In St Louis, Missouri, on July 30, Dr Barry Commoner gave the keynote address at the Second Citizens' Conference on Dioxin. Following are excerpts.
I am convinced that 1994 will be seen as the year in which — despite every effort of the chemical industry and its journalistic allies — the true dimensions of the ominous threat of dioxin to human health became known. Dioxin and dioxin-like substances represent the most perilous chemical threat to the health and biological integrity of human beings and the environment.
The history of dioxin is a sordid story — of devastating sickness inflicted, unawares, on chemical workers; of callous disregard for the impact of toxic wastes on the public; of denial after denial by the chemical industry; of the industry's repeated efforts to hide the facts about dioxin and, when these become known, to distort them. We need to learn what must be done, now, not merely to diminish, but to end the menace of dioxin and its many toxic cousins.
The chemist learns to favour the production of a particular molecule by controlling temperature, pressure and other conditions and, more precisely, by introducing a catalyst.
But the process is never perfect; some unwanted molecules that happen to be very stable and resist further transformation will persist — as waste. [Dioxin is one of these stable waste products.] Toxic waste is not simply a matter of poor housekeeping or bad management; it is an inescapable part of chlorine-based chemical production.
In 1985 the EPA [US Environmental Protection Agency] issued its first formal cancer risk assessment of dioxin. EPA estimated that people would be exposed to the one-per-million risk if they lived near soil contaminated at the level of one part per billion.
[In October 1990 EPA and the Chlorine Institute — an industry group — convened a conference at the Banbury Center in Long Island.] The purpose of the conference was to review new data about how dioxin caused cancer in order to provide a "scientific" basis for a new risk assessment. The "new data" were studies that actually went back to the 1970s.
The EPA participants in the Banbury Conference hurried back to Washington with news that prompted the administrator, William K. Reilly, to predict that a new reassessment would in fact reduce the dioxin risk. But the new attempt to downgrade the dioxin hazard, like all the earlier ones, has failed.
In failing, it has not simply confirmed the important but narrow result of the 1985 risk assessment that dioxin is an enormously potent carcinogen. It has also greatly expanded the range and biological impact of dioxin's effects, at levels of exposure already experienced by the entire US population.
Apparently Americans are sufficiently exposed to some very general source of dioxin to put us all well above the "acceptable" cancer risk of one in a million, and within range of its numerous other harmful effects. That source is chiefly food.
The general spread of dioxin and dioxin-like chemicals in the US environment has already exposed the entire population to levels of these extremely toxic substances that are expected to cause a number of serious health effects. These include an average risk of cancer of 100 or more per million in the entire US population — 100 times greater than the risk standard that has triggered EPA remedial action.
The EPA document also acknowledges that the newly appreciated hazards of dioxin go far beyond the risk of cancer. The expected non-cancer effects include:
- disruption of endocrine hormone systems, especially those related to sexual development;
- disruption of critical stages of embryonic development, for example of the nervous system;
- damage to the developing immune system, leading to increased susceptibility to infectious diseases.
These are intergenerational defects, imprinted for life on the developing foetus by the effect of dioxin on the mother and sometimes the father.
[Chlorinated molecules] are rare in living things; only about 600 such substances have been identified, compared with tens of thousands of different organic substances made by living things that are not chlorinated. Moreover, not a single chlorinated compound has been identified as natural in mammals.
Chlorinated organic compounds like dioxin are incompatible with the distinctively complex hormonal systems and developmental processes that are characteristic of vertebrates, especially mammals.
The industry's chief defence against shutting down the use of chlorine in chemical manufacturing is that it is essential to the manufacture of most of its products (true), which are in turn essential to most other industries and agriculture (not so true).
Synthetic organic chemicals — plastics, pesticides, detergents and solvents — have deeply penetrated the modern world. This was done not so much by creating new industries as by taking over existing forms of production. After all, we did have food before synthetic pesticides, and there was furniture, flooring and paint long before plastics.
The chemical industry is the source of persistent, dangerously toxic substances that must be eliminated. To meet that obligation, the industry must change its methods of production — and, where necessary, its products — beginning with the elimination of chlorine.
We are at a turning point not only in the history of dioxin, but of the chemical industry itself. What has brought us to this point, I am convinced, is the environmental movement — at its powerful grassroots. Let this conference be the start of new campaigns and new victories — for the sake of the environment and the people who live in it.
[From Rachel's Hazardous Waste News (US).]