Do you know what’s in the mascara you wear or the toys your kids play with? Has the chemical industry blocked regulation of products that may be linked to cancer, infertility, neurological and hormonal disorders? Makeup. When a woman puts on mascara or lipstick or powder, someone’s tested it, haven’t they?
This is an illusion that a lot of Americans have, that somebody out there in the government is assessing the safety of the ingredients in the cosmetics that they put on their body. there’s a deep mythology people have here in US that the government is looking out for their health and safety, when it comes to chemicals. Unfortunately its not the case and what the consequences are for our health, but also for our economic and political status in the world.
Back in the 1930s, coming out of that hole, there in Depression era. This is the Roosevelt era. And the Food and Drug Administration was created at that time to monitor the types of food and the types of drugs that Americans were taking. At that time, there was a proposal to include cosmetics under the purview of the Food and Drug Administration. That effort was derailed by the cosmetics industry, which was a little more nascent than it is now but succeeded in essentially exempting the cosmetics industry from regulation by the FDA.
The only thing the FDA really looks at now is hair dyes. But anything else, whether it’s your nail polish, eye shadow, actually shampoo, essentially personal care products, is not regulated by the FDA. The FDA doesn’t even have the power to regulate it. And numerous times in the Senate over the last fifty years, there have been efforts to actually expand the purview of the FDA, and it’s been repeatedly beaten back by the cosmetics industry.
Lipstick, lead in lipstick—is this an issue today?
There’s an environmental group, Health Care Without Harm, which demanded from the FDA its data about lead in lipstick. And the response that it got repeatedly was, “We’re looking into it, we’re looking into it, we’re looking into it,” and basically, in the end, wouldn’t provide the data about lead in lipstick. So the answer as to whether it’s still there is yes, and—which is kind of extraordinary when you think of what lead does. Kids are told not supposed to chew a lead pencil, because it’s like going to affect your brain. And here, people who wear lipstick are licking it all day. And then they’re reapplying it. And then they’re licking it again.
The skin, medically speaking, is actually an organ. It’s a living organ. It’s not just a covering of the human body; it’s actually a living organ. So whatever you put on the skin ultimately makes its way into the body.
There are array of ways we get exposed to toxic chemicals, but when you look at cosmetics, you have an array of substances that actually—some of which mimic estrogen, for example, the female sexual hormone, and which is—many scientists have a lot of concern about that idea. European Union which has actually decided to ban a whole array of these substances, things that cause cancer, mutation of human genes, reproductive damage.
The stuff is an array of ingredients that cause—that are determined to cause cancer, that are determined to cause reproductive damage, and that are determined to cause mutation of human genes. They’re called CMRs.
They way chemicals work is complicated. It’s not like you put lipstick on, and you’re going to get sick. That is not how it works. But we’re talking about an accumulation over life, over the course of your life, over years and years, multiple times repeated, very, very minute amounts over the course of many years. And that’s where the concern lies in many of these substances.
Phthalates” starts with a “p.” It’s a very unusual spelling, a lot of consonants. But phthalates are basically a plastic additive that makes plastic soft. The rubber duck is traditionally made soft with phthalates. Kids play with these things, as they do with many other toys. And what’s interesting about that is that studies have been done for years now suggesting that the phthalates, which soften plastic, contribute to the reduction of testosterone in young male infants and are very potent, endocrine disruptors, in an early stage in life, in particular. And these are used in a whole array of things, from children’s toys—kids suck on them. Kids play them. They’re soft, so they play with them and squeeze them and throw them at their mothers and all that and their fathers. And they’re also in our shower curtains, dashboards in automobiles, you have phthalates.
About ten years ago, the European Union began removing phthalates from the children toys. Why? Because children suck on these things, and when they suck on these things, their levels of phthalates are elevated, and they—and there could be a potential contribution to disrupting a very vulnerable endocrine system. Back and forth, back and forth, there’s been massive lobbying by the American chemical industry to try to prevent the Europeans from moving forward. They did move forward. But in America, ten years later, have actually banned—about six months ago, the US Congress finally banned phthalates in the United States in certain children’s toys, number one, ten years after the European Union did, which means the European companies got a big advance on finding alternatives, and two, they’re still selling out the inventory, so they’re permitted to sell the inventory in America until it runs out.
Electronics—there was a law passed by the European Union saying, let’s remove mercury, lead, chromium, cadmium, very potent neurological toxins, from electronics, because they leak into the water supply when they decay and the air and the soil.
The large multinational companies largely adapted to the European laws. That made the EPA completely irrelevant. EPA has basically dug itself into a hole of becoming totally irrelevant to the decisions of major corporations, which are aligning themselves increasingly with the European standards.
However, if you’re a small operator in China or elsewhere in the spokes of the global economy, and you want to sell stuff to—you only care about the American market, the American and the African and Latin America market, you can manufacture goods that you could never sell in Europe. And that’s what’s happening.
So you now have lobbyists not only going to Washington; they’re going to Brussels, the head of the EU.
K Street is the center of American lobbying in Washington. When the Europeans began trying to do these things, trying to change the production system or trying to protect people from some of the dangers of what’s in these products, the US chemical industry manufacturers, they began flooding Brussels with lobbyists. And what’s happened the European Parliament, the European Commission, which is essentially the Congress and White House of the European Union, quaintly put, are now surrounded by the Burson-Marstellers, the Hill & Knowlton companies. All the lobbying firms that are familiar with in America moved wholesale to Brussels and have launched essentially a transatlantic, very aggressive lobbying campaign.
One of the reasons the action moved there is because over the last eight years the only threat really coming to major corporate interests, was coming from Brussels. The American Chamber of Commerce has a huge presence in Brussels. And what they’ve tried to do is actually lobby. But you can’t lobby in the same way in Europe that you can in US. You don’t have campaign contributions, so you can’t do those whole things. So the lobbying has a very different form. you’ve got different languages, the lobbying is very different, the way you exert influence is very different. And to a great extent, a good deal of the American lobbying didn’t work and has been causing backfires.
The issue of regulation is now being presented as, “Well, that’s bad for business. And especially in these economically perilous times, people have to let up.”
That is a line that has been repeated so many times that it’s almost tiresome to hear. However, people have begun believing that there’s something deep in the American psyche that says that it’s we, individuals, in opposition to the government, and there’s a very, profound American sense that that argument has plugged into over the last two decades.
What happens when the government does get a little more intrusive into the marketplace? What happens when they start regulating? And in Europe was the government said, “Wait a minute, you can’t use these substances in these products. We want you to do things otherwise. We want you to find less toxic alternatives,” over and over again the industries didn’t shrink, they didn’t lose market share. In fact, there were a lot of new jobs created. Many new markets, particularly, for example, in international trade, if you look at the emerging economies, with the new middle class coming up in Brazil and South Africa and Korea and other countries, that are now in play sort of between Europe and America, which direction they’re going to go, are increasingly, the trade figures are showing, moving in the European direction when it comes to many of these products.
The European states pay for healthcare of their citizens. So, when people, advocates and scientists and such, started arguing these cases with their governments, they made an economic argument. They said, “Look, you invest now in getting these things out of circulation, and in ten, twenty, thirty years down the line, there are going to be billions of dollars in savings.” And that’s in fact what the European Commission now estimates, that by this array of different environmental initiatives, they’re going to save up 40, 50 billion euros over the next thirty years. So it’s an enormous financial investment in the health of their citizens, and whereas in America, basically people are basically on our own. which is very difficult. And politically speaking, it creates a less receptive political atmosphere, because there’s not the economic incentive.
The market moves forward, huge market, organic this and that is growing dramatically—natural products, less toxic ingredients, more green, etc., etc. But there is a very key difference between the market moving those forces and laws. And if you don’t have a law, what you have is a market, that if people have the money and the knowledge, they can actually go seek out the products. And I’m sure people can figure out how to do that. But if you have a law, it makes it far more equitable, because everybody gets the same protections, whether you have the resources or the knowledge to pursue the alternatives. So I think there’s a big difference.
Baby bottles, some of them have BPA, which is bisphenol A, which is a big issue right now, as to how safe bisphenol A—a lot of fears that it is a potent endocrine disruptor, possible carcinogen. You can actually go to a store, and if it says “no bisphenol A,” then you could probably trust it. But the point is that there is no requirement that that be disclosed to you. And that’s what we do not have here in America. We don’t have a requirement that companies tell you what’s inside their goods. There actually has be kind of a change in that regard.
There are efforts to keep that information from the public. There are levels of disclosure required on European products that are not required on American products. We live in a global economy. So that information is going to start making its way back here to the United States. And it’s going to start creating some interesting tensions when people start seeing information disclosed there that’s not disclosed here.
European Union is a fascinating political experiment. What you have is twenty-seven different countries, and from all the way in Spain, of course, to Finland, to Sweden, to Cyprus, and they’ve decided to voluntarily integrate their economic—enormous portion of their economic systems and to develop joint political structures. And they’ve got essentially a parliament, an executive arm, and they have a judicial arm that enforces the kind of accords between the different nations. So, this, as a political—they call it an unidentified political object. It’s one of the ways that they describe it to themselves in Europe. What’s interesting is that in 2005, this entity, the European Union, became essentially the world’s largest economy, so supplanted the United States as the world’s largest economy.
So now, what’s interesting is that other parts of the world are beginning to assemble themselves. The African Union, which is actually beginning to see the European Union as a model for allying itself and beginning to assert its authority in the global economy. Similar thing is happening with Mercosur, in Latin America, where the Mercosur countries, it’s now five or six Latin American countries—have banded together in an economic alliance that has certain common policies and which is detouring the United States—not detouring, but their primary trading partner is no longer America; it actually is the European Union. So this notion of how America exerts its influence in the world through trade and through standards, which the world used to follow, is no longer the case. It’s a much more complicated and fluid
Discussion: Mark Schapiro, Amy Goodman
Mark Schapiro, Editorial Director of the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco and author of Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power.
Award-winning investigative journalist Mark Schapiro is the author of Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power, just out in paperback. He writes, “The European-led revolution in chemical regulation requires that thousands of chemicals finally be assessed for their potentially toxic effects on human beings and signals the end of American industry’s ability to withhold critical data from the public.” Mark Schapiro is the editorial director of the Center for Investigative Reporting
– from democracynow