THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  Take fish, for example: the EPA has authority to monitor pollution in fish you catch from a stream, while the FDA has authority over a fish that someone else catches and you buy at the grocery store. The two agencies are supposed to work together and sometimes they do, like in 2004, when they jointly released guidelines recommending that pregnant women, women of childbearing age, nursing mothers, and young children not eat more than 12 ounces of fish each week in order to limit mercury intake.171 Then, in late 2008, the FDA drafted a new report recommending that women now eat more than 12 ounces of fish each week.172 The Washington Post reported that the FDA did not consult the EPA until the report was nearly completed. EPA internal memos called the new FDA recommendations “scientifically flawed and inadequate” and said that they fell short of the “scientific rigor routinely demonstrated by EPA.”173 The watchdog organization Environmental Working Group went even further, declaring the FDA’s report “an astonishing, irresponsible document. It’s a commentary on how low FDA has sunk as an agency. It was once a fierce protector of America’s health, and now it’s nothing more than a patsy for polluters.”174

  If these two agencies can’t get on the same page about something as critical and basic as keeping neurotoxins off our dinner plate, what can we expect of the whole mess of government measures? Just take a look at the various agencies, commissions, and laws we’re relying on:

  GOVERNMENT LAWS & AGENCIES

  Executive Branch

  National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) (1969)

  A broad national framework to assure that all branches of government give proper consideration to the environment.

  Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) (1969)

  Within NEPA, ensures that environmental amenities, services, and values are considered in decision making. Administered by the Office of Environmental Quality.

  Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (mandated by the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act 1938)

  Within the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA is responsible for protecting the public health by assuring the safety and efficacy of our nation’s food supply, medicines, cosmetics, etc. Amended in 2002 to authorize the EPA to set maximum limits for pesticide residues on foods.

  Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) (1970)

  Created within the Department of Labor by the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970) to assure safe and healthful conditions for workers. OSHA handles enforcement while NIOSH (now part of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) conducts research, education, and training on occupational hazards.

  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (1970)

  Within the Department of Commerce, a science-based agency responsible for predicting changes in the oceanic and atmospheric environments and living marine resources. NOAA encompasses the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service (responsible for the management, conservation, and protection of living marine resources), the National Ocean Service (maintains safe, healthy, and productive oceans and coasts, for example by ensuring safe and efficient marine transportation), the National Weather Service, and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (provides research for NOAA).

  Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) (created by the Consumer Product Safety Act, 1972)

  Protects the public from risks associated with consumer products such as electrical, chemical, or mechanical hazards.

  Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (2008)

  Establishes consumer product safety standards and other safety requirements for children’s products (modernizes the original act).

  Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (1970)

  EPA’s mission is to protect human health and to safeguard the natural environment—air, water, and land—upon which life depends. EPA coordinates research, monitoring, standard-setting, and enforcement activities to ensure environmental protection.

  Laws Administered within the EPA

  Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) (1947)

  Registers (licenses), or exempts from registration, the sale and use of pesticides, including antimicrobials, for control of pests that threaten crops, animals, and humans.

  Food Quality Protection Act (1996)

  Sets safety standards on pesticide tolerances, especially for infants and children.

  Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) (1976)

  Addresses the production, importation, use, and disposal of specific chemicals including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), asbestos, radon, and lead-based paint.

  Clean Air Act (CAA) (1963, extended 1970, amended 1977 & 1990)

  Limits certain air pollutants, including from sources like chemical plants, utilities, and steel mills. Individual states or tribes may have stronger air pollution laws, but they may not have weaker pollution limits than the federal standard. The 1990 revisions address emissions trading and clean fuel standards.

  Clean Water Act (CWA) (1972)

  Regulates discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulates quality standards for surface water.

  Safe Drinking Water Act (1974, amended 1986, 1996)

  Protects the quality of all waters actually or potentially used for drinking, from both above-ground and underground sources, and requires public water systems to comply with these primary (health-related) standards.

  Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) (aka Superfund, 1980)

  Provides a special fund (originally $1.6 million) for cleaning up uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous-waste sites as well as accidents, spills, and other emergency releases of pollutants and contaminants into the environment. Seeks out parties responsible for any releases and assures their cooperation in the cleanup.

  Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (1986)

  Updates CERCLA to increase states’ involvement and citizen participation, increase the focus on human health impacts, revise the Hazard Ranking System, and increase the size of the trust fund to $8.5 billion.

  Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (1986)

  Designed to help local communities protect public health, safety, and the environment from chemical hazards. The Community Right-to-Know provisions increase the public’s access to information on chemicals at individual facilities, their uses, and releases into the environment.

  Oil Pollution Act (1990)

  Provides resources and funds to clean up oil spills as well as mitigation requirements for the polluter.

  Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) (1976, 1986, plus 1984’s Hazardous and Solid Wastes Amendments)

  Gives EPA the authority to control hazardous waste from “cradle to grave,” including generation, transportation, treatment, storage, and disposal. Amendments focus on waste minimization and more stringent standards for hazardous wastes.

  Pollution Prevention Act (1990)

  Focuses on reduction of industrial pollution at the source, alongside resource efficiency and conservation, as part of pollution prevention.

  Endangered Species Act (ESA) (1973)

  Protects threatened and endangered plants and animals and their habitats.

  Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act (aka Ocean Dumping Act, 1972)

  Prohibits ocean dumping.175

  Notice something that all these have in common? Many were created before any of us had cell phones or Internet access; some were established even before fax machines. Lots were created before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, before the Bhopal disaster, before climate change was a household topic. While the intentions at their founding were good, many of these agencies and laws are now simply out of date. Even the more recent amendments are often out of date. Environmental health threats have changed and continue changing while our understanding of those threats ha
s evolved greatly, but the laws and regulatory agencies haven’t kept up. Many of these laws were made back when people still believed that “dilution is the solution to pollution.” Back then, folks thought that taller smokestacks or longer discharge pipes would solve the problem. No longer.

  To further confuse matters, implementing the federal regulations set by many of these agencies is often a state-level responsibility. That means that compliance and enforcement varies from state to state depending on the priorities and powerful interests within each state. “States dominated by specific industry types (chemicals, mining, specific types of manufacturing) tend to be more tolerant of noncompliance by those sectors than other states with more heterogeneous industrial mixes,” writes Professor Ken Geiser of the University of Massachusetts Lowell.176 And since laws are only as strong as compliance and enforcement, this means that the effectiveness of these laws can look very different in different places.

  Another huge issue is that so-called independent advisory committees that provide policy recommendations or scientific advice to government are stacked with people who have financial interests in the very activities on which they are advising. Isn’t that what people mean when they say “the fox is guarding the henhouse”? In the United States there are about nine hundred advisory committees that provide peer review of scientific research, develop policy recommendations, evaluate grant proposals, and serve other functions to support good governance.177 These committees are so active in providing advice to Congress, federal agencies, and the president that they are sometimes referred to as the “fifth arm of government.”

  Federal law requires that these independent committees have members who represent a balanced diversity of views and who are free from conflicts of interest (that is the “independent” part). In spite of that mandate, however, industry influence continues to dominate these committees, undermining their value and credibility as sources of independent and unbiased expertise. For example, in 2008, the FDA released a report that found that bisphenol A (BPA), a plasticizer used in food packaging and many water bottles, is safe.178 This report followed growing concern about BPA’s links to neurological, developmental, and reproductive harm to children. Then the Integrity in Science Project reported that the two main studies on which the FDA based its analysis were funded by a unit of the American Chemistry Council, an industry trade group that includes companies that produce or use BPA.179 This is just one example from a long list of suspect information sources and appointments among government advisory committees. (And there’s still no federal ban on BPA, despite proof that it causes reproductive damage in animals. To help get BPA out of food packaging, visit www.saferstates.com/2009/06/safer-cans.html.)

  The nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is one organization that researches and campaigns against corporate influence on science-based public policy. CSPI scrutinizes more than two hundred science-based federal advisory committees for undisclosed conflicts of interest and posts the results in a searchable online database (www.cspinet.org/integrity). In early 2009, CSPI released a new report, Twisted Advice: Federal Advisory Committees Are Broken, which revealed that government advisory panels continue to be skewed toward industry, largely through an overrepresentation of industry members with direct financial interest in the outcome of the committees’ work.180

  It’s clear that the current approach to regulating toxic chemicals, worker safety, and broader environmental issues is not functioning to protect us. In some cases—like the chemical industries stuffing advisory panels with their people—the intent is bad. In other cases—like the mix-and-match collection of laws and agencies with overlapping areas of jurisdiction—the structure is bad. In either case, we clearly need another way. We need regulators and scientists who are working for the well-being of people, not for specific industries. And we need laws and agencies that understand and reflect the complexity of the planet, including the natural environment, the built environment, communities, workers, kids, mothers—the whole package.

  Professor Ken Geiser, who is also the director of the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production, laid out a vision for a different approach in his 2008 paper Comprehensive Chemicals Policies for the Future. According to Geiser, a new chemicals policy would consider chemicals as components of the broader system of production in which they are used, not as isolated individual entities, which is never how they actually show up. A more successful approach to chemicals policy would include researching and disseminating more complete information on whole classes of chemicals, ramping up development of less toxic alternatives, and converting industry sector by sector from using high-hazard chemicals to using ones that represent a low hazard. With an integrated systems perspective, it will be possible to transform electronics, transportation, health care, and other sectors away from a reliance on toxic chemicals. As Geiser notes, “We need to think less about restriction and more about conversion.”181

  It Wasn’t Always This Way

  The problems with the production of Stuff seem nearly intractable. If you were born anytime in the last sixty-odd years, it’s hard to imagine that things could possibly be any different. But it wasn’t always like this. The most toxic parts of today’s production processes have been with us for less than a hundred years. And that is cause for hope.

  For a long time, the production of all our Stuff caused far less environmental harm. There were definitely some negative health impacts in early production, especially around the use of heavy metals like mercury and lead before people realized they were as dangerous as they are. But it was insignificant compared to today’s global environmental destruction and persistent toxics, their reach extending from seemingly pristine wilderness areas to the fat cells of every person on the planet.

  When we look back through history, we see two periods of change that fundamentally transformed production processes, with devastating effects. Before the Industrial Revolution, nearly all production was powered by elbow grease—meaning we humans, and the animals we could enlist to help, provided the energy needed to make Stuff. That meant there was a limit to how many resources we could collect and how much Stuff we could make. Then in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries we developed the steam engine, and soon machines could replace a lot of people, toiling harder and longer, without demanding things like safe working conditions or breaks to eat or rest.

  Suddenly the limits on how much Stuff we could extract and process disappeared, under the motto “more, faster, better.” It was definitely more and faster, but not always better. The volume of resources moving through the system—both those used to power processes and those used as materials in production—increased dramatically. For example, in 1850, U.S. coal production was just under 8.5 million tons; by 1900 it increased to 270 million tons; and by 1918, it had reached 680 million tons.182 A frontier mentality reigned: there would always be more forests to cut, more valleys in which to dump the waste. It seemed that there was no need even to think about limits back then.

  Yet despite using more natural resources and making more Stuff faster, we needed less human labor. This raised a dilemma: if factories kept all the workers and introduced these new output-increasing machines, they would soon be producing more Stuff than people would need. (Economists call this overproduction, when production outpaces consumption.) There were two options: to ramp up consumption (more Stuff) or slow down production (more leisure). As I’ll explain fully in the upcoming chapter on consumption, at that juncture America’s business and political leaders unequivocally chose more Stuff.

  The next wave of major change came in the early to middle twentieth century. This time it was on the materials front, as scientists began developing a whole new set of chemical compounds that hadn’t previously existed. Many naturally occurring materials were replaced with synthetic petrochemicals. The volume and toxicity of chemical compounds used in production skyrocketed.

  Of course the Industrial Revolution and modern synthetic chem
istry have benefited us. I appreciate many things in my life that wouldn’t have been possible without them. Refrigeration. A heated home. Medicine. The Internet. A tiny little device that brings music wherever I go. I don’t want to do without these things and I don’t want others to either. But it’s time for another set of advances—another revolution.

  Today we are running out of resources, while our population continues to grow. Yet our productive technologies have not kept up with this reality. We are still using processes that consume and waste huge amounts of energy and materials, acting as though both the supply of resources and the planet’s ability to assimilate waste and pollution are endless. We’re still celebrating economic activity that undermines the planet’s very ability to support life. We have to figure out how to transform our production systems yet again: to make far less Stuff and far better Stuff.

  Starting Upstream

  The very first stage of production—way before we start the physical production—is the most important and least visible step: design. The design determines:

  which ingredients need to be extracted or created

  the amount of energy used in making and using the product

  the presence or absence of toxic chemicals

  the length of the product’s life span

  the ease or difficulty of repair

  its ability to be recycled

  the harm caused by burying or burning the product if it’s not recyclable

  Architect Bill McDonough, an internationally renowned sustainability guru, calls design the “first sign of human intent.”183 Is our intent to make the cheapest-possible electronic gizmo to feed the latest consumer frenzy? Or is our intent to make a nontoxic, durable product made of ecologically compatible materials that provides a needed service, adds to society’s well-being, can be easily upgraded and repaired as technology advances, and can ultimately be recycled or composted at the end of its life?