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.
(Main text)
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 phaseout 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 bioaccumulators, 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 available
on 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 chemical
mixtures, present in the surrounding environmental media (water, air, soil), in food or in
consumer 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.”
Health implications
56
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 wellintentioned, 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-21st 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 dieoffs 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.
1
See USEPA Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) chemical inventory.
http://www.epa.gov/oppt/existingchemicals/pubs/tscainventory/index.html
2 Kortenkamp A, Faust M, Backhaus T, State of the Art Report on Mixture Toxicity, EU, 2009, Executive Summary p11
3 Global Chemical Outlook, UNEP, 2012
http://www.unep.org/pdf/GCO_Synthesis%20Report_CBDTIE_UNEP_September5_2012.pdf
4 UNEP 2012, op cit. p10
5
UNEP 2012, op cit p20
6
UNEP 2012, op cit p19
7
See Tran X T, Consequences of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam, March 2006, and "Agent Orange: Diseases Associated with
Agent Orange Exposure", US Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Public Health and Environmental Hazards. March 25,
2010
8
Assumes tripling in global chemical output (UNEP) and global population of 9.2 billion (UN Population Program)
9 Rockstrom et al., A safe operating space for humanity. Nature 461, September 2009.
http://www.stockholmresilience.org/download/18.1fe8f33123572b59ab800012568/pb_longversion_170909.pdf
10 Diaz, R. J., & Rosenberg, R. (2008). Spreading Dead Zones and Consequences for Marine Ecosystems. Science, 321(5891),
926-929.
11http://www.publicservice.co.uk/article.asp?publication=Europe&id=590&content_name=Environment,%20Agriculture%2
0and%20Energy&article=20829
12 Earthworks Action, February 2012. www.earthworksaction.org/files/publications/Troubled-Waters_FINAL.pdf
13 http://www.green-blog.org/2008/06/14/pollutants-from-coal-based-electricity-generation-kill-170000-people-annually/
14 https://sites.google.com/site/yarravalleyclimateactiongroup/pollution-deaths-from-fossil-fuel-based-power-plants
15 For a breakdown of reported hazardous waste, see http://www.grida.no/graphicslib/detail/global-hazardous-wastegeneration-by-type-as-reported-by-the-parties-to-the-basel-convention-for-the-years-1993-2000_1031
16 Klein W, Mobility of Environmental Chemicals, Ecotoxicology and Climate, 1989.
17 USEPA. http://www.epa.gov/ozone/science/index.html
18 World Meteorological Organisation. Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion, 2010.
19 Akimoto H, Global Air Quality and Pollution, Science 302, 2003, p1716
20
UNEP Centre for Clouds, Chemistry and Climate, The Asian Brown Cloud, 2002.
World Health Organisation, Mortality and burden of disease from outdoor air pollution, 2012.
22 Tanabe S et al., Global contamination by persistent organochlorines and their ecotoxicological impact on marine
mammals, Science of the Total Environment, 1994.
23 US National Ocean and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA), July 2008.
http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/press_release/2008/SciSpot/ss0810/
24 Dietz R et al, Three decades (1983-2010) of contaminant trends in East Greenland polar bears (Ursus maritimus),
Environment International, 2012.
25 Australian Antarctic Division, 2012 http://www.antarctica.gov.au/environment/pollution-and-waste
26 B.Yeo and S.Langley-Turnbaugh, Trace Element Deposition on Mt Everest, Soil Survey Horizons, 2010.
27 Auman H. et al. PCBS, DDE, DDT, and TCDD‐EQ in two species of albatross on Sand Island, Midway Atoll, North Pacific
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28 Sviridova M., at al. UK Groundwater Pollution,
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/section2group1/solutions_and_world_implications
29 China’s Water Crisis, II, 2010, http://chinawaterrisk.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Chinas-Water-Crisis-Part-2.pdf
30 Rockstrom et al, 2009. Op cit.
31 CDC Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, 2009.
32 http://www.cdc.gov/exposurereport/faq.html
33
Environmental Working group (EWG), Pollution in People: Cord blood contaminants in Minority Newborns. 2009 , p4
34 Environmental Working group (EWG), op cit., 2009. http://www.ewg.org/files/2009-Minority-Cord-Blood-Report.pdf
35 Weldon RH, Barr DB, Trujillo C, Bradman A, Holland N, Eskenazi B. A Pilot Study of Pesticides and PCBs in the Breast Milk
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36 http://www.crccare.com/view/index.aspx?id=57447
37 Australian Dept of Sustainability and the Environment, 2012
http://www.environment.gov.au/atmosphere/airquality/publications/sok/vocs.html
38 US EPA 2011. http://www.epa.gov/ttn/atw/urban/fs_indoor.pdf
39 WHO 2012. http://www.who.int/foodsafety/chem/en/
40 WHO, May 2010.http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs225/en/
41 http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/olderadults.pdf
42 Dent B., The Hydrogeological Context of Cemetery Operations and Planning in Australia, University of Technology
Sydney, 2002.
43 UNEP 2012, op cit. NB: <2m of these deaths are caused by pollution from indoor cooking fires.
44
WHO estimates global malaria deaths at 660,000 in 2010.
45 http://ec.europa.eu/environment/chemicals/pdf/report_Mixture%20toxicity.pdf
46 UNEP 2012, op cit
47
E-waste contains valuable metals (Cu, platinum group) as well as potential environmental contaminants, especially Pb,
Sb, Hg, Cd, Ni, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Burning E-waste may
generate dioxins, furans, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polyhalogenated aromatic hydrocarbons (PHAHs), and
hydrogen chloride. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969709009073
48 http://www.crccare.com/view/index.aspx?id=57401
49 http://www.nanotechproject.org/inventories/consumer/analysis_draft/
50 US FDA, 2012.
http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/GuidanceDocuments/ucm300914.htm?source=gov
deliveryof
51 Mae-Wan, H., Nanotoxicity in Regulatory Vacuum, UK Institute of Science in Society (ISIS), 2010, http://www.isis.org.uk/nanotoxicityInRegulatoryVacuum.php
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53 Global Chemical Outlook, UNEP, 2012
54 http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2012/120111KrupkeBees.html
55 Based on http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080915122725.htm
56 http://www.epa.gov/oppt/sf/
57 http://health.discovery.com/fansites/mystery-diagnosis/top-ten.html
21
58
http://media.jamanetwork.com/news-item/study-suggests-possible-association-between-cardiovasculardisease-chemical-exposure/
59
Smith KR, Corvalan CF, Kjelstrom T, How Much Global Ill Health Is Attributable to
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60
UNEP 2012, op cit. p20
61 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-05/study-household-chemicals-childhood-disease/2826166
62 http://www.chemicalshealthmonitor.org/spip.php?rubrique5
63 http://chm.pops.int/default.aspx
64 Ruiz R. Industrial chemicals lurking in your bloodstream. Forbes Magazine, January 2010.
65
66
UNEP 2012, op cit
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