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« Farm livin': Not the life for toads | Main | Imagine a tangled toxic mess »
The chemical industry's war on California toxics reform
Raise your hand if you want your food packaging – hamburger wrappers, french-fry bags, pizza boxes – coated with cancer-causing Teflon chemicals that pollute the bodies of unborn babies and Arctic polar bears. How about baby bottles and sippy cups made with hormone-disrupting chemicals that are about to be banned in Canada and that Wal-Mart and Target have pulled off the shelf?
I didn't think so.
But the chemical industry, with its typical regard for your health, is waging a take-no-prisoners war in California to stop the state from banning those same chemicals.
The American Chemistry Council and DuPont are leading the ranks of lobbying groups and companies who, between them, have hired an army of lobbyists – including a K Street firm that ran Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's first campaign – and are paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars to block the proposed bans. They're using scare tactics, telling food banks that a ban on bisphenol A (BPA) in baby bottles would mean the end of canned goods. They're brazenly greenwashing, calling one of their food-packaging chemicals – C6, which EWG found in the blood of 10 of 10 newborns – a shining example of the "green chemistry" movement they say is going to transform the industry.
An aide to Sen. Ellen Corbett, author of Senate Bill 1313, which would ban perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) from food packaging, counted 13 lobbyists who've been hired by companies or groups trying to stop the bill. The odds seemed so long against the outnumbered environmental, health and labor groups backing the bill that gasps were heard from lobbyists in the hearing room when the Assembly Health Committee approved the bill a couple of weeks ago.
SB 1713, by Sen. Carole Migden, would ban BPA from baby bottles, sippy cups, and any food container or feeding device intended for children 3 and under. It doesn't have as many registered opponents arrayed against it. But the most recent players to come on board are Navigators LLC, a lobbying firm with offices in Washington and Sacramento, that steered Gov. Schwarzenegger's 2003 campaign and his campaign for budget reform in 2004. Navigators principal Mike Murphy was chief campaign strategist for Arnold in 2003 and Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign in 2000, and just joined NBC and MSNBC as a pundit, after speculation that he would step in to rescue McCain's currently floundering campaign.
Navigators wasted no time in raising the ante and lowering the bar. On July 9, Colleen Coghlan, a senior communications consultant in the Sacramento offices of Navigators, sent the following email, obtained by EWG, to an unknown number of non-profit food banks in California. I'm not sure who the coalition she mentions consists of; disclosure reports for current lobbying activity won't be available until the end of the month.
Canned Goods Removed from Food Banks?By way of introduction, my name is Colleen Coghlan and I am working with a large coalition of members within the health, business and food community to build awareness of a bill moving ahead in Sacramento.
As written, SB 1713 (Migden) could lead to the removal of food from the shelves of grocery stores as well as those from local food banks. SB 1713 becoming law will result in the loss of safe and necessary consumer products such as the following canned and jarred:
• Fruits
• Vegetables
• Sauces
• Olives
• Pickles
• Tuna and other seafood
• Pasta
• Beans
• Soup
• Chili
• Whipped Toppings
• Cooking Spray
• Chicken
• Sausages
• Meats
• Milk, condensed and evaporated
• JuiceThe burden on consumers created by SB 1713 unfairly falls upon society’s most vulnerable who do not have access to alternatively packaged products which are often more expensive and less available to consumers. This bill would ban Bisphenol A (BPA), an epoxy lining, which acts as a barrier to contamination, used in almost all food containers.
BPA has been tested, scientifically reviewed and approved for safe use in food containers by the responsible regulatory agencies in the USA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency), European Union (European Food Safety Commission), Canada (HealthCanada) and Japan (Japanese Ministry of Environment) and has been safely used for over 50 years.
Ensuring CA families eat healthy and have access to the foods they need should be a priority for the state. The current manner in which this bill is written would create greater difficulty for parents to get access to the food their families need.
I could call in an EWG toxicologist to refute Coghlan's claims one by one, but it should suffice to counter the biggest whopper: Migden's bill is specifically aimed at containers for food intended for babies and toddlers – most importantly, formula packages. Even if you don't believe the hundreds of studies showing harm at current levels of BPA exposure, shouldn't we be more cautious when it comes to babies?
This is not nanny government. Neither one of these bills tries to ban all uses of the chemicals, or any uses for which there aren't already safe alternatives. Corbett's bill seeks to eliminate the most direct route of exposure – putting the chemical in your mouth and swallowing it – for a chemical that DuPont has agreed to phase out nationally by 2015. That's too long to wait on a toothless, loophole-ridden agreement the company only accepted after the EPA fined it $16 million for concealing evidence of PFCs' health risks.
The chemical industry is trying to have it both ways, saying legislators shouldn't have to make chemical-by-chemical decisions, but at the same time refusing to support more ambitious reform bills. If reform must come, they would rather see it come from the state-sanctioned Green Chemistry Initiative, which gives corporations a seat at the table in proposing safer chemicals. But the GCI is still in its first draft, and today's 3-year-olds could be in middle school before we see results. I don't think the prospect of a better chemical regulatory system in the future frees the Legislature – or the governor – from taking action now against two very clear threats to public health.
California sets the standard I hope it will continue to do so. The world can not afford to compromise on health issues like this.