"No university in the United States teaches even basic toxicology or other environmental sciences to students
studying for a traditional chemistry degree, even a doctorate. Chemistry textbooks are devoid of any mention too".
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-greenchemside19-2008sep19,0,772775.story
http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/enviro-scientists-chemists-join-forces-to-promote-safe-chemicals
Enviro health scientists, chemists join forces to promote safe chemicals
Scientists convene in Southern California to draft a consensus statement designed to overcome obstacles to creating
new, environmentally benign industrial compounds.
By Marla Cone
Editor in Chief
Environmental Health News
September 19, 2008
In an effort to match problems with solutions, environmental health scientists and chemists convened this week to
chart a path to promoting development of safe, sustainable chemicals.
Leaders in environmental health and green chemistry met at University of California, Irvine to draft a consensus
statement designed to offer advice and overcome obstacles to creating new industrial compounds that won’t
endanger public health or the environment.
“Our understanding of toxicity has gone through a transformational evolution in the last decades. Everyday chemicals
that once looked benign no longer do,” said Lynn Goldman, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns
Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The goal of the collaboration is to merge the knowledge and ideas of toxicologists and others who specialize in the
dangers posed by chemicals with experts in green chemistry, who design nontoxic, environmentally benign materials.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related stories:
Los Angeles Times:
Potential environmental risks aren't part of chemical engineers' training.
Most industries remain dependent on hazardous substances.
Opinion from Environmental Health News:
Green chemistry: Real world solutions for real environmental problems.
Why not just use something else?
California's new chemical laws fail to protect us.
The laws are a good start, but need work.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday’s session at the National Academies’ Beckman Conference Center was open to the public, drawing an
audience of about 200. But the scientists on Tuesday and Wednesday met behind closed doors to craft a consensus
statement they plan to deliver in a few weeks to the public, particularly policymakers.
Facing scientific uncertainty, controversy generated by industry and ever-increasing complexity of issues, many
environmental scientists in recent years have turned to consensus statements, which summarize the state of the
science and recommend steps to address problems.
Pete Myers, chief executive officer of Environmental Health Sciences, which organized the conference with the
nonprofit group Advancing Green Chemistry, said the group’s mission is to avoid “yet another generation of
problematic chemicals.” The central theme, he said, is that new chemical compounds can be both profitable and safe.
The scientists involved in this week’s meetings expressed a sense of urgency, a desire to ensure that green chemistry
becomes a priority. They are particularly concerned about hundreds of industrial compounds that can disrupt
hormones at low levels. Animal studies, as well as some human data, suggest that exposure to many chemicals,
particularly in the womb, can alter reproduction, immune systems, brain development and other vital functions.
Endocrine disruptors are to the chemical industry what sub-prime mortgages are to the banking industry, said Terry
Collins, Thomas Lord Professor of Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University and director of its Institute for Green
Science.
As with the mortgage crisis, he said, “it’s important not to drag our feet.”
However, many obstacles remain to promoting development of safer chemicals.
Lack of regulation, insufficient investment and inadequate training keep many chemists from embracing green
chemistry. Of the estimated 83,000 chemicals in commerce, only a few hundred are “green.” For the vast majority of
the others, the risks are unknown.
“The current regulatory strategy of testing chemicals one by one cannot possibly identify all of the substances that
threaten health,” said Joe Thornton, an associate professor in the Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the
University of Oregon.
Thornton recommended three changes:
Reform the nation’s chemical-by-chemical regulatory process.
Put precautionary policies in place when the science about a compound is uncertain.
End the use of chemicals with properties that are likely to disrupt hormones.
Goldman said one major barrier is that chemicals are regulated one at a time, while in human bodies, they always
occur in mixtures. She said the current U.S. law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, “will never be effective unless the
burden can be shifted to industry to prove a product is safe.”
Under the law, enacted in 1976, the Environmental Protection Agency can only ban or restrict an industrial chemical if
it poses an “unreasonable” risk to humans or the environment. In addition, the EPA is required to choose the “least
burdensome” approach to regulate the chemicals.
As a result, the environmental agency has not banned any existing industrial chemical since 1989, when it tried to
phase out asbestos. The asbestos ban was overturned in 1991 when a federal appeals court ruled that the EPA had
not proven it was necessary. Since then, the agency has relied mostly on voluntary efforts by chemical companies.
The European Union already reformed its policies. Two years ago, the EU enacted the world’s most stringent law
aimed at toxic chemicals, and it already is having global effects on the chemical industry, which must test and register
thousands of compounds.
In September, California launched its own program, the nation’s most comprehensive reform of chemicals policy. The
new law requires the state to evaluate, identify and perhaps ban industrial chemicals that are linked to health effects.
The group’s consensus statement is likely to tackle one of the newest environmental health issues--epigenetics.
Some scientists believe that exposure to many chemicals can trigger heritable changes in how genes express
themselves, making a person more susceptible to disease. Those changes might remain in place not just for the
exposed fetus, but for all future generations.
Jerrold Heindel, scientific program administrator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said many
diseases and disorders, including asthma, obesity, attention deficit disorder and heart disease, may be triggered
when fetuses, babies or young children are exposed to chemicals in plastics, cosmetics, pesticides and other
consumer products.
By changing chemical policy, we can “shift the focus from curing disease to prevention and intervention," Heindel said.
When pregnant rats are exposed for a few days to a mix of two pesticides, 90% of their offspring have reduced sperm
counts and 10% are infertile. And those effects lasted for at least four generations of the rats.
“If it’s true” for humans, Heindel said, “imagine the implications.” What that means, he said, is that your great-
grandmother’s chemical exposure could be harming your own health and fertility.
Nevertheless, the number of students studying to become chemists is declining right at the time that innovation is
desperately needed, said John Warner, president of the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry.
“The large army of practicing scientists worldwide investigating the next generation of materials has no training or
skills necessary to meet these challenges,” Warner said.
Some industries are slow in following the tenets of green chemistry.
EPA officials say many high-tech industries, including the pharmaceuticals industry, are among the most wasteful in
terms of the chemicals they use and the hazardous waste they create. For every kilogram of a drug they make,
pharmaceutical companies use more than 100 kilograms of chlorinated compounds and other solvents that are
thrown away. In comparison, the oil industry wastes a much smaller amount of solvents: 0.1 kilogram for every
kilogram of product.
Many pharmaceuticals wind up in surface waters and drinking water after they are excreted. Berkeley Cue, formerly
an executive at Pfizer Global Research and Development, said the biggest challenge is that a drug needs to be stable
in manufacturing and in shelf life, so it is difficult to make ones that degrade to something benign in the environment.
Making environmentally benign active ingredients for drugs “is beyond our scientific understanding today,” Cue said.
Currently, drugs are screened for environmental toxicity late in the development process. Cue recommends that such
screening come early in the drug discovery stage.
Chemists attending the conference said industries need incentives, sometimes regulations, to switch to
environmentally benign chemicals.
Donald Blake, chair of UCI’s chemistry department who works with Nobel Laureate F. Sherwood Rowland, said the
aerospace industry was resistant to eliminate metal-cleaning solvents that deplete the ozone layer. But when the
Montreal Protocol phased out such substances in the 1990s, the industry discovered that a citrus-based cleaner
worked just as well.
Sometimes the pursuit of profits isn’t enough to persuade companies to replace risky compounds, Warner said. For
many chemicals, substitutes already have been invented, but they are not manufactured because they are big, risky
investments.
Collins recommended multiple changes in policies to transform industrial chemicals, including a way to prioritize
chemicals that should be replaced and elimination of all compounds that are persistent in the environment or are
transported globally via the air or oceans.
“We have no choice but to embark on a course to adapt the economy to these realities,” he said.
Otherwise, chemicals invented today could harm people’s descendants hundreds of years from now.
“Trans-generational justice is really the critical thing for our civilization in the next century,” Collins said.