Dioxin is back in the news. It’s the chemical that won’t go away, in more ways than one. The Environmental Protection Agency is releasing the results of its nine-year reassessment of dioxin. Nine years of study reveal exactly what the environmental community has said all along: dioxin is a much greater health hazard, in smaller doses, than government officials have ever been willing to admit.
I’m glad the government is beginning to recognize the serious threat posed by dioxin, but some things I’m seeing in the press are just plain wrong. The Los Angeles Times reported dioxin comes from both natural and industrial sources. That’s wrong. Nature does not make dioxin, only humans do. There is dioxin in trees, but only because industrial processes have dispersed dioxin to every corner of the globe, where trees take it up from soil, or it is sprayed on by humans.
Press reports also say dioxin levels in our environment are decreasing. Unfortunately, that’s also wrong. Dioxin emissions are declining, but since dioxin is not made by nature, nature has no way of getting rid of it. As a result, dioxin levels in our environment continue to rise, and so do the levels of dioxin in our bodies.
We’re exposed to dioxin in the foods we eat, particularly fish and meat. Dioxin’s effects are profound – cancer, birth defects, reproductive failure, damage to the immune system and on and on.
The spokespeople for the industries that make dioxin – like the PVC plastic industry or the pulp and paper industry – will be running around the country for the next few months to tell you not to worry about dioxin, that the amount of dioxin their factory puts out is very small. A favored sound bite from the paper industry claims that the amount of dioxin coming from a pulp mill is roughly equivalent to “one second in 32,000 years.” That’s a very small amount.
But, one of the principal pathways for dioxin’s effects in the human body is through the endocrine, or hormone, system. Think about this: when a girl reaches puberty, her body begins to secrete the hormone estrogen into her bloodstream. As a result, she develops breasts, pubic hair and curves we associate with women. She begins to ovulate and menstruate, two functions on which the continuation of life depends. All these effects are triggered by the release of estrogen, at levels that are the equivalent of one second in 64,000 years. All those changes from so little estrogen, and yet there are women walking around with twice as much dioxin in their blood as estrogen and the while the changes triggered by estrogen are life-affirming, the changes wrought by dioxin are life-destroying.
So, the good news is the EPA is finally admitting all this. The bad news is, they don’t seem willing to do anything about it, or perhaps they’ll spend the next nine years figuring this out.
It shouldn’t take nine years. So far, the EPA has hinted that it may crack down on people who burn garbage in their back yards. The problem is not people burning trash. The problem is industries that make dioxin and put it in thousands of commercial products.
The answer is clear. The root source of dioxin, and a bunch of other toxic pollutants, is the industrial use of chlorine. It’s in PVC plastic, but we have ways to make plastic without chlorine or dioxin. It’s a by-product of papermaking, but we can make paper without chlorine or dioxin.
The real problem is that the people who make dioxin have far too much influence – at EPA, in Congress, and in the west wing of the White House.
If we’re ever going to clean up the physical pollution of this planet, we’re also going to have to clean up the political pollution in Washington, DC.
Political Pollution
Dioxin is back in the news. It’s the chemical that won’t go away, in more ways than one. The Environmental Protection Agency is releasing the results of its nine-year reassessment of dioxin. Nine years of study reveal exactly what the environmental community has said all along: dioxin is a much greater health hazard, in smaller doses, than government officials have ever been willing to admit.
I’m glad the government is beginning to recognize the serious threat posed by dioxin, but some things I’m seeing in the press are just plain wrong. The Los Angeles Times reported dioxin comes from both natural and industrial sources. That’s wrong. Nature does not make dioxin, only humans do. There is dioxin in trees, but only because industrial processes have dispersed dioxin to every corner of the globe, where trees take it up from soil, or it is sprayed on by humans.
Press reports also say dioxin levels in our environment are decreasing. Unfortunately, that’s also wrong. Dioxin emissions are declining, but since dioxin is not made by nature, nature has no way of getting rid of it. As a result, dioxin levels in our environment continue to rise, and so do the levels of dioxin in our bodies.
We’re exposed to dioxin in the foods we eat, particularly fish and meat. Dioxin’s effects are profound – cancer, birth defects, reproductive failure, damage to the immune system and on and on.
The spokespeople for the industries that make dioxin – like the PVC plastic industry or the pulp and paper industry – will be running around the country for the next few months to tell you not to worry about dioxin, that the amount of dioxin their factory puts out is very small. A favored sound bite from the paper industry claims that the amount of dioxin coming from a pulp mill is roughly equivalent to “one second in 32,000 years.” That’s a very small amount.
But, one of the principal pathways for dioxin’s effects in the human body is through the endocrine, or hormone, system. Think about this: when a girl reaches puberty, her body begins to secrete the hormone estrogen into her bloodstream. As a result, she develops breasts, pubic hair and curves we associate with women. She begins to ovulate and menstruate, two functions on which the continuation of life depends. All these effects are triggered by the release of estrogen, at levels that are the equivalent of one second in 64,000 years. All those changes from so little estrogen, and yet there are women walking around with twice as much dioxin in their blood as estrogen and the while the changes triggered by estrogen are life-affirming, the changes wrought by dioxin are life-destroying.
So, the good news is the EPA is finally admitting all this. The bad news is, they don’t seem willing to do anything about it, or perhaps they’ll spend the next nine years figuring this out.
It shouldn’t take nine years. So far, the EPA has hinted that it may crack down on people who burn garbage in their back yards. The problem is not people burning trash. The problem is industries that make dioxin and put it in thousands of commercial products.
The answer is clear. The root source of dioxin, and a bunch of other toxic pollutants, is the industrial use of chlorine. It’s in PVC plastic, but we have ways to make plastic without chlorine or dioxin. It’s a by-product of papermaking, but we can make paper without chlorine or dioxin.
The real problem is that the people who make dioxin have far too much influence – at EPA, in Congress, and in the west wing of the White House.
If we’re ever going to clean up the physical pollution of this planet, we’re also going to have to clean up the political pollution in Washington, DC.