Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (67 page)

The list of vinyl products used in health care facilities and products is impressive. It includes blood bags, intravenous tubing, antiseptic gloves and caps, catheters, goggles, oxygen delivery, thermal blankets, and dialysis equipment. Just as important are the materials used to build health care facilities. Vinyl flooring and wall coverings can be applied seamlessly and provide an easily disinfected surface. Vinyl wall coverings can be impregnated with anti-microbial compounds that kill bacteria. Vinyl windows are superior in terms of both energy efficiency and cleanliness. All in all the halogens make a greater contribution to the safety of health care and medical treatment than any other class of substances. And it is largely because they are toxic to bacteria and other disease agents and because products made from them are easy to disinfect.

The result of removing vinyl and other halogenated compounds from health care would be twofold. It would lead to increased health care costs and an increased risk of infection while in a health care facility. And this does not take into account the ridiculous notion that chlorine should be removed from water supplies and medicines. Vinyl is chosen for its many applications because it is the best product and it is cost-effective. I have provided comments to the USGBC on the subject of halogens in health care in which I have warned of the increased risks of “super-bugs” in health care facilities if vinyl is eliminated. It is a fact that two million people get infections annually in American hospitals, at least 100,000 die from these infections, and this adds $30 billion per year to health care costs.
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Chlorine and the other halogens play an important role in reducing this toll. Campaigns to eliminate them are based on misinformation, sensation, and fear— the stock-in-trade of environmental extremists.

At this writing the USGBC, which is under constant pressure from anti-PVC activists, has introduced a Pilot Standard for the elimination of chlorine and other halogens from buildings. This is in complete violation of its own TSAC recommendations. But politics has trumped science at the USGBC and will infect the green building movement for years to come.

Bisphenol A (BPA)

Another chemical that has come into disrepute lately is bisphenol A, otherwise known as BPA. It is the building block of plastics known as polycarbonates. Activists claim it is a “gender-bender” that mimics the female hormone estrogen. To quote Margaret Wente, a noted Canadian journalist, “activists have warned that BPA in plastic water bottles is associated with cancer, diabetes, man-boobs, reduced sperm counts, shrunken testicles, early onset puberty and obesity.”
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She goes on to explain, “A mountain of evidence has been thoroughly evaluated by regulators, scientists and expert panels in Japan, Australia, the European Union, France, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway. None found any risk. The World Health Organization and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have weighed in, too. All have rejected the environmentalists’ claims.” Yet a vocal and concerted effort continues to scare parents and the public into thinking they are being poisoned.

This time Canada was first out of the blocks. In 2008 it banned BPA in baby bottles. When announcing the ban, then environment minister John Baird stated, “Although our science tells us that exposure levels to newborns and infants are below the levels that cause effects, we believe that the current safety margin needs to be higher. We have concluded that it is better to be safe than sorry.” Just what is the basis for the “belief” that safety margins should be higher than “science tells us”? Maybe because we trust activists and politicians more than we trust scientists, especially toxicologists? Lord help us. I have saved my polycarbonate drinking bottle and will continue to use it knowing that it keeps my water clean and safe.

The alleged dangers of BPA have been written about in every Lifestyle section of every newspaper and magazine in the English language. But regulatory authorities don’t usually get their information from Lifestyle sections; they’re supposed to get it from scientists working in labs. At this writing neither the U.S. nor the U.K. has officially banned baby bottles that contain BPA. The U.K. Food Standards Agency recently stated, “The Food Standards Agency, working closely with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), and the European Commission have looked into the potential risks from BPA and found that exposure of UK consumers to BPA from all sources, including food contact materials, was well below levels considered harmful.”
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The April 2010 issue of
Toxicological Sciences
reports on a study conducted by Dr. Earl Gray of the EPA on the effect of BPA on rats. He fed the rats up to 4,000 times the highest dose of BPA than the average human might be exposed to and found it had absolutely no adverse effects on the animals.
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Professor Richard Sharpe of the Medical Research Council’s Centre for Reproductive Biology in Edinburgh stated, “The results [of the study] are unequivocal and robust and are based on a valid and rational scientific foundation,”.
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(Sharpe is one of Britain’s leading specialists in endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment.) It’s time to dig your BPA water bottle back out.

Both phthalates and BPA are very useful substances. They have been thoroughly studied by many regulatory agencies and have been found to be harmless at typical levels of exposure. Yet a massive campaign is being waged against them in the media and more frequently in legislatures across the globe. The impetus for this can be traced to a combination of the media tending toward sensationalism and perpetuating conflict, activist groups perpetuating fear and therefore fundraising, activist scientists trying to make a name for themselves, and politicians wishing to look like they are saving babies from large corporations. This is not so much a conspiracy but rather a case of converging interests. Everyone benefits: more papers get sold, more funds are raised, more research grants handed out, and more politicians wear halos. Only the truth, the public, and the economy lose out in this case of what one of my friends calls a classic clusterfuck.
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Brominated Flame Retardants

Another class of chemicals that have borne the brunt of activist wrath are the brominated flame retardants. They are added to a number of consumer items, including mattresses, upholstered furniture, infants’ clothing, and electronics, including computers. In the event of a fire, these items do not ignite as quickly or burn as intensely as those that are not treated with a flame retardant. These retardants have saved many lives in house fires. In one dramatic incident an Air France passenger jet crash landed and burned to the ground. Yet every passenger escaped uninjured due to the fact that the upholstered seats did not catch fire quickly, leaving time for the evacuation. The seats had been treated with brominated flame retardants.

Once again we are dealing with a halogenated substance for which groups like Greenpeace have an automatic banning policy. But there is no evidence that brominated flame retardants cause any harm and there is ample evidence that people are being saved by them. It’s not as if the very presence of bromine will give you cancer. I treat my spa with brominating tablets to keep it antiseptic, so I am essentially swimming in bromine. I know this is a lot better for me than the risk of infection from untreated water. I would suggest whatever risk is associated with the brominated flame retardants in our beds and computers it is worth taking to avoid immolation in our sleep or at our desk. Activists do not accept this common sense approach, rather they emphasize the (unknown) risk and ignore the known benefits of flame retardants. That is no way to interpret the precautionary approach.

Tobacco and Nicotine

It is a shame so much energy is wasted campaigning against substances that cause no harm while there are many chemicals that really do harm us. Tobacco and the nicotine it contains deserve more attention from activists who are concerned with human health. I was a heavy smoker for 15 years and it was a real struggle to quit. I haven’t had a cigarette for more than 30 years and I know quitting was the best thing I ever did for my health. In a perfect world it is obvious tobacco would be banned like so many other harmful addictive substances. But that would just create another black market and the crime that goes with it. Surely there should be even more effort put into campaigns to convince young people not to start smoking and to help addicts kick the habit. If Greenpeace really cared about people’s health, it would adopt an antismoking campaign and put some real effort into it. Greenpeacers say nothing about a substance we know causes 30 percent of all cancer, yet they spend millions on campaigns against substances for which there is no evidence of harm. And they spend millions more campaigning to stop the development of crop varieties that could save millions of lives. In fact the only time they express concern for people’s health is when it furthers one of their misguided efforts to ban something useful.

Thalidomide

Chemicals are not simply good or bad. Take the example of thalidomide. It was prescribed for morning sickness in pregnant women in the U.K. and Canada in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The resulting birth defects were horrific and included missing and misshapen limbs. Up to 20,000 babies were born with serious defects. This was possibly the worst accident in the history of modern medicine and it resulted in many of the safeguards that are in place today to make sure such a thing never happens again. If there were a chemical you would think deserves an absolute ban from the face of the earth, thalidomide would be near the top of the list.

In 1964 Jacob Sheskin, a professor at Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem, discovered thalidomide could be used to treat leprosy, a disease that still occurs in a number of countries, including Brazil.
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Thalidomide has been used successfully to fight leprosy in Brazil since 1965. In 1998 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved thalidomide for treatment of lesions caused by leprosy. Since then thalidomide has been found to be an effective treatment for multiple myeloma, a cancer of the white blood cells that typically kills two-thirds of the people who contract the disease.
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At present thalidomide is being investigated as a possible treatment for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aphthous ulcer, behcet’s syndrome, brain cancer, breast cancer, cachexia, colorectal cancer, congestive heart failure, crohn’s disease, diarrhea, fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, graft-versus-host disease, hematological malignancies, HIV infections, Hodgkin’s disease, Kaposi’s sarcoma, leprosy, leukemia, macular degeneration, malignant melanoma, mycobacterium avium complex infections, myelodysplastic syndromes, myelofibrosis, myeloid leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, non-small cell lung cancer, ovarian cancer, pain, prostate cancer, prurigo nodularis, renal cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, small cell lung cancer, solid tumors, systemic lupus erythematosus, thyroid cancer, and tuberculosis.
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Thalidomide is already recognized for a number of treatments but the list could grow much longer as a result of these investigations.

This long list stresses the fact that a chemical that has such deleterious effects in some circumstances can save lives in other circumstances. Today the rules that govern whether or not to prescribe thalidomide focus on preventing pregnant women from accessing the drug. And this brings us straight to a hard question: If it can be demonstrated that legalizing thalidomide to treat certain illnesses would save 100,000 lives per year but might also result in unauthorized access to the drug resulting in two children with birth defects, what choice would you make? The precautionary approach would clearly come down on the side of the 100,000 saved lives. But what politician could stand up to the charge that he or she was condemning a few people to lives of extreme disability by supporting a chemical that would save thousands as many from an early death?

The Dirty Dozen

The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) came into effect in 2004 when the minimum of 50 countries ratified it. With the notable exceptions of the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, most countries have ratified the convention.

It is a United Nations treaty aimed at eliminating or reducing a number of chemicals that do not biodegrade quickly in the environment and are considered toxic to humans and wildlife. The 12 chemicals in the original list for discussion became known as the “Dirty Dozen.” There are now 17 chemicals in the list, including DDT. Most of them are chlorinated or brominated pesticides that are used to control insects in the field of agriculture and to control termites in order to protect wooden structures. Some of them are chemicals used in industry and still others are unintentional by-products of chemical manufacturing.

Most environmental groups, including Greenpeace and the Word Wildlife Fund, initially took the position that all POPs should be eliminated. But as the meetings progressed, it became clear that even some of the most toxic chemicals had uses that were considered sufficiently beneficial to adopt exemptions for certain purposes. Of the 17 POPs listed for elimination, 7 have been registered for exemptions. These include chlordane, which is used to control termites, dieldrin, which is used in agriculture as an insecticide, and DDT, which is used in the production of dicofol, used to control mites on fruit and vegetable crops. These exemptions were made because no other suitable chemical could be found to replace the ones in use. This highlights the fact that when one applies the precautionary approach in a balanced fashion, reasonable people will sometimes decide a toxic chemical is worth keeping in our arsenal for limited or restricted use.