Our regulatory system is a failure.
If two million lives were lost due to chemical exposures in 2019, about the same number of people (or more) likely die from chemical exposures every year. Year after year. Why aren’t people up in arms about this?
We have posted countless pieces on this website about how city, county and state agencies here allow polluters to discharge poisons into our air, water, soils, and fish–and often don’t even bother to enforce the (often weak) environmental laws on the books. Even more troubling, in far too many cases, the agencies themselves are the polluters, and seem to feel that they are exempted from these laws.
The regulatory system is also completely broken at the federal level. Dr. Tracey Woodruff, with the UCSF Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment (PRHE), summarized this recent Environmental Science & Technology paper– Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Implementation: How the Amended Law Has Failed to Protect Vulnerable Populations from Toxic Chemicals in the United States as follows:
- In the 40 years between enactment of original TSCA and its 2016 amendments, EPA regulated fewer than 1% of the existing chemicals registered for use in commerce.
- EPA’s risk evaluations on the first 10 TSCA chemicals systematically underestimated human health risks of chemical exposures, which puts the public’s health at risk.”
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Below, teens from the East Madison Community Center standing next to heavily PFAS contaminated Starkweather Creek. (Photo by Maria Powell). How did this creek become so poisoned in green, progressive, privileged Madison, Dane County? Why isn’t more being done to clean up this creek and to prevent more PFAS from spewing into it now?
Regulatory failure at all levels…
