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The price of caution
NewsWeek
To reduce risks to consumers, Europe is putting common chemical products under intense scrutiny.
Heavy industry is scarce in the pastoral patch of northern Sweden where Margot Wallstrom spent her childhood back in the 1950s. Is it safe to assume, then, that she was spared exposure to the nasty pollutants that usually accompany factories and cities and other manifestations of economic development? No, it's not. Last year Wallstrom, 49, had her blood tested for the presence of trace amounts of toxins. All sorts of chemicals turned up, from the long-banned pesticide DDT to PCBs, the cancer-causing compounds used in a range of electrical goods. Even her two children probably imbibed the chemicals from Wallstrom's breast milk.
The lesson, says Wallstrom, the European Union's Environment commissioner, is simple. The price of progress—the release of a slew of potentially dangerous chemicals into the environment—has been too steep. In many cases the long-term health implications of trace chemicals are unknown—thousands have never been subjected to a formal test—but they've been blamed for everything from falling sperm counts in men to rising rates of asthma in children to higher cancer rates in the general population. And no one—not even a clean-living, eco-aware Swede from the countryside—is immune. "These substances are turning up where they don't belong and are not expected," says Wallstrom. Consumers have a right to know the risks they're taking each time they apply deodorant or bring an appliance into their homes, she says. "The knowledge gap is unacceptable and must be closed."
To close it, Europe is now proposing a new regime for regulating chemicals. It's based on the "precautionary principle," which holds that products or processes should be presumed dangerous unless proved safe. The new regime will basically make manufacturers responsible for ensuring the safety of almost every chemical sold in the EU in quantities greater than a metric ton a year. This amounts to a tenfold increase in the number of substances under regulation—to more than 30,000 chemicals, including some that have been in use for decades. Industry will have 11 years to test, at its own expense, every such chemical on the market. The results of these tests will go into in a vast EU database, which will be made available to the public. If a chemical is deemed unsafe, the manufacturer will have to apply for special authorization to sell it. Even so, that won't absolve the firm from legal liability should the chemical prove, in subsequent years, to be harmful in ways that cannot be foreseen. The chemicals in the hairspray you've been using for the past 30 years, in the cleaner that takes the stains out of your leather sofa and in a panoply of other common household products will all be tested and filed into the database. If they're judged too risky, they'll be pulled off the market.
Proponents of the new rules point to a string of disasters that advance testing might have prevented. Think only of asbestos, the wonder fireproofing product of the early-20th century that has since claimed tens of thousands of lives through cancer. "If we had been more precautionary in the past, then we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now," says Helen Lynn of the Women's Environmental Network, a British lobbying group. Plenty of other products with questionable characteristics are also lurking in the home, finding their way into the bloodstream, skin, lungs and other organs. "The fact is that so far we have only experienced the tip of the iceberg in terms of exposure to substances like these," says Lynn. Beware that highly effective carpet-stain remover or the flame-retardant chemical in the sofa.
Especially troubling are the so-called endocrine disrupters—chemicals that slowly accumulate in the body, interfering with hormones and reproductive systems. Last year more than 60 leading scientists signed a petition calling for limits on these chemicals, which are found in household products from toys to televisions. Even deodorants contain parabens, commonly used preservatives that mimic the female hormone estrogen. "I challenge anyone to look on the bathroom shelf: you will find something there that contains parabens," says Lynn.
European industry leaders have lobbied hard against the changes. They argue that the measures will be unreasonably expensive. The EU concedes that the rules will cost 2.3 billion euro to implement, driving up bills in the chemical industry, a business that already faces intense international competition. Last year industry put the cost much higher—at 12.6 billion euro—and enlisted British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Jacques Chirac of France, among others, to warn Brussels of the measures' likely impact. As a result, the scope of the draft regulation was narrowed to exclude, for example, polymers, or plastics. Although industry lobbyists haven't yet revised their cost estimate, they maintain that the rules are still onerous. "Safeguarding the consumer is fine, but not at the cost of the European business community," says Arnaldo Abruzzini, president of Eurochambres, an industry group in Brussels.
Objections to the rules go beyond the matter of who pays. The EU's penchant for safety at all costs, say business leaders and scientists, is just the latest example of a wider mistrust of scientific innovation that the pols have picked up from voters. Europe—in sharp contrast to the business-happy United States—is developing a culture of risk aversion, of which the precautionary principle is the clearest expression.
Perhaps the most damning criticism of the precautionary principle, though, is that it is illogical: it requires proving a negative—that a given substance is not dangerous in any way—which is an impossible condition to satisfy. Even exhaustive testing will never quite do the trick. The EU, notes Bill Durodie of the lobbying group Scientific Alliance, has renewed its "emergency" ban on the use of phthalates, a softening agent used in PVC, 14 times while it looks for conclusive evidence of harm. Science just can't deliver the definitive answers that the precaution-ary principle requires, says Jaap Hanekamp, a Dutch research chemist working for the Heidelberg Appeal Foundation.
Are Europeans being misled by the politicians who tell them what they want to hear—namely, that risk can be reduced to zero? "A broader precautionary culture encourages people to think that a society free from danger and damage can actually exist and is—with the implementation of the precautionary principle—within reach," says Hanekamp.
Even if the new regulations could eliminate risks from man-made chemicals, what about the millions of natural chemicals that aren't regulated, such as table salt? "Cabbage contains 17 to 27 substances which, fed separately in sufficient quantities to animals, can be carcinogenic," said the U.K.'s Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett last month. "Are we all to stop eating cabbage?" Sometimes caution gets the better of common sense.Fuente: NewsWeek
Fecha: 05/04/2004
