The City Council of Burlingame, California, is moving ahead with plans to come up with a cell phone right-to-know ordinance.

Council members said last week (Oct. 18) they are working to draft the measure. If passed, it would require stores to post on their shelves the specific absorption rate (SAR), a measure of how much electromagnetic radiation our bodies absorb, of every cell phone sold in the city.

The ordinance would likely be very similar to the right-to-know legislation passed by San Francisco in June, making it the first city in the nation to require cell phone radiation disclosure at the point of sale. No vote was taken in Burlingame, but four of the five Council members spoke in favor of enacting such a measure as early as January, 2011.

The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) opposes radiation disclosure. After losing a bitter battle to stop the measure in San Francisco, it has done everything short of disabling cell towers to block it from taking effect.

The industry’s first retaliatory move was moving its annual conference out of San Francisco. (You may have seen similar tactics employed by first graders who strategically un-invite former friends from their birthday parties.)

The industry group then filed a lawsuit against the city, arguing that the measure would mislead consumers into thinking that some phones were safer than others and that the city does not have the authority to require SAR disclosure.

What happened to the customer always being right? Or at least, the customer’s right to be informed?

“The fact that EWG’s cell phone radiation database has seen more than 2 million page views since September 2009 shows that consumers want access to basic information about the amount of radiation their cell phones are emitting,” said EWG’s California Director Renee Sharp. “The way CTIA is behaving about the simple issue of public disclosure only makes it look as if the industry has something to hide.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has yet to respond to EWG’s Freedom of Information Act request regarding its communications with CTIA. As a consumer watchdog group, EWG suspects that CTIA hopes to enlist the FCC in its battle with San Francisco. The agency has a history of siding with industry in legal disputes concerning cell phones.

So you’re thinking about trading in your old cell phone, and you want to know how much radiation the new models emit. Think scavenger hunt and you’ve got the idea.

Technically speaking, the Federal Communications Commission makes that information public through its FCC SAR Database. But only the most tenacious shopper will have the patience or know-how to navigate the agency’s online maze to find a phone’s Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) value – the standard measure used to define the amount of radio frequency energy absorbed by the body of a person using a cell phone.

To search the FCC database you have to dig into the recesses of the phone you’re considering to find its FCC ID number. Once you locate that string of letters and numbers, you have the joy of sifting through online documents cell phone makers are required to submit to the FCC. Somewhere in that digital tangle is the SAR value. But make a pot of coffee and prepare to do a lot of clicking.

Why would you care about a phone’s emissions? The FCC permits marketing of cell phones with SAR values of up to 1.6, a figure set in 1996, but more recent scientific research has produced inconclusive but troubling evidence that longtime exposure to cell phone radiation might induce head and neck tumors. Additional research is essential, and it’s in the pipeline. Meanwhile, Environmental Working Group is advising consumers to seek out lower-emission phones and take other steps to minimize their exposure to this form of radiation. To give them easy access to SAR values, which vary widely, EWG has published an interactive database of the SAR values of most cell phones on the market.

San Francisco leaders also believe in an informed public. On July 1, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom signed into law the Cell Phone Right-to-Know Ordinance, the first effort by a U.S. jurisdiction to require retailers to display SAR values at the point-of-sale.

No guessing games. No hassle.

But as scientists generate more questions about cell phone safety, hassle has become the battle cry of industry groups, which increasingly cry foul when anyone tries to empower consumers with more information about their products. Not long after the San Francisco ordinance was enacted, officials of CTIA, the cell phone industry association, announced that they would no longer hold their convention in the city.

CTIA followed up with a lawsuit asking a federal judge to order the city not to enforce the new ordinance.

CTIA argues that San Francisco’s disclosure law is unjustified because it conflicts with federal regulation of cell phone emissions and threatens to disrupt nationwide uniformity in the cell phone market.

As a consumer watchdog group, EWG suspects that CTIA hopes to enlist the FCC in its battle with San Francisco. And, in fact, the agency has a history of siding with industry in legal disputes concerning cell phones.

To shed light on whether the federal government and CTIA are working in tandem, EWG has filed a Freedom-of-Information-Act request with the FCC, asking for all agency communications with CTIA regarding the San Francisco ordinance.

EWG urges the FCC to follow the Obama administration’s commitment to greater transparency in government and to the public’s right to know about the products on store shelves across the U.S.

As everyone pressing for non-toxic personal care products is probably aware, Reps. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., dropped the Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010 in the House’s hopper last month.

Now begins the hard work of moving the bill through Congress. It won’t be easy. Powerful forces are arrayed against changing the status quo, which is, essentially, no regulation.

As the national conversation over this issue intensifies, everyone who is seriously involved in the discussion will want the facts. They are persistent things, facts. They can cut through clouds of rhetoric and dispel many a false claim.

You can read the legislation for yourself at this link. Or if you’re like most people and you’re multi-tasking, Environmental Working Group and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, which EWG helped launch, have an easy button for you. Here is the Campaign’s section-by-section analysis of the bill.

There’s a lot to like about the bill, but our hope is that Section 614, requiring safety testing of cosmetic ingredients, is enacted as it is written. It seems obvious that chemicals mixed into personal care products or that crop up as adulterants should be tested for their impact on human health. Unfortunately, they’re not – yet.

EWG strongly supports cosmetics companies that strive to make the safest possible products. Unfortunately, with major gaps in current cosmetics law, some manufacturers don’t always choose the safest ingredients. The Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010 would help close these gaps.

Current law requires a company to post a warning on any product whose safety has not been substantiated. But the law does not define safety or require that companies document their (highly variable) decisions on what is safe enough to sell.

The 2010 bill goes one important step further than current law. It would require companies to submit to the Food and Drug Administration the studies they use to substantiate safety. This important advance in transparency will help ensure that any companies currently cutting corners on safety will improve their practices.

Among other provisions, each cosmetic manufacturer would be required, for the first time, to register with the FDA and to provide the agency with product ingredient lists. This will give the agency for the first time a full record of the many thousands of chemicals used by the industry.

The bill has caused quite a stir. In particular, some smaller companies have expressed concerns about the resources that would be required to comply with the proposed law.

However, the bill’s authors have included several provisions to make it easier for small companies comply with the new, basic safety standards for cosmetics:

• Registration fees would be required only of companies with gross annual receipts exceeding $1 million.
• FDA would be required to make public all health and safety studies it receives from every manufacturer. This means that small businesses would have access to studies currently thought to be held unpublished by a wide range of manufacturers, including major companies with extensive libraries of unpublished research. This new font of information should help all manufacturers make safer products.
• Ingredient suppliers would be required to provide all available health and safety studies available for their products to any manufacturer requesting the information. Small businesses in particular would benefit from this provision.
• The FDA would be required to publish a list of ingredients it deems to be Safe Without Limit (SWL). These would be chemicals that the agency found to be safe in any amount, in any product.

At EWG, we’re sure the debate will continue. We expect to hear from many more companies. But we hope that before cosmetics makers react to the bill’s new standards, each one will give the proposal a careful, thoughtful read and consider what the bill requires that it is already doing – and its competitors aren’t.

We think the Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010 would help level the playing field and bring all companies up to the high standard that only some meet now.

By David Andrews, EWG Senior Scientist, and Nils Bruzelius, Executive Editor

One hundred and six days later, it finally appears that the gusher in the Gulf has been tamed, plugged at the top and soon to be plugged at the bottom. Today (Aug. 5), the government says that three-fourths of the unprecedented discharge of crude oil is gone from the rich, warm waters of the Gulf, indicating that the first act of the vast, horrendous floating experiment is winding down.

Let’s hope they’re right, but let’s not forget that, in fact, 50 percent of the oil is still there, either dispersed or in its original form. It’s in the water column, in rapidly thinning sheens on the surface, in the sediments below, perhaps hidden in the coastal marshes and tissues of the region’s marine life. And the 26 percent that’s still in its original form — just less visible — amounts to nearly 1.3 million barrels (53.5 million gallons). That’s nearly five times as much as spilled from the Exxon Valdez.

And then there is the matter of the 1.8 million gallons of chemical dispersants that petroleum giant BP pumped onto and into the Gulf to try to limit the impact of the toxic oil.  Now that the spill is apparently ended, EPA has just publicized the results of its second round of testing. It concluded that these chemicals, used in unprecedented volume, had similar acute toxicity to the alternatives and was no more toxic than untreated oil when mixed with Louisiana crude.

It’s great to have more information and it’s fortunate that the dispersant BP used was evidently not much more toxic than other options.  But here at the Environmental Working Group, we don’t think that luck is an effective chemicals policy.

The government is saying that the worst is over, and that the remaining oil – wherever it is – is unlikely to do much additional damage.

But there’s much left to do, including finishing the cleanup as well as possible and gathering the data that will let us fully understand the consequences of this spill, the efficacy of the cleanup, and, hopefully, ensure that the nation is better prepared for the next one.

“I think we don’t know yet the full impact of this spill on the ecosystem of the people of the Gulf,” Dr. Jane Lubchenko, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told The New York Times this week.

No kidding.

The job of collecting and understanding the data has barely begun, but it’s certainly not too soon to be laying out the questions that NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other federal agencies need to answer – must answer – before the next such hydrocarbon disaster unfolds. Here are just a few:

• What will be the ultimate toll of the Macondo blowout on the environment, on marine life and on people’s health, both from the oil itself and the dispersants?
• Did the dispersants limit the ecological consequences, or perhaps make them worse?
• Was the chemical mixture in the dispersants the most effective, least toxic formulation? Was it used in the right amounts and applied in the least damaging ways?
• If all but 26 percent of the oil has already disappeared from sight, what about the dispersed oil and the dispersants? What has become of them, and with what effects?
• In a report released Wednesday, government agencies said the chemicals dispersed just 8 percent of the oil, a surprisingly small number to some. Was that the best they could do?
• Since we won’t be free of our dependence on fossil fuels any time soon, will industry and the government be any better prepared to cope than they were this time? How can we reduce the risk that supposedly fail-safe devices like blowout preventers will not in fact fail, and to limit the damage when they do?

The EPA and other government agencies must not rest until they’ve answered these and many other questions with the best data they can gather from this disaster, a job that will take months and years.  The EPA can’t afford to wait until the next disaster happens to do test the chemicals that might be used to fight it.  And the nation can’t afford to confront the next such catastrophe with as little solid information as we had this time.

photo by Lindsay Talley

At a packed hearing before a key House subcommittee, Environmental Working Group President and co-founder Ken Cook called on Congress yesterday (July 29) to pass tough new legislation to repair a “broken toxic chemicals policy” that is currently so weak “the American public has lost confidence that the products they are using, the chemicals they are being exposed to, are safe.”

Cook voiced broad support for the House measure (H.R. 5820), saying it “would squarely place the burden of proof on industry to show that its products are safe for public health and vulnerable populations,” but he urged revisions to give highest priority for safety reviews to chemicals detected in the umbilical cord blood of newborns. He noted that cord blood tests conducted by EWG have shown that babies are born “pre-polluted” by nearly 300 chemicals, “including BPA, fire retardants, lead, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and pesticides that were banned more than 30 years ago.”

He noted that earlier this year the President’s Cancer Panel of cancer experts similarly declared in its annual report that “to a disturbing extent, babies are being born pre-polluted.”

EWG has been a leading advocate for fundamental reform of the 34-year old and deeply flawed Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Cook told the subcommittee:

Because TSCA leaves the government so stunningly powerless to deal with the soup of toxic chemicals in the environment and, indeed, in the blood of all of us, the American public has lost confidence, has lost trust, that the products they are using, the chemicals they are being exposed to, are safe.

Now the chemical industry wants a law strong law behind it, not a feeble law under foot.

Within the environmental community, TSCA was the crazy aunt the family didn’t talk about and tried to forget—with the exception of the Environmental Defense Fund, which to its great credit maintained a strong focus on a statute that most everyone else ignored.

Other witnesses also supported the major elements of the pending bill, including Assistant Administrator Steve Owens of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); Senior Scientist Richard A. Denison of the Environmental Defense Fund; Dr. Mark A. Mitchell, president of the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice; and Howard Williams, an executive with a manufacturer of construction materials.

Major provisions of the bill would require chemical makers to conduct testing to prove their products are safe and close loopholes that currently allow industry to keep secret crucial data, including safety studies, about many toxic substances.

Two witnesses representing industry voiced strong objections to key provisions while insisting that they favor reform of the law and would work toward that end. Cal Dooley, president of the American Chemistry Council, said the bill’s proposed safety standard for chemicals “sets an impossibly high hurdle” and would “stifle the manufacturing sector.” And Beth D. Bosley, speaking for the Society of Chemical Manufacturers and Affiliates, said the bill is “overreaching and unworkable” and will “drive innovation and manufacturing from our shores.”

Comments and questions by the nearly 20 House members who attended the nearly three-hour hearing of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection highlighted a sharp partisan divide between those voicing the need for stronger protections against toxic chemicals and those arguing that stronger regulation would kill jobs in an already wobbly economy. Supporters of reform argued that industry would respond to stronger regulation with innovations that would create, not destroy, jobs.

Reps. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.), the subcommittee chairman, and Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the parent Committee on Energy and Commerce, co-sponsored the pending bill along with three other House members.

“Americans are exposed to a staggering number and variety of chemicals – even before birth,” Waxman said in his opening remarks, “yet consumers lack even basic information about these chemical exposures. And the federal government is no less in the dark.”

Rush said he hoped to achieve “a bill that all sides won’t necessarily fall in love with, but a bill that all sides can live with.”

Ranking Republican member Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) set the contrary theme voiced by a number of Republicans, scoring the bill with words including “cumbersome,” “unworkable,” “ineffective,” and “overly broad.”

If the bill becomes law, Whitfield said, “we would be exporting innovation and jobs instead of products.”

A handful of Democrats called for caution in finding the right balance between protecting the public without discouraging innovation.

Perhaps the most unexpected testimony of the day came from Howard Williams, vice-president and general manager of the Pennsylvania Division of Construction Specialties, Inc., a maker of building products for commercial construction. Williams described his firm’s difficulties in obtaining detailed information about the chemicals in the materials it buys, focusing particular on PBTs (persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals) and carcinogens.

“Environmentally preferable and green building standards reward those whose materials have high amounts of recycled content,” Williams noted, but if the original materials contain long-lasting PBT chemicals, this has the unintended effect of recycling these toxic materials “from one generation to another.”

Describing himself as a Republican from a conservative area of Pennsylvania, Williams said:

“Given the economic and population multipliers, coupled with America’s global reach, H.R. 5820 becomes one of the more beneficially impactful pieces of legislation of our generation.”

In his prepared testimony, EWG’s Cook gave the committee a point-by-point analysis of language in the proposed bill. Among his other key points:

• EWG strongly supports language that would make “reasonable certainty of no harm” the safety standard for existing and new chemicals and require EPA “to consider aggregate exposures and all exposure routes” when evaluating whether a chemical meets that standard.
• EWG also supports a requirement that manufacturers provide EPA with “key data sets” including specified information about the characteristics of every chemical.
• EWG commends language that immediately places 19 well-known toxic chemicals on a priority list for rapid review that EPA would develop.
• EWG calls for strengthening language in the bill that would require EPA to focus on poor and minority communities that are “disproportionately affected by industrial pollution.”
• EWG strongly supports language that would limit industry’s ability to hide key information about its products under the cloak of  “confidential business information,” particularly with regard to health and safety studies.
• EWG would like to tighten a provision that gives EPA “broad discretion” to exempt certain chemicals or mixtures from the minimum data set, safety standard and reporting processes in the bill.
• EWG applauds language that would greatly expand EPA’s authority to conduct inspections and issue subpoenas to chemical facilities to ensure compliance with the law.

That’s been the case in recent days with The Washington Post’s two-year effort on the growth of Top Secret America, with The New York Times’ investigation of BP’s history of cutting corners, and now with The News Journal’s year-long investigation of chemical contamination, some of it dating back decades, that is insidiously threatening the aquifer that provides drinking water to much of Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey.

The multi-part, two-day series that began Sunday (July 25), accompanied by an array of interactive elements and graphics on-line, reveals dramatically that polluters and government agencies made a serious mistake when they assumed that layers of impermeable clay below ground would prevent spilled and dumped toxins from leaching into these deep aquifers far below.

As the series’ opening piece puts it:

Northern Delaware is home to some of the worst chemical dumping grounds in America, a legacy of broken promises and corporate misdeeds. Regulators working for Delaware and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have long claimed that the deep clay layers above the aquifer protected it from the foul waters discharged by chemical and petroleum manufacturers.

Those assurances have proved false.

The protective layer over the aquifer, scientists now say, is full of holes.

It’s worrisome that in our rapidly shifting media landscape fewer and fewer news outlets have the ability and will to set a reporter to work for a year on a project of this scope, but encouraging that the 116,000-circulation News Journal could and did pull it off.

EWG offers its kudos to reporter Jeff Montgomery and to The News Journal’s editors and publisher.

You stand in line with your latte, your tube of toothpaste or your cart of groceries, you hand over your cash or credit card to the cashier, and he hands you back the receipt. You check that the amount looks right, then stuff it in your pocket or purse. Maybe you pull it out later to make a record of your purchase and then toss it in the wastebasket or slip it into a file. And then — you forget about it.

You should give that little scrap of paper a second thought.

This spring, researchers at Environmental Working Group collected 36 samples of cash register receipts from fast food restaurants, big retailers, grocery stores, gas stations and post offices in seven states and the District of Columbia and had them tested by a renowned lab.  The lab found that 40 percent had high levels of the endocrine-disrupting chemical BPA, which has been the target of nationwide efforts to ban it in food and beverage containers, especially those used by babies and children. Animal tests show that BPA, a plastics hardener that is also a synthetic estrogen, can cause reproductive and behavioral abnormalities and lower intellectual ability, as well as setting the stage for cancers, obesity, diabetes, asthma and heart disease.

The tainted receipts tested by EWG came from a variety of well-known outlets including McDonald’s, KFC, CVS, Walmart, Safeway and Whole Foods.

The tests also showed that the BPA on the receipts could easily rub off onto the hands of anyone who handles them. That’s a potential worry for shoppers but even more so for the tens of thousands of store and restaurant workers who handled hundreds of receipts daily. Federal data analyzed by EWG shows that retail workers carry an average of 30 percent more BPA in their bodies than other adults.

As Jane Houlihan, EWG’s Senior Vice-President for Research, put it:

“A typical employee at any large retailer who runs the register could handle hundreds of the contaminated receipts in a single day at work. While we do not know exactly what this means for people’s health, it’s just one more path of exposure to this chemical that seems to bombard every single person.”

The source of the BPA is the paper used in these cash registers. This “thermal paper” is coated with a dye and a second chemical, which is often BPA. When a cash register imprints on the paper, its heats brings out the black lettering, avoiding the need to have ink in the printer.

EWG’s testing found amounts of EPA on receipts that were 250 to 1,000 times greater than in the more widely discussed sources of BPA exposure, especially canned foods, baby bottles and infant formula. Because the BPA in food is completely ingested, this remains by far the most worrisome route of exposure. It is unclear how much of the BPA that rubs off on skin gets into the bloodstream, but it’s likely to be a fraction of the total BPA on the paper.

What is clear, however, is that it wouldn’t be hard to get rid of the BPA in thermal paper. In fact, a number of the outlets sampled by EWG issued receipts that had no BPA or only trace amounts. They included such well-known companies as Target, Starbucks and Bank of America ATMs. And some big chains used BPA-laced paper in some outlets but not others. If they can get along without BPA-laden paper, there’s no reason everyone can’t.

For that matter, the leading U.S. maker of thermal paper, Appleton Papers Inc., no longer incorporates BPA in its products. Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has launched a program to evaluate the safety and availability of alternatives to BPA in thermal paper. (LINK)

EWG president and co-founder Ken Cook has written to the top executives of major retailers whose outlets issued BPA-laden receipts that figured in our study, urging them to switch to BPA-free alternatives for the sake of their employees and customers.

In the meantime, EWG has some advice for consumers:

• Don’t let infants or children handle receipts.
• Avoid paper receipts entirely when electronic or email alternatives are available.
• If you save receipts, keep them in a separate envelope.
• After handling receipts, be sure to wash your hands thoroughly before preparing and eating food (and that’s a good practice even when you haven’t handled receipts).
• Don’t use alcohol-based hand cleaners after handling receipts; they can increase absorption of BPA through the skin.
• Don’t recycle receipts and other thermal paper. BPA residues will contaminate recycled paper.

(By the way, it’s easy to check whether a receipt is printed on thermal paper. Just rub it with a coin. The heat of the friction will discolor thermal paper, but not conventional paper.)

This week, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) National Drinking Water Advisory Council met for a three-day meeting (July 21-23) reviewing the new drinking water strategy proposed by EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson.

EPA’s visionary plan includes four principles to provide greater protection of drinking water:

• Address contaminants as groups rather than one at a time so that enhancement of drinking water protection can be achieved cost-effectively.
• Foster development of new drinking water technologies to address health risks posed by a broad array of contaminants.
• Use the authority of multiple statutes to protect drinking water.
• Partner with states to share more complete data from monitoring of public water systems (PWS).

EWG applauds the renewed focus on drinking water quality under the new administration and the agency’s plans to explore various pathways for protecting our water supplies from pollution.

The advisory council discussions tackled a broad range of water topics, with a special focus on using EPA’s authority under several existing environmental statutes – the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and the Clean Water Act (CWA). The goal is to prevent pollutant runoff into source waters as well as to minimize or eliminate contaminant discharges from agricultural, industrial and urban sources.

EWG’s National Tapwater Quality Database is a Model

EWG research on tap water quality, presented in our National Drinking Water database, has been instrumental in driving forward the national debate on safe drinking water policy. EWG assembled an unprecedented database of 20 million drinking water quality tests performed by water utilities since 2004. Our analysis revealed a total of 316 contaminants in water supplied to 256 million Americans in 48,000 communities in 45 states. Among the contaminants were 202 chemicals that are not subject to any government regulation or safety standards for drinking water.

The National Drinking Water database developed by EWG presents a working model for making information about tap water quality accessible to everyone – state and federal drinking water authorities, the general public, water utilities and researchers. We eagerly support the fourth principle in the EPA new water strategy that would lead to sharing water quality monitoring data from public water systems. Typically, this information is maintained by state water offices, which collect the results from the utilities to enforce state and federal water quality standards.

Moving forward – or back?

Throughout most of the 20^th century, Americans enjoyed a record of improvement in drinking water quality and safety. But with a growing population, urban sprawl and intensive, expanding agricultural activities, source water quality has been negatively affected, threatening to reverse great public health gains made with the historical development of treatment facilities for drinking water and wastewater. Tap water quality cannot be taken for granted. More and more water utilities are having to turn to water sources compromised by various forms of pollution as water scarcity becomes a fact of our daily lives. Unless source water protection becomes a priority for government, businesses, communities and individuals, tap water safety around the country would suffer.

Join EPA’s Web Dialogue about Water Quality on July 28^th & 29^th

Like air quality, drinking water quality is an environmental issue that affects every single person in the country. We are all stakeholders in the government’s decisions that determine water policy. To encourage public participation in the development of its new strategy for addressing drinking water contaminants, the EPA is hosting a web dialogue on July 28 and 29 titled “Drinking Water Strategy:  A New Framework for Addressing Contaminants as Groups.” The dialogue is free and open to the public. You can register here.

Please spread the word by sharing this announcement with others. We encourage Enviroblog readers to join in the dialogue, offer your opinions, share your insights and make the voice of your community heard in this important national conversation.

After all, tap water is something that we depend on every single day.

Over the past decade, Environmental Working Group has uncovered either hazardous or untested cosmetics ingredients everywhere our research has taken us — in product tests, in ingredient label surveys and even in people.

In our biomonitoring studies, we sent blood and urine samples from 20 teenage girls from across the country to the laboratory.  It turned out they were tainted with an average of 13 potential hormone-disrupting preservatives, plasticizers and other cosmetic chemicals. In umbilical cord blood from 7 of 10 newborn babies, we found synthetic musk fragrances that had crossed the placenta from mother to infant to pollute the developing child before birth.

Our researchers have identified 500 products sold in the U.S. that contain ingredients that are banned in cosmetics in Japan, Canada or Europe.  Nearly 100 products have been found to contain ingredients the industry itself has declared unsafe for use in fragrance. Perhaps most disconcerting, our investigations have found that 99 percent of all personal care products are made with at least one and usually several ingredients that have never been assessed for safety by the government or any other publicly accountable institution.

The federal Food and Drug Administration oversees cosmetic safety, but under the shackles of a 1976 law, the agency lacks the authority to review the safety of products before they are sold, or to require recalls of those it knows are harmful.

There’s no doubt Americans want safer products. EWG’s Skin Deep cosmetics safety database logs between 1 and 2 million searches monthly, conducted by people seeking simpler, safer cosmetics from among the more than 60,000 products in our lists. Consumers armed with this information are already driving changes.  Many companies are removing suspect chemicals from their wares as a result. More than a thousand have pledged to make safer products through the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, where EWG is a founding member.

And now, federal legislation proposed this week by Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) would close major gaps in the law – finally.   This measure would give FDA real authority to ensure that personal care products sold in the U.S. meet a basic standard of safety.

This measure is long overdue.  We stand with Reps. Schakowsky, Baldwin and Markey as they embark on the tough work necessary to move this legislation, so that someday Americans will be able to go to the store and buy shampoo, moisturizers, body wash and other grooming products with full confidence they aren’t laced with chemicals whose effects on health are unknown or downright dangerous.