Environmental Health Reports

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Executive Summary

As the new home of CALPIRG's environmental work, Environment California can be contacted with any questions regarding this report. 

California based Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and the California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) Charitable Trust have joined together to prepare the report Generations at Risk: How Environmental Exposures May Affect Reproductive Health in California. This report brings together for the first time information about the reproductive health effects of selected chemical exposures with California chemical use and emissions data.

Major findings of the report include:

1. Of the more than 75,000 synthetic chemicals in commercial use today, only a small fraction have been adequately examined for toxic effects in humans and other life forms.

2. Despite limited scientific information, there is solid evidence of the reproductive toxicity of many substances that are widely used in commerce, including solvents, metals, and pesticides. Emerging evidence suggests that hormone (endocrine) disruption, which has long been identified but largely ignored, is a frequently occurring mechanism of toxicity.

3. Federal and state regulations are frequently not written or implemented in ways protective of human health and the environment.

4. Of industries required to report chemical use or release, including pesticide applicators, California businesses used or released more than 306.8 million pounds of chemicals associated with reproductive or developmental disorders from 1991 to 1995.

5. While California facility emissions of reproductive and developmental toxicants have declined over this period, use of these chemicals in agriculture is rising steadily. Total releases of these chemicals is increasing.

6. Right-to-know legislation like the federal Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and California pesticide use reporting system provide the public with essential information which is rightfully theirs about toxicants to which they may be exposed. However, information gaps and accessibility problems show that these laws do not go far enough. While the TRI has been widely used to encourage facilities to reduce emissions, the California Pesticide Use Reporting Program data remains under-utilized and bears untapped potential for reducing pesticide use.

7. In order to protect the public from known and suspected reproductive toxicants, policymakers, industry managers, members of the medical and scientific communities and individual citizens must all adopt a precautionary approach when making personal and public decisions that may result in exposure to these chemicals.

The Scope of the Problem—Extensive Exposure, Limited Information

More than 75,000 synthetic chemicals and metals are currently in commercial use in the US. The toxicity of most of these is unknown or incompletely studied. In humans, exposure to some may cause cancer, reproductive and developmental disorders, adverse neurological and immunological effects, or other injury. Reproductive and developmental effects are of concern because of important consequences for couples attempting to conceive and because exposure to certain substances during critical periods of fetal or infant development may have lifelong and even intergenerational effects.

Unfortunately, toxicological information is often incomplete. Animal testing usually looks at health effects using one chemical at a time. This strategy fails to provide information about interactive effects which may occur with exposure to more than one chemical. Moreover, animal tests often fail to examine for subtle, delayed, or difficult-to-diagnose conditions. Epidemiological (human) studies are often limited by inaccurate exposure assessments and incomplete information about health outcomes. Further complicating matters, the federal government is reducing its support for research and information analysis. Corporate funding is filling the void, providing an opportunity for bias in study design and data interpretation.

Some Chemicals Known, Some Suspected, as Reproductive Toxicants

Some of the specific synthetic chemicals or metals reviewed in this report are known to harm human reproduction or development. Lead and mercury, for example, disrupt brain development in the fetus. Solvent exposures are associated with spontaneous abortions in female workers. Several specific solvents have additional adverse effects — glycol ethers damage male reproductive function, and toluene causes birth defects at high levels of maternal exposure. Many Californians, particularly farm workers, are exposed to mixtures of pesticides and are at increased risk of spontaneous abortion and birth defects in offspring. Some pesticides, like the fumigant, ethylene oxide, used to sterilize medical equipment, or the fumigant, methyl bromide, and herbicide, cyanazine, used in California agriculture, are identifiable as particularly associated with adverse reproductive outcomes. While the scientific evidence is weaker and still emerging, many other chemicals are also likely to adversely impact human reproduction. Suspects include manganese, several solvents including xylene, styrene, and perchlorethylene, and numerous pesticides and plasticizers.

Animal testing reveals that a single dose of a tiny amount of dioxin administered during a critical “window of vulnerability” in pregnancy can lead to life-long health effects in offspring. Men exposed to Agent Orange, an herbicide containing dioxin, are more likely to father children with birth defects. In addition, maternal exposure to PCBs seems to result in developmental delays in children. Dioxin and PCBs are examples of chemicals which appear to derail human reproduction and development by interfering with hormones. Other chemicals which may also be endocrine disruptors in humans are commonly found in consumer products such as plastics, paints, detergents, cosmetics, and pesticides. While the full significance of some of these newly recognized or suspected reproductive and developmental toxicants is not yet clear, there is reason for concern about a wide range of chemicals and their potential effects on human health.

The Need for Policy Reform—Using Precaution as a Guide

Laws which regulate human and environmental exposure to hazardous substances generally take one of two possible approaches — “better safe than sorry” or “innocent until proven guilty.” We believe that a “better safe than sorry,” or precautionary approach, should guide risk management and regulatory decisions. This means that the issue of safety should be thoroughly considered before human and environmental exposures are permitted. No hazardous substance should be allowed to slip through the cracks because of a lack of information, time, or funding. Where there is some evidence of human or environmental toxicity, the precautionary approach demands that exposures be avoided or minimized.

Federal legislation which regulates pesticides and pharmaceuticals, for example, intends that manufacturers provide evidence of safety before a product is released for use — a seemingly cautious approach. But for many pesticides which were in use for years and “grandfathered” when EPA took over the pesticide registration process, safety studies are seriously inadequate. The special review process designed to address these deficiencies will not be complete for years. Moreover, despite the legislative intent, animal testing used to support an application for new pesticide registration currently fails to examine adequately for subtle and delayed toxicity. Furthermore, the registration process for pesticides does not account for interactive or cumulative effects of multiple exposures that individuals are likely to experience in real-world situations (recent legislation would address the problem of cumulative pesticide exposures, though it remains unclear if the law can or will be effectively implemented). Finally, there is no comprehensive evaluation of the impact such chemicals may have on the environment generally.

For most industrial chemicals, however, there is no absolute requirement for advance demonstration of safety before the product enters the commercial market. For example, under the Toxic Substances Control Act, the only legislation which addresses chemicals not covered by other laws, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency must have reason to believe that a substance poses unreasonable risk to health or the environment before proposing controls - i.e., the chemical is “innocent until proven guilty.” Though the law states that the Administrator should have adequate data on which to base a decision, there are no standard testing protocols which are required before the chemical is released for use. And, with chemical manufacturers announcing more than 1,000 chemicals for production annually, the political and economic pressures to avoid thorough safety review are enormous. Appropriate screening and testing have never been practical possibilities under existing law. Moreover, industry has frequently abused “confidential business information” provisions in the legislation, effectively concealing the nature of industrial chemicals to which many people are exposed.

What Right-to-Know Data Reveal:

Trends in Selected Chemical Use and Environmental Releases — Leading Industries, Facilities, Municipalities

The federal Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and the California Pesticide Use Reporting Program are two landmark laws that require public disclosure of chemical release by large manufacturing facilities and pesticide applicators, respectively. Each is based on the fundamental principle that individuals have the right to know the identity of substances to which they are or might be exposed. Because of the TRI, information is now available throughout the country about emissions of some toxic substances from selected industrial sources. In California, information about pesticide use is also available.

This report quantifies the use and release of 78 “listed chemicals” which have been identified as reproductive and developmental toxicants by government agencies or by weight of the evidence published in the scientific literature, as evaluated by the authors (see Table 1). In addition to this list, this report discusses the reproductive and developmental effects of additional chemicals for which use and release data are not available or for which the weight of evidence was not deemed sufficient for listing. For a variety of reasons, many chemicals are not adequately reported under the Toxic Release Inventory or the Pesticide Use Reporting Program.

Environmental releases by California manufacturing facilities of chemicals with evidence of reproductive toxicity have declined substantially over the most recent five year period for which data are available. Emissions of these listed chemicals have declined 47% between 1991 and 1996, to 10.6 million pounds in the most recent year. However, the amount of these chemicals reported transferred offsite for recycling, treatment or disposal has increased, on average, over this time period, totaling 35.3 million pounds in 1996 (though transfers decreased from 1995 to 1996). Many of these transfers will inevitably re-circulate into the environment via leaking landfills, incinerator emissions or unsafe recycling practices.

Industries transferring and releasing the bulk of these chemicals include:

Fabricated metal products
Rubber and miscellaneous plastics
Petroleum refining
Transportation equipment

Toluene, styrene, glycol ethers, perchlorethylene and methylene chloride (also called dichloromethane) were all released in large amounts by California facilities. Toluene comprised 18% of total releases by manufacturing facilities. Several studies have demonstrated an increased risk of spontaneous abortion in women exposed to toluene in the workplace. The chemical is toxic to fetuses in animal studies at doses well below those causing maternal toxicity and is known to the state of California to be a developmental toxicant.

Approximately half of all facility releases of listed developmental and reproductive toxicants occurred in two southern California counties –Los Angeles and Orange. In northern California, Santa Clara, Alameda, and Contra Costa ranked highest for releases of listed chemicals.

Relative to reported releases by manufacturing facilities, California pesticide applicators are using and releasing many more pounds of reproductive and developmental toxicants. Fifty eight million pounds of these pesticides were reportedly used in 1995. Furthermore, use of reproductive and developmentally toxic pesticides is increasing steadily, rising by almost 3 million pounds per year between 1991 and 1995. Numerous studies suggest that pesticide exposure is widespread and a high percentage of the population currently carries pesticide residues in body tissues and fluids.

Like total California pesticide use, the bulk of use for those chemicals identified as reproductive and developmental toxicants occurs in agriculture. Agricultural pesticide use poses high exposure risk to farmworkers and may also be a source of significant exposure for those living in rural communities, consuming contaminated groundwater or eating pesticide residues on food. Approximately 40% of listed chemicals applied as pesticides were used on carrots, cotton, strawberries and almonds in California.

Listed pesticides were also used extensively for non-agricultural applications. Over three million pounds were applied in and around buildings in California in 1995. In a recent CALPIRG survey, half of 46 California school districts – representing one in four of all California school children – reported using pesticides identified by U.S. EPA as reproductive and/or developmental toxicants in schools and on school grounds.

As expected, the bulk of these chemicals are used in the Central Valley, the nation’s agricultural epicenter. Highest using counties include Fresno, Kern, Imperial, Monterey, Tulare, Merced, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Kings, and Riverside counties.

To the degree that right-to-know laws have contributed to the decrease in emissions they have been useful for protecting public health. However, their ultimate validity rests in their recognition of the public’s right-to-know, irrespective of incentives they provide for reducing toxicant use and releases. Such laws ensure that the public has the information required to make policy decisions and give individuals access to information they may need to protect themselves. We support efforts to expand each of these laws to include chemical use information; add additional industries and hazardous substances; and to make the data more readily available and understandable to the general public. We also encourage greater use of the Pesticide Use Reporting Program, both to encourage pesticide use reduction and generate demand for improving this under-utilized resource.

Policy Recommendations

We base our policy recommendations on three fundamental principles. They are:

1. Minimization of Chemical Use and Exposure
Strategies to eliminate unnecessary use, switch to safer alternatives, and a goal of zero-discharge of toxic chemicals should inform our decision-making.

2. The Precautionary Principle
The burden of proof must be placed on the industrial producer to prove that their chemicals are safe for use, rather than on the government or the public to prove that human health is being harmed.

3. Right-to-Know, Right-to-Education, Right-to- Training
We believe that all members of the public, both in and outside of the workplace, have the right to be fully informed about the chemicals that they are likely to come in contact with and the potential health hazards associated with those chemicals. Adequate information and education is essential for responsible personal and public decision-making where chemical exposure and proliferation may occur. Finally, disclosure has proven to be a highly effective tool in creating incentives for pollution prevention.