A WORLD AWASH WITH CHEMICALS

Julian Cribb

Canberra

Summary

Planet Earth is awash with more than 83,000 man-made chemicals, constituting one of humanity’s greatest yet least-understood impacts on itself, on biodiversity and on ecosystem health. These contaminants are now to be found from the stratosphere to the deep ocean, from pole to pole and in biological organisms and food webs planet-wide. Growing evidence suggests they rarely ‘disappear’, but frequently spawn new products or recombine with one another into new, potentially hazardous compounds, in soil, water, living organisms, the food chain and individual humans themselves. Tens of thousands of new chemical products are developed and released each year, mostly untested for health or environmental impacts. The prevailing regulatory paradigm to await evidence of harm before then taking action, substance by substance, would require 1.5 million years to complete its task and can never keep abreast of new compounds or mixtures. The extent of man-made chemical pollution on the total Earth System is poorly documented and understood, while international and national efforts to regulate it remain fragmentary and compliance is sketchy. The article calls for a new approach to consumer education, driving reform of global efforts to control anthropogenic contamination of the Earth system.

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Planet Earth, and the whole of humanity with it, are awash with man-made chemicals. As of December 2012, the US Environment Protection Authority listed no fewer than 83,590 different chemical substances manufactured or used in the United States alone.1 Although it includes 16,572 ‘confidential’ chemicals the list does not cover unique substances made in other countries or new chemicals for which registration has not yet been sought. The European Community estimates more than 70,000 manufactured chemicals are currently marketed in its member countries.2 Together these offer an indication of the sheer scale and range of the contemporary human chemical production enterprise, which is projected to grow at 3 per cent a year to 2050 – in short, to triple in size in less than four decades.3

The value of chemical production worldwide has risen from $171 billion in 1970 to $4.1 trillion in 2010, and is projected to reach $6.4 trillion by 2020, when more than half of global output will be concentrated in developing and newly-industrialising countries.4 Man-made chemicals are ubiquitous in all spheres of human activity – they are to be found in homes, offices and factories, on farms, in clothing, cosmetics, medicines, electronics, in vehicles, aircraft and ships, in construction, industry and pest control. They, and their breakdown or recombination products, are in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and almost everything we touch. Unlike previous generations of humans, we are now immersed in these synthetic substances, toxic metals and metalloids and chemical mixtures from our very conception to the moment of our death. The UN

Environment Programme states, “Of the tens of thousands of chemicals on the market, only a fraction has been thoroughly evaluated to determine their effects on human health and the environment.” 5

UNEP estimates that of the 5.7 million metric tonnes of pollutants released in North America (United States, Canada and Mexico) alone in the year 2006, 1.8 million tonnes were chemicals rated as persistent, bio-accumulative and toxic to humans and animals.6 A million tonnes of these chemicals are linked with, or have suspected links with, cancer while a further 857,000 tonnes are linked to or suspected of causing birth defects and genetic diseases. Since North America produced around a quarter of the world’s chemical output at the time, it may be inferred that the total world release was about 20-22 million tonnes in 2006 and is today of the order of 30 million tonnes, driven chiefly by industrial expansion in Asia.

Another way to look at the issue is that the human race is presently being carpet-bombed with 8-10 million tonnes of toxins, probable carcinogens, mutagens and teratogens every year. For each person on Earth 1.4 kilos of these substances are released annually – a per capita annual load which may be contrasted with the exposure of the rural Vietnamese population during the Vietnam war (2.5kg/pc/pa, since linked to 400,000 cases of death or maiming, and 500,000 birth defects). 7

Under a ‘business as usual’ scenario, global toxic chemical output will reach 3.2 kilos of toxins per human being by 2050.8 In advanced countries such as America the combined toxic output per person is already of the order of 5.6 kilos a year – more than twice the volume of chemicals to which rural Vietnamese were exposed.

In addition to the 30 million tonnes of manufactured chemicals produced and released each year, humanity also concentrates and releases vast amounts of artificial nutrients through worldwide agriculture and manufacturing. Rockstrom and colleagues (2009) 9 estimate that humanity is injecting 121 million tonnes of elemental nitrogen from the atmosphere annually into soil and water processes. It is also discharging an estimated 8.5-9.5 million tonnes of elemental phosphorus into the oceans. Together these contaminants greatly exceed the volumes naturally recirculated in the Earth system and, in the case of N, constitute one of the three dangerous boundaries which, in the opinion of the authors, we have already transgressed. While not linked to large-scale human mortality, the release of these nutrients is causing the eutrophication of most of the world’s rivers and lakes and increasing areas of ocean. This has so far resulted in the creation of more than 400 documented ‘dead zones’ – areas of sea which have become hypoxic due to human release of nutrients and a subsequent process of stagnation, leading to heavy losses of local marine life. 10

At the same time vast quantities of mineral pollutants are produced by the mining, minerals and energy sectors. To take a single example, world production of red mud, a potentially harmful byproduct of the Bayer process for alumina extraction from bauxite, is currently estimated at 120 million tonnes a year – and the accumulated global stockpile at in excess of 3 billion tonnes.11 Most of this is stored in dams, which are subject to unpredictable failure, while large volumes are still being dumped in the oceans. To take another, just ten of the world’s top mining companies are estimated between them to dump 180 million tonnes of toxic tailings into nearby rivers and lakes, mainly in Third World countries. 12

World production of coal is around 7.7 billion tonnes a year, leaving an extensive legacy of toxic contamination from mining, processing, stockpiling, atmospheric pollution and fallout and fly-ash disposal. Contaminants found in coal include mercury, cadmium, radioactive elements, sulphur and nitrogen compounds, volatile organic carcinogens and toxins, acid runoff and acid rain, and it is the world’s primary source of greenhouse gases. By volume coal constitutes the largest source of toxics from any human activity and has been estimated to directly kill around 170,000 people a year.13 In countries such as Australia, coal is thought to claim 4 to 5 times as many lives as the annual road toll and a third as many as tobacco.14 Other fossil sources of power generation energy, including petroleum and gas, are estimated to cost a further 130,000 human lives.

Finally, according to UNEP estimates, the world produces some 400 million tonnes a year of hazardous wastes which it struggles to dispose of safely.15 The Basel Convention (1992) restricts the international transport and dumping of toxic waste – but this is thought to apply to less than 4 per cent of the quantum of this waste actually produced globally. Earth-system contamination

Pollution has long been regarded as a local problem, the very term ‘contaminated site’ connoting a geographic limit to the danger zone. In recent years it has become increasingly clear ‘contaminated site’ is a misnomer – no site is an island, and all pollutants are, to some extent, continually in motion and subject to chemical interaction. Rather there exists a ubiquitously polluted planet. Man-made chemicals have been shown to move constantly in both space and time. They combine and recombine to form new compounds. They break down into smaller, often more mobile and sometimes more highly toxic substances. While some dissolve into harmless elements and disperse, others are continually recycled and reprocessed in water, air, soil and especially the global food web and the human food chain. 16 This process may continue for decades and even centuries.

In the early 1970s it was realised that 89 man-made chemicals, principally chlorine and bromine compounds, were responsible for the destruction of the ozone layer in the upper troposphere, which protects life on Earth against excessive ultraviolet-B radiation in sunlight. 17 While their phase-out began with the signing of the Montreal Protocol in 1987, it has not proceeded as fast as hoped – and, in fact, ozone-depleting chemicals have significantly been replaced by HCFCs and other chemicals which are highly active greenhouse gases contributing about 1.3 billion tonnes of additional CO2-equivalent emissions to the atmosphere and growing at a rate of 8 per cent a year.18 Humanity thus appears to be in the process of trading one form of upper atmospheric pollution for another, potentially even more risky. This gives an inkling of how difficult it may prove to escape the chemical treadmill, especially by substituting one compound for another with unknown side-effects.

At the same time air pollution caused by uncontrolled industrial development, the release of aerosols, the burning of forests and fossil fuels has multiplied, with widely-documented impacts on human health.19 This pollution is now observed to move freely around the Earth’s hemispheres and across its largest oceans and continents, producing phenomena like the Indian-Asian ‘brown cloud’.20 It results in about 1.3 million deaths a year, mostly avoidable, growing at a rate of 16% per annum.21

In addition to widespread scientific reports on pollution by man-made chemicals in marine fish and mammals such as whales, seals and dolphins,22 researchers have also found “measurable and sometimes high amounts of toxic pollutants” in cephalopods taken from the deep and remote oceans at depths of 1000-2000 metres.23 These included tributyltin (TBT), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), brominated diphenyl ethers (BDEs), and dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT), collectively known as persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, for their ability to persist and concentrate in foodwebs.

At the polar extremes of the planet, hundreds of Arctic polar bears have been found to be contaminated with a wide range of common industrial chemicals in a study that ran over almost 30 years 24, the bears’ health suffering as a consequence. In Antarctica, says the Australian Antarctic Division “Minute traces of man-made chemicals used in other parts of the world are now being detected in the snow that falls over the region. Some of these chemicals can become concentrated in the bodies of local wildlife, such as seals, penguins and whales, and can be harmful to these animals in the long-term.” 25

Even on the Earth’s highest point, Mt Everest, which extends into the remote troposphere, researchers have discovered toxic heavy metals in freshly-fallen snow at concentrations that exceed the USEPA’s maximum safety guidelines for drinking water.26 While their origin is not entirely clear, the metals occurred at several orders of magnitude higher than in fresh snow in Antarctica, causing the scientists to suspect Asian industrial air pollution as the most likely source. Paralleling this, research among pristine seabird colonies on isolated Pacific atolls revealed the birds to have high levels of PCBs, DDT and other toxic chemicals, thought to originate with industrial waste dumped into the ocean.27

Groundwater, which constitutes 97 per cent of the Earth’s freshwater supply, feeds most rivers and lakes and supplies 40 per cent of human water needs, is increasingly polluted with man-made chemicals. Since groundwater can travel for many kilometres underground, and is recharged on scales from months to millions of years, contamination can travel widely and last for generations. Pollution is from multiple sources, including: leaky landfills, hazardous waste disposal, illicit industrial discharges, mining, ‘fracking’, oil and chemical spills, badly-managed sewage systems, disposal of medications, urban runoff, agricultural runoff and naturally-occurring (geogenic) pollution as in the Bangladesh arsenic epidemic. The problem is found in every developed country and most developing countries, a University of Michigan report stating “In most countries the majority of groundwater under cities is contaminated beyond acceptable levels, and therefore cannot be used.” 28 In China half the nation’s shallow groundwater and 90 per cent of its urban groundwater are contaminated and 100,000 people die annually of chemical-related water poisoning. 29

From these brief examples it is evident that humanity’s 83,000-plus existing synthetic chemicals are now distributed all around the Earth, from the stratosphere to the deep oceans, from the surface to the underground, from the highest mountains to the remotest islands and from pole to pole. They are found especially in cities, the food chain and drinking water. Furthermore man-made chemicals are increasingly found in wildlife and natural food webs well beyond immediate contact with industrial civilisation, and are affecting not only human health but, potentially the health of much of life on Earth. This worldwide dissemination has occurred in barely 100 years and points to a degree

of mobility, ubiquity and persistence in man-made chemicals, and a scale of threat to our common future well-being of which the world at large is broadly unaware, and with which decision makers, ethical industries and regulators are relatively powerless to deal given its exponential rate of expansion and its chemical complexity, especially in poorly- or un-regulated countries.

It is no longer simply a case of a local factory site, river or industry being contaminated. There is convincing evidence that man-made toxins now pervade the Earth system, via its physical and biological circulations, the human food chain and also economic trade. While there has been scientific focus on specific aspects of this issue, such as ozone depletion, particular chemicals like the ‘dirty dozen’, world trade in hazardous waste, carbon emissions and the uncontrolled release of nitrogen, phosphorus and potash into the global water supply, there still exists no ‘big picture’ understanding of the total planet-wide impact of this unprecedented chemical overdose – or of its wider ramifications, either for humanity or for life on Earth. As Rockstrom and colleagues observe, there is ample scientific evidence of the injurious impact of individual chemicals but there is “no aggregate, global-level analysis”. As a result the thresholds at which large-scale tipping points, either in human or ecosystem health, may occur remain unknown.30

This remains a crucial scientific oversight and a gap in our understanding both of ourselves and of our home planet. It renders the prevention of large-scale human or environmental poisoning at present impossible.

Humans as “contaminated sites”

Public awareness of the extent of toxicity caused by man-made chemicals in the environment and in humans themselves has been growing since Rachel Carson’s celebrated ‘Silent Spring’ was publishing in 1962. However so titanic has the task now become of measuring the extent and scale of contamination of either the environment or of humans themselves, that most national regulators and governments do not even attempt it, confining themselves mainly to limited investigations of a very small number of substances of immediate concern in subsets of the population.

The US Centers for Disease Control, for example, regularly monitors for 212 out of 83,000 individual chemicals made or used in the US, using a sample size of 2500 to reflect a population of >320 million people. 31 It chooses which chemicals to watch on the basis of “scientific data that suggested exposure in the U.S. population; the seriousness of health effects known or suspected to result from some levels of exposure; the need to assess the effectiveness of public health actions to reduce exposure to a chemical; the availability of a biomonitoring analytical method with adequate accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and throughput; the availability of adequate blood or urine samples; and the incremental analytical cost to perform the biomonitoring analysis for the chemical.” Even such a large survey plainly leaves a lot of gaps.

Nevertheless it found that certain chemicals, such as acrylamide and its metabolites, are “extremely common in the US population”. It found a steady increase in blood mercury content for Americans as they grow older, especially for the black population. It found detectable levels of perchlorate – a chemical used in auto fuel – in the urine of all participants in its survey. It found a “high percentage”

of participants had MTBE in their blood. It found 5% of the population had cadmium levels close to the level of concern. It found “widespread population exposure” to the common industrial chemical PBDE. It found BPA in the urine of more than 90 per cent of participants and PFOA in most of them.

The CDC cautions that the presence of a certain chemical in blood or urine need not mean the health of the individual is at risk. However it also concedes that the threshold levels for adverse health effects of many individual chemicals are simply unknown. 32 And it is silent about the possible health effects of combinations of chemicals. Concerned at some of the gaps, the Environmental Working Group, a not-for-profit NGO, ran some small scale studies of its own to see how polluted Americans are. It established they were affected literally, cradle-to-grave. “To date, EWG studies have found 414 industrial chemicals, pollutants and pesticides in 186 people, from newborns to grandparents,” it said.33

In an even more striking report in 2009, EWG revealed that Americans now enter the world already laden with toxic and cancer-causing chemicals: “A two-year study involving five independent research laboratories in the United States, Canada and the Netherlands has found up to 232 toxic chemicals in the umbilical cord blood of 10 babies from racial and ethnic minority groups. The findings constitute hard evidence that each child was exposed to a host of dangerous substances while still in its mother’s womb.” 34

Nine out of the ten baby samples contained bisphenol A, an industrial petrochemical produced by the millions of tons annually in the production of polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins: “BPA has been implicated in a lengthening list of serious chronic disorders, including cancer, cognitive and behavioral impairments, endocrine system disruption, reproductive and cardiovascular system abnormalities, diabetes, asthma and obesity.” Major sources of BPA, and presumably the reason for its high prevalence, are its widespread use in plastic drink bottles and in timber particle board and furniture made with epoxy glues.

Furthermore, the poisoning continues as soon as the newborn baby begins to feed. A team at UC Berkeley found pesticides and PCBs in all samples of mother’s breast milk it collected in the San Francisco Bay area and Salinas Valley. 35 The most disturbing feature of this study was that most of the pesticides found were modern, “non-persistent” types which had been introduced to replace banned persistent organochlorine chemicals – and whose health effects remain “largely unknown” according to CDC. These findings were replicated in a Chinese study in the Guangzhou region, which found banned DDT, dioxins, organochlorines and other POPs in mother’s milk.36

A major source of this contamination of newborns is “air toxics” – volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) emitted by the home and its furnishings. The Australian Government states: “VOCs are emitted from some fabrics, carpets, fibreboard, plastic products, glues and solvents, some spray packs and some printed material, paints, varnishes, wax, cleaning products, disinfectants, cosmetics, degreasing products, hobby products, fuels. Petrol stations are significant emitters of VOCs.” 37 Since urban people spend <90 per cent of their time indoors, 38 exposure to air toxics is now regarded as a serious and lifelong potential source of health issues, as they may be inhaled with almost every breath taken.

With chemicals used to produce, preserve or process half of the world’s food supply, the modern diet is widely recognised as a potential source of chemotoxicity. The WHO states: “The contamination of food by chemical hazards is a worldwide public health concern and is a leading cause of trade problems internationally. Contamination may occur through environmental pollution of the air, water and soil, such as the case with toxic metals, PCBs and dioxins, or through the intentional use of various chemicals, such as pesticides, animal drugs and other agrochemicals. Food additives and contaminants resulting from food manufacturing and processing can also adversely affect health.” 39 Owing to its high public profile, food contamination receives extensive regulatory attention – which tends to focus on one chemical substance at a time, rather the on the complex mixtures and synergies which actually occur within the diet as a whole.

Exposure to and accumulation of chemicals continues in most human societies throughout life. To take but one example, the World Health Organisation considers “all people (author’s emphasis) have background exposure and a certain level of dioxins in the body, leading to the so-called body burden.” While this may not cause disease in most people, nevertheless the risks include skin lesions, altered liver function and cancers, and the effects are far more dangerous for the unborn.40

Chemical uptake by humans may also increase with age, according to recent studies. This is because older skin is thinner and less able to exclude toxins, while the kidneys, liver and blood supply are less efficient at breaking down and removing them from the body.41 Nowadays, too, older people are often fatter, and fat is where many toxic substances accumulate. The longer such substances remain in the body and the more they concentrate, the greater the likelihood of health damage. This suggests that the incidence of chemical poisoning and related diseases is likely to rise as an unanticipated result of the ageing population – but an additional healthcare cost to society.

Death itself marks no boundary to the processes by which toxic substances may be released and recirculated. “Almost all cemeteries have some potential for pollution,” concludes a world-first study of the emissions from burial grounds, carried out in Australia. 42 This concluded that most of the chemical substances contained within a corpse at the time of death are re-released into groundwater within ten years of its burial, thus exposing future generations to accumulated toxins from the present age. While the most obviously risky discharges from burials are bacteria and viruses, more subtle and long-lasting releases of heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants have been reported in groundwater downstream of the burying ground. Humans, as long-lived, top bio-accumulators, store more of these things in their bones and fat than do other animals – and give them back to future generations in a process which has all the hallmarks of a Pharaonic curse.

While cemeteries are not to be compared with, say, landfills or contaminated industrial sites as a point source of future chemical health risks, these findings nevertheless suggest the long toxic life of some of the metals and compounds and their capacity to recycle within the Earth system, potentially entering future water supplies and food chains – and reaching generations yet unborn. This raises the disturbing reflection that chemical toxicity may now, in some senses, be cumulative generation upon generation, a morbid and lethal heirloom. Like climate change, its impacts reach into the distant future.

The total human toll from man-made chemicals remains obscure, but WHO (2011) conservatively estimates that 4.9 million annual deaths (8.3 per cent of all deaths) and 86 million year-disabilities are attributable to man-made chemical pollution in one form or another. 43 Of these, 1m deaths and 21m disabilities are directly attributed to cases of chemical poisoning. WHO adds “This global estimate is an underestimate of the real burden attributable to chemicals.” For example, it does not include deaths from cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, stroke, COPD, genetic and mental disorders in which chemicals are increasingly implicated by medical research. Nevertheless, it still ranks chemicals among the top ten leading causes of death in humans, claiming seven times as many lives as malaria, for example.44

The trouble with mixtures

“Real-life exposures are rarely limited to a single chemical and very little information is availableon the health and environmental effects of chemical mixtures,” comments the UN Environment Program in its 2012 Chemical Outlook. Whether it is a combination of volatile organics (VOCs) and heavy metals leaching from a former industrial site, a family of POPs entering groundwater from a former petrol station or fuel dump, a very wide blend of toxins in a long-used urban landfill, a cocktail of pesticides, preservatives and additives in the daily diet or a brew of metals and organic chemicals in cosmetics and ‘beauty treatments’, modern humans are assailed by hundreds and probably thousands of different man-made chemicals every day of their lives.

“Humans and all other organisms are typically exposed to multi-component chemicalmixtures, present in the surrounding environmental media (water, air, soil), in food or inconsumer products,” says the European Union in its 2009 State of the Art Report on Mixture Toxicity.45 “However, with a few exceptions, chemical risk assessment considers the effects of single substances in isolation, an approach that is only justified if the exposure to mixtures does not bear the risk of an increased toxicity.”

To put it plainly, modern chemical risk assessment, however well-intentioned and thorough, does not represent more than a few pixels in the megabyte-sized picture of contamination and toxification now taking place in humans and other forms of life, especially at a global scale. “Of the tens of thousands of chemicals on the market, only a fraction has been thoroughly evaluated to determine their effects on human health and the environment,” states UNEP.46 Chemical toxicity is normally investigated one chemical at a time, and at considerable public expense. As a result, citizens, societies and governments alike remain largely in the dark about a significant, growing and increasingly complex threat to their future health and wellbeing.

Although thousands of scientific mixture toxicity experiments have now been carried out – chiefly using simple organisms such as worms, plant seeds and microbes – many assume the increase in toxic risk to be an arithmetic function, adding the risk factor for one chemical to that of another to obtain an estimate for the mixture as a whole, whereas more recent research suggests the risks may often be non-linear, with some chemicals reinforcing or multiplying the effects of others. The problem is compounded by the fact that, over a lifetime, humans may be exposed to highly complex mixtures of many thousands of chemicals, generally in small doses, sometimes for short periods,

sometimes constantly over many years and sometimes in episodic pulses. The thresholds for health effects of mixtures remain unknown to science.

The exceptional complexity of this challenge has led organisations such as Australia’s CRC for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of the Environment (CRC CARE) to explore measures which may give an indication of the overall state of toxification of an individual from all sources, rather than attempting to separate and attribute the individual causes to particular substances. If successful, this approach at least has the virtue of disclosing how poisoned we are as individuals (at a particular time), and from this society-wide estimates may be assembled.

Novel substances

In 2010 the world produced more than 100 million new computers a month – a volume that has since grown exponentially with the rise in popularity of mobile devices. World production of electronic waste (‘e-waste’) was estimated by UNEP at 40 million tonnes and others at 53 million tonnes. This waste is hazardous, containing heavy metals – some of them entirely new to Earth in their pure state – flame retardants and other suspected or known carcinogens.47 Professor Ming Hung Wong from Hong Kong Baptist University states that 70 per cent of this waste ends up in China where it is mostly ‘cooked’ on crude open fires to recover the metals. “These persistent pollutants end up everywhere – the air, the ocean, or leak into soil and groundwater,” he says. “This problem has been identified in China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Pakistan and India. It’s no longer a problem that is confined to the villages that deal with e-waste, because when water and soil is polluted, everyone is vulnerable to the food products that are exported from these regions.” 48 His comments highlight how contamination can begin in one place, move to another far away, then re-enter global circulation, potentially even reaching back to consumers on the far side of the world where it began.

E-waste, with its many novel compounds, illustrates how rapidly new sources of contamination can arise and disseminate around the planet – and of the difficulty, even the impossibility, of limiting or preventing their spread in the face of free trade and market demand, and the Earth’s natural circulatory systems.

Nanotoxicity is an emerging area of great concern. The nano industry creates chemicals and metallic compounds whose molecular size is so small they can easily pass through the skin, blood-brain barrier, maternal barrier, lung lining, digestive lining and other normal protections of humans and other living organisms, with resulting health impacts. Despite the many and great economic benefits offered by these novel products, scientists fear their small size may give rise to new forms of disease in humans and, once released, they can never be recalled. The number of nanoproducts developed and released has grown exponentially in recent years. As of March 2011, the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies listed 1317 nanoproducts on the market, 49 primarily in the areas of cosmetics, health and fitness and clothing. Owing to industrial secrecy, this is likely to be a significant underestimate of the real number of products, some of which are even found in human food, according to the US Food and Drug Authority.50 The OECD is attempting to establish a register.

In a fully-referenced paper, the UK-based Institute of Science in Society (ISIS) reported the first cases of occupational nanotoxicity and stated “Diseases associated with inhaled nanoparticles include asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, lung cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. Nanoparticles in the gastrointestinal tract have been linked to Crohn’s disease and colon cancer. Nanoparticles that enter the circulatory system are implicated in arteriosclerosis, blood clots, arrhythmia, heart diseases, and ultimately death from heart disease. Nanoparticles entering other organs, such as liver, spleen, etc., may lead to diseases of these organs. Some nanoparticles are associated with autoimmune diseases, such as systemic lupus erythematosus, scleroderma, and rheumatoid arthritis.” 51

Nanoparticles are generally significantly smaller than the blue asbestos fibres implicated in the mesothelioma pandemic, which claims 43,000 lives a year. 52 At such small sizes they have increasingly complex, new and unknown physico-chemical interactions with living tissues, other chemicals and their environment. In view of this, the potential for numerous future nano-pandemics cannot be ruled out – yet industrial production and distribution is proceeding worldwide at breakneck pace, as if this were not the case.

According to the UNEP, a further issue of concern is ‘chemical intensification’, which is the widespread replacement of natural materials with petrochemicals in industrial and commercial products like lubricants, coatings, adhesives, inks, dyes, creams, gels, soaps, detergents, fragrances and plastics.“Chemical intensification is not just a measure of the chemical production and use but reflects changes in functions of chemicals and the importance of chemicals in all aspects of economic development. It also incorporates the increased complexity of chemicals themselves and the ever lengthening and more intricate chemical supply chain,” it says. 53

Public concern and growing evidence for the toxic effects of pesticides in the human population has long prompted ethical manufacturers to seek new, safer compounds. These are now being continually released, but often without adequate scientific scrutiny of their safety for humans and the environment. A recent example are the neonicotinoids, a group of novel pesticides based on nicotine, and now linked unequivocally by Purdue University to Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious condition that kills about a third of America’s bee colonies each year. 54 As an indicator of the hidden costs of inadequate chemical scrutiny, the global loss of bee pollination services could cost the international economy around one third of a trillion dollars and reduce the world food supply by 10 per cent, causing widespread starvation. 55

These brief examples of e-waste, nanoproducts, chemical intensification and novel substances highlight the near-impossible task for regulators, public health authorities, governments and citizens in keeping track of the exponential growth in new chemical substances, products, byproducts, recombination products whose health impacts are almost totally unknown, and the multiplying unseen risks to the lives and health of billions of humans as well as to planetary biology as a whole. Indeed the US environmental guardian, the EPA, admits that one of its aims is “to make new chemicals safer, available faster, and at lower cost.” 56

Health implications

The number of previously-unknown and unexplained human diseases is multiplying. Recent examples include Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), Gulf War Syndrome, Stiff Person Syndrome, Morgellon’s Disease, Cycle Vomiting Syndrome (CVS), Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In addition there has been a dramatic increase in conditions long-recognised by medicine, but previously seen at much lower levels in the population, such as depression and other mental disorders, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, asthma, obesity and diabetes, most of which have now been linked by science to some extent with exposure to man-made chemicals.57 At the same time chemical toxicity has also been linked by science with the rising incidence of common killers such as heart disease and cancer: a US study, for example, links the substance PFOA, commonly found in food packaging and cookware and present in 98 per cent of the American population, with elevated cardiovascular risk.58

The WHO estimates that 25-33% of the global disease burden is attributable to environmental factors (as distinct from infectious or genetic causes or accidents), including man-made chemicals, and that this burden falls especially heavily on children aged less than five years. 59

UNEP says “Exposure to toxic chemicals can cause or contribute to a broad range of health outcomes. These include eye, skin, and respiratory irritation; damage to organs such as the brain, lungs, liver or kidneys; damage to the immune, respiratory, cardiovascular, nervous, reproductive or endocrine systems; and birth defects and chronic diseases, such as cancer, asthma, or diabetes. The vulnerability and effects of exposure are much greater for children, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups.”60

Announcing a new global research program to investigate possible links between chemicals and childhood disease, Professor Peter Sly, Deputy Director, of the Queensland Children's Medical Research Institute (2011) said “There are increasing data that a lot of the chemicals we use in our homes can have an impact on the developing foetus and child. Unfortunately our environment now is full of chemicals. We have plasticizers, we have flame retardants, we have many other chemicals which remain in the environment for a long time. And mostly we've ignored them. We now are just starting to see some of the chronic childhood diseases may be related to these agents in our environment.” Professor Sly added most new chemical products reach the market without ever being tested for how they will impact the health of children. "It's not tested at all. There's very little requirement to test a product that comes on the market," he said. "There's 40,000 new chemical entities that come onto the market globally every year. The number of those that have actually undergone testing is very few.” 61 He instanced the case of some countries banning BPA in plastic bottles over concerns about it effect on children’s health, but added it has now been replaced with other chemicals that have never been tested for their health effects on children at all.

The Europe-based Chemicals Health Monitor (CHM) says that chemicals (both banned and legal) are now associated with:

Testicular problems; Fertility disorders; Birth defects; Miscarriages; Learning disabilities;

Neurological deficits and diseases; Certain types of cancer (i.e. non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma; childhood and occupational cancers); Immune system weakening; Metabolic disorders; and Occupation-related asthmas, etc. 62

While the evidence remains fragmentary, its multiplying fragments and overall weight now point to a connection between rising human chemical use and rising ill-health, declining mental health and premature death in the world population at large.

What is of even greater concern, is that it appears necessary for many thousands of people to suffer and die before sufficient scientific and regulatory attention is drawn to a chemical of concern, a proper investigation conducted and the long and frequently unsuccessful process of restricting or banning its production begins, first in one country and then in others. In the present age the burden of proof that a chemical is dangerous rests with its victims – rather than with the producer to demonstrate its safety.

Regulatory failure

Of the tens of thousands of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals which have been developed and released globally in the past century of industrial development, only a handful have ever been banned. The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (2004) initially outlawed nine of 12 chemicals, the so-called ‘dirty dozen’. It subsequently called for the elimination of a further nine substances in 2010.63

The picture is bleaker at national level. In the US, on only five occasions in the past 36 years has US EPA managed to have a new chemical banned. 64 Since the Centre now lists over 83,000 substances, a third of which are rated as potentially toxic, carcinogenic or gene-damaging, it follows that almost every new chemical is eventually approved and/or released, regardless of its possible toxicity or ultimate human cost, even in well-regulated societies.

The situation echoes the experience of regulators with the tobacco industry, which began with a 1964 report of the US Surgeon General concluding, on the basis of 7000 separate scientific studies, that tobacco consumption was injurious to health. Half a century and 33,000 more studies on, tobacco is still in widespread use and implicated in the deaths of half its users. If such an experience were to be replicated, chemical by chemical, across all the 30,000-odd known or suspected toxic man-made substances, it would take around 1.5 million years to bring them all under similar (only partially effective) regulation – a period almost equal to the entire evolutionary history of the genus Homo. This hypothetical scenario is presented by way of suggesting that regulation, however well-intentioned, is unlikely on its own to solve the problem of Earth system contamination by man-made chemicals as, in the vast majority of cases, it takes too long, is either ignored or else is circumvented. Yet it remains the main resort and shield of concerned societies.

Current world regulation of dangerous chemicals may be compared, in a sense, with attempting to regulate the traffic of a big city one vehicle or driver at a time, instead of having road rules and traffic lights observed by all. When the number of chemicals was small and their dissemination local, this

might have worked: in today’s industrial and economic climate and with global dissemination of chemicals through the Earth system, it has no chance.

“There is increasing recognition among governments, non-governmental organizations and the public that human health and the environment are being compromised by the current arrangements for managing chemicals and hazardous wastes,” comments the UNEP.65 “These concerns take on a new level of urgency as the quantity and range of new and existing chemicals grow rapidly in developing countries and economies in transition.” By 2020, the bulk of the world’s chemical production will take place in Asia and in developing countries.

What can be done

Anthropogenic chemicals are so widespread in the world today because they are very useful, and help to save and enhance millions of lives. They and their uses are never going to be universally banned – nor should they be.

But the growth in chemical, and especially toxic chemical output, has crept up on the human population unawares. Even the chemical industry, with its particular focus on specific substances and end uses, appears to have little grasp of the current planet-wide and pandemic impact of its products and their deeper interactions with other substances and all lifeforms. Or, if it does, it is not saying.

While regulation of chemicals is important, it is already clear that it cannot, on its own, prevent the poisoning of a planet or the entire human species. The reasons are:

1. Regulation has so far banned less than 0.025 per cent of all man-made chemicals, and even this does not prevent their illicit use or their persistence in the environment.

2. In all likelihood regulation will struggle to deal effectively with the problem of chemical mixtures (as innocuous constituents may have toxic effects in combination).

3. The chemical industry is rapidly transferring its base of production from well-regulated developed countries to weakly- or unregulated developing countries in order to avoid the associated costs and controls. It is moving outside the law.

4. Regulation has little prospect of restricting the production or use of tens of thousands of substances whose health thresholds are still unknown or poorly defined.

5. Regulation has so far been unable to require thorough testing or restrict the use of new chemicals, whose deleterious effects and thresholds are unknown.

6. Regulation cannot control the formation of new, adventitious compounds caused by the interaction of existing and novel synthetic chemicals in the Earth system and food webs.

7. Restricting or banning chemicals one or a few at a time will, at current rates, take many thousands of years, along with vast expense.

Prospects for achieving the ‘Johannesburg Plan’ adopted at the Earth Summit in 2002 that, by 2020, “chemicals will be produced and used in ways that minimize significant adverse effects on the environment and human health”, appear bleak. It is clear national and international regulation alone cannot restrain anthropogenic chemical output, which is on track to triple by the mid-21 st century. At best, regulation will keep the issue in the foreground of public debate, apply standards to the

behaviour of ethical industries and restrict the use of a handful of the most noxious substances in a handful of countries. It does not come to grips with the pandemic aspects of global contamination – especially with the fact that badly-made chemicals in poorly-regulated countries now have the potential to impact the whole human race via the global circulations.

Several promising approaches are being considered or adopted by ethical manufacturers, which include the development of “green manufacturing” or “green chemistry” – a concept first proposed in California in 2008 in which all toxics developed during a manufacturing process are recycled, or safely destroyed – and industrial synergies, in which one industry uses the waste-stream from another, minimising waste disposal. These however do not prevent the legal production and use of toxic substances and tend mainly to ameliorate the hazardous waste disposal situation.

Perhaps the only possible means by which the worldwide toxic flood can be stemmed is through informed public opinion – and the refusal of citizens and consumers worldwide to accept food, air, water, soil, consumer products and babies contaminated by legally-manufactured toxins. For this to occur will require:

1. A worldwide educational campaign to inform ordinary people of the personal, societal and universal risks posed by anthropogenic chemicals, and ways they can avoid them or minimise their exposure

2. A prevention focus, including a universal requirement that all new chemicals or reformulations of existing chemicals be tested to demonstrate human and environmental safety, including in common mixtures, before being released.

3. Worldwide adoption of uniform chemical regulations would help greatly: if the world can have uniform regulations for air safety, it can for chemicals too.

4. Trade bans, fines and legal sanctions and ‘naming and shaming’ of companies engaged in manufacture or trade in contaminated or outlawed products, especially from unregulated parts of the world.

5. An ethical resolution on the part of the chemical industry to ‘retire’ as many old compounds as possible, accompanied by thorough health and environmental testing of new and current ones.

6. A massive increase in health monitoring and reporting, and vastly improved analysis of the economic, ecological, planetary and social costs of chemical impacts.

Parts of the chemical industry will no doubt resist, just as the tobacco industry has for half a century fought greater regulation, public education and product restriction. Yet if governments and the public accept it is legitimate and in society’s best interests to try to reduce the burden of sickness and premature death from tobacco (or drugs, alcohol, motor vehicles, accidents, heart disease, cancer or any preventable form of demise) then the argument applies with equal force to man-made chemicals. Where lies the logic in society passing laws to prevent the poisoning of an infant by a badly-made toy – yet accepting the poisoning of a baby in the womb or at its mother’s breast?

A warning from ‘deep time’

The toxification of Earth and its lifeforms by anthropogenic chemistry has taken place in a relatively short time, since the chemical industry emerged as economically significant during World War 1 –

when, as handmaiden to the war industry, its notable products were high explosives, chlorine and mustard gases. In less than 100 years its products have engulfed the planet.

The only known precedent for the poisoning of an entire planet by a lifeform took place some 2500 million years ago, when anaerobic bacteria used photosynthesis to excrete vast volumes of oxygen – then a toxic substance not present in the early atmosphere. To begin with, the surplus oxygen was absorbed by the Earth’s minerals and volcanic gases, leading to the formation of giant deposits of mineral oxides and limestone which we still see today.

After a time, however, saturation was reached, and atmospheric ‘pollution’ levels began to climb steeply. Poisoned by their own emissions, early lifeforms perished in droves. From being unimportant, oxygen had suddenly become disastrously lethal. This era is known as the ‘oxygen holocaust’, a period of universal global toxicity lasting for 200-300 million years. It caused mass die-offs among the primitive bacteria and prompted the evolution of new, oxygen-using lifeforms from which humans and all animals are descended. This episode was described by distinguished biologist Lynn Margulis as “by far the greatest crisis the Earth has ever endured”.66 It may now face a second.

The oxygen holocaust is not a cautionary tale widely known to or understood by the average person, and thus the opportunity for humans to commit a similarly profound, catastrophic and irretrievable error out of sheer ignorance and purblindness is very great.

The moral, however, should be plain to anyone:

Foul your planet, and it may well kill you – and your children.

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