million gallons of the chemical dispersant…
One of my treasured books from the 1930s is called "100,000,000 Guinea Pigs", written by a pair of consumer protection advocates named Arthur Kallet and F.J. Schlink. The book, born of a crusade to end unregulated use of industrial chemicals, is a wonderful mixture of painstaking research and angry invective. "Let your voice be heard loudly and often against indifference, ignorance and avarice," the authors wrote in my 1935 edition (the ninth printing of the book.) "In adulteration and misrepresentation lurks a menace to your health that ought no longer be tolerated." The 100,000,000 million…