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Smart discussion of the latest science and news on toxins in your food, water, and air, and what government agencies should be doing to protect public health. Written by EWG staff.

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Toxins in our Kids' Foods: Where is the FDA?

Why, oh why is there plastic in my aluminum water bottle?

Fluoride in Your Water: How much is too much?

Borax: Not the Green Alternative It's Cracked Up to Be

Test Your Knowledge of Cosmetics Safety: 8 Myths Debunked

EWG's Healthy Home Tips

EWG's Tips to avoid BPA exposure

EWG on TV

Cutting the Pork from U.S. Farm Bill

Toxic Tub?

Sunscreen safety & DC drinking water

Perchlorate in people, kids' personal care products & plastics, and sunscreen

BPA in baby formula & safe cosmetics

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Monthly Archive

CA Cosmetics Bill Passes Cmte

By EWG

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that California Assembly's Health Committee advanced a bill that would require manufacturers of personal care products to inform the state's Department of Health Services whenever they are making products with chemicals linked to cancer or birth defects.

EWG compiled a list of 155 products by name that will be affected by the bill if it passes into law. Search for these and other products in our Skin Deep database at http://www.ewg.org/reports/skindeep/browse_products.php.
Link

Louisville Becomes Trendsetter on Air Quality

By EWG

Supported by local health and environmental activists, the Air Pollution Control Board in Louisville, Ky., made admirable history last week with the Strategic Toxic Air Reduction (STAR) program. Three years ago, according to the Courier-Journal, the EPA rated the city’s air the worst in the entire Southeast, but as of July 1, Louisville will have some of the nation’s strongest, healthiest air quality standards. The plan will reduce 37 specific chemicals emitted by industrial activity; programs to reduce emissions from cars and other sources will be implemented soon.

Predictably, local business groups immediately began moaning about government regulation and warned of possible layoffs. But as the Courier-Journal reports, one air pollution official “cited a number of businesses, like United Parcel Service, that are expanding, investing or coming to Louisville as examples that the STAR program isn't hurting economic development.”

The program, with regulations surpassing EPA standards, recognizes that clean air is an asset that will attract business and residents to the area. And with a phased-in six-year plan for improving Louisville’s air, companies can know exactly what to expect and what it will cost.

The STAR program is a win-win that sets a national standard. Everybody wins when community health is improved and health care costs go down. Everybody wins when quality of life improves and more families and businesses decide to call that place home. Legislators across the country should pay close attention to how Louisville and Jefferson County thrive, and then take their lead from “The City of Parks’” courageous, commonsense plans for a healthy community.

Link

Energy Bill Ensures Dependence on Foreign Oil and Gas

By EWG

As the Senate considers the energy bill, the major issue is energy independence. Industry and administration sources have long argued that the key to breaking our addiction to foreign oil and gas is opening our public lands to more drilling. “We've taken large chunks of the country and put it off limits to any kind of exploration or development,” Vice President Cheney told a town meeting in Arkansas last year. “Large parts of the Rocky Mountain West are off limits."

To the contrary, an Environmental Working Group first-ever look at government leasing and production records shows that for decades the oil and gas industry has had broad access to our most energy-rich public lands, and that this access has produced very little oil and gas. Instead of energy independence, this open access to public lands has profited a handful of companies, and increasingly threatened our most treasured natural parks, forests and wilderness areas.

We found that from 1982 through 2004, U.S. dependence on foreign oil increased from 28 percent to nearly 58 percent (EIA 2005), while the federal government offered 229 million acres of public and private land in 12 western states for oil and gas drilling, an area greater than the combined size of Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.

Our analysis of government records on well-by-well oil and gas production shows that over a fifteen-year period (1989-2003), the oil and gas industry has produced just 53 days of oil at U.S. consumption rates. As the Senate decides how to address the nation's energy problems, it would do well to consider that this wide-open access to public property in the West has produced a negligible amount of oil.

Read The Facts on Energy Independence (PDF document).

Industry Study Used by Feds Hid Evidence of Rocket Fuel's Effects

By EWG

A major investigation by The Riverside Press-Enterprise finds that an industry-funded study, relied on by federal scientists to recommend drinking water standards for a toxic rocket fuel chemical, erroneously reported no effects on people from low doses of the chemical. The newspaper reports that previously unpublished data from the so-called Greer study show that perchlorate could have harmed thyroid function in several of the seven subjects, bringing the government's reliance on the study under fire by regulators in at least three states. "Something is going on there that gives us pause," said a Massachusetts health official.

EWG's own extensive investigations on perchlorate have repeatedly questioned the value of the Greer study, which inappropriately focuses on the chemical's effects on healthy adults, rather than fetuses, infants and children, who are most at risk from exposure. Studies by EWG, federal regulators and academic researchers have found the chemical in human milk, cow's milk and lettuce in concentrations exceeding the safety standards established or proposed by Massachusetts and California, two of the states criticizing the industry-funded Greer study.

Read more at EWG's Perchlorate Issue Page.

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