Slow Death By Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health
By Rick Smith & Bruce Lourie
University of Queensland Press, 2009
323 pages, $34.95 (pb)
To understand threats to health, Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie decided to risk their own through self-experimentation. Their bravery knew no bounds as they drank tea, coffee and Coca-Cola, ate Campbell's chicken noodle soup and Heinz spaghetti, got their carpet treated with stain repellent, sat on flame-retardant couches, showered, shaved, brushed teeth, ate tuna sandwiches, microwaved meals and used moisturisers.
This experiment, no different to the daily behaviour of almost everyone on the planet, allowed them to measure, with alarming results, how exposure to these activities flooded their bodies with toxic chemicals.
Pollution, they argue, has changed from a largely local, visible and acute phenomenon to a global, invisible and chronic threat.
We marinate daily in a sauce of noxious chemicals, often coming from household products, capable of serving up a menu of health effects including neuro-developmental disorders (such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and learning disorders), reproductive problems, birth defects, cancer and other chronic diseases.
Chemicals have a particular liking for the foetus and young children who lack certain detoxification mechanisms and are more prone to damage from endocrine-disrupting or hormone-mimicking chemicals.
Smith and Lourie examine how toxic chemicals get into us and the corporate interests that make it happen.
Phthalates (global production of which is eight billion kilograms a year) are used extensively as a plasticiser in toys (one quarter of their children's yellow plastic duck was pure phthalates), shower curtains, raincoats, car interiors and cling wrap, and as a fragrance extender in air fresheners, shampoos, deodorants, moisturisers, and other toiletries from where they leach into humans.
Chemical pollution from phthalates is one of the main reasons for the increasing trend of early sexual maturation in girls with its associated risk of breast cancer from exposure to estrogens from early-onset puberty.
Teflon — "it's everywhere" boasts DuPont, its manufacturer. You will find it in non-stick cookware, irons, carpet glues, sofas, oven interiors, pizza box linings, water-repellent fabrics (Gore-Tex), stain-repellents (Scotchguard, Stainmaster) not to mention, as DuPont don't, in Arctic seals and the blood of 98% of Americans.
Teflon is made from perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA).
PFOAs win the deadly chemical trifecta of persistence (a long half-life), bio-accumulation (concentration up the food chain) and toxicity.
PBDEs (poly-brominated diphenyl ethers) are the most common form of brominated flame retardants used in furnishings from which they migrate over time and settle as house dust.
In unusual corporate behaviour, PBDE manufacturers lobby for more government regulation. But with a highly profitable 450 million kilogram a year market at stake, the laws they call don't apply to their harmful product. Instead, they call for other manufacturers to have more stringent flammability standards to guarantee a growing market for PBDEs.
Triclosan is an anti-bacterial agent, first introduced in 1972 for hospitals and laboratories. It has spread like a contagion and can be found in garden hoses, steering wheels, pillows, personal care products, underwear, socks, mattresses, telephones, cutting boards and cosmetics.
Its "anti-bacterial" tag is a pure marketing ploy — when below hospital-grade, it works no better than triclosan-free products, it pollutes the environment (95% of the products that have triclosan end up going down the drain), and it has been linked to health problems in animals. Its potentially biggest health threat is that it may contribute to bacterial resistance from the overuse of antibiotics.
The hormone-screwing effects of Bisphenol A (BPA) have been known for 70 years but three billion kilograms are produced a year by Bayer, Dow, GE and other big chemical companies. It is used in polycarbonate (hard, clear) plastic, epoxy resins, drink bottles, baby bottles, kitchen utensils, the glossy paper of cash register receipts, newspaper ink (and thus recycled paper) and, in what is the primary avenue of human exposure, the lining of tin cans. Animal and cell culture studies show a link between BPA and prostate and breast cancer and many other diseases.
2,4-D is the chemical herbicide contained in lawn and garden fertilisers. One of the carcinogenic ingredients in the defoliant Agent Orange, used in the Vietnam War, it continues to bring the war back home through the garden with its human health toll.
Nanotechnology has recently joined the chemical fray, finding an unregulated home in antibacterial agents, cosmetics, sunscreens, surface coatings and anti-odour socks. Nano-silver is flavour of the month in this potentially lethal universe of the very tiny.
The US Environmental Protection Authority classifies silver as an environmental hazard to plants and animals, yet nano-silver is 45 times more toxic than standard silver.
Mercury is a naturally occurring element but is a potent neurotoxin. It has no safe level of human exposure but is being released in huge quantities by waste incinerators and (a further good reason to break our addiction to fossil fuels) coal-fired power stations.
It returns from the atmosphere in rain and snow. Because it is good at killing living things, mercury has been used in dental amalgam fillings, paint, vaccines, nasal spray and contact-lens solutions.
What it can do to big living things who eat tuna salads (one gram of mercury can contaminate all the fish in a 20 acre lake) was demonstrated by the mercury pollution from a polyvinyl plastics factory in Minamata in 1956, which poisoned 35,000 tuna-eating Japanese. And don't break your "green" compact fluorescent lightbulbs because they contain mercury.
Chemical companies have long placed the corporate bottom line before public health and this has required keeping the public in the dark about the health effects of their products.
When challenged by environmental campaigners like Smith and Lourie, the companies' response has been to mobilise their battalions of lawyers, PR agents, lobbyists, industry-funded academics and industry-friendly government regulators. Their philosophy is that a chemical is safe unless proven otherwise. However, in a people and planet friendly world, this principle would be reversed.
Smith and Lourie conclude that, because of the pervasiveness of global chemical pollution, no person can be a toxic-chemical-free island solely through wise consumption choices. Rigorous government regulation is also essential.
One question they don't raise is who will regulate pro-corporate governments.
If we want chemicals to serve us safely, rather than poison us, we need to take them out of the private hands of the Dows and DuPonts. For them, the science of chemistry is subordinate to the alchemy of transmuting matter into the gold of profit.