WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 (AScribe Newswire) -- Great Lakes Chemical Corp. has agreed to an early phaseout of two widely-used neurotoxic chemicals used as fire retardants, which a recent Environmental Working Group (EWG) study found at potentially harmful levels in the breast milk of American mothers.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Great Lakes, of West Lafayette, Ind., will cease production of the chemicals by the end of 2004. The chemicals, known as Penta and Octa, are members of a class of chemicals called brominated flame retardants (BFRs).
The chemicals are used in hundreds of everyday items, including computers, TVs, cars and furniture. Great Lakes is the only U.S. manufacturer of the two chemicals. A third class of the chemicals, known as Deca, which is the most heavily used, are made by Great Lakes and Albemarle Corp. of Richmond, Va.
Both Penta and Octa will be banned in the European Union starting next year. California recently passed a law banning the two chemicals in 2008, so the EPA phaseout significantly accelerates the timetable for a U.S. ban.
"We welcome the news that Great Lakes is facing the facts and agreeing to get rid of these two dangerous chemicals," said Bill Walker, a vice president of EWG, "but the real test will be a remaining and more widely used flame retardant known as Deca. The company claims it's safe, but the latest research shows it's as harmful as Penta and Octa, and our tests found it in the breast milk of almost every American woman tested. The EPA should move quickly to ban all forms of brominated flame retardants."
Like PCBs, their long-banned chemical relatives, PBDEs and other brominated fire retardants are persistent in the environment and bioaccumulative, building up in people's bodies over a lifetime. Brominated fire retardants impair attention, learning, memory and behavior in laboratory animals at surprisingly low levels. The most sensitive time for toxic effects is during periods of rapid brain development.
Scientists worldwide have found the fire retardants building up rapidly in people, animals and the environment. There are currently no preliminary safety tests for these chemicals before they are allowed out on the market. In September, in the first nationwide tests for chemical fire retardants in the breast milk of American women, EWG found unexpectedly high levels of the chemicals in every participant tested.
The study is available at www.ewg.org/reports/mothersmilk/.
The average level of bromine-based fire retardants in the milk of 20 first-time mothers in the EWG study was 75 times the average found in recent European studies. Milk from two study participants contained the highest levels of fire retardants ever reported in the U.S., and milk from several of the mothers in EWG's study had among the highest levels of these chemicals yet detected worldwide. These results confirm recently published findings from University of Texas researchers, as well as other U.S. studies, that Americans are exposed to far higher amounts of fire retardants than Europeans.
An EPA ban on Penta and Octa will increase the pressure
of the mounting campaign to also ban the third type,
Deca. Although Great Lakes and other manufacturers claim
that deca isn't harmful to human health, European studies
have shown that in the environment deca rapidly breaks down
to penta and octa, the two most harmful and readily absorbed
forms of the chemicals. Nearly 19 million pounds of Penta
and Octa were used in the Americas in 2001, compared to 54
million tons of Deca.
|
|
|
AScribe Newswire distributes news from nonprofit and public sector organizations. We provide direct, immediate access to mainstream national media for 600 colleges, universities, medical centers, public-policy groups and other leading nonprofit organizations.
AScribe transmits news releases directly to newsroom computer systems and desktops of major media organizations via a supremely trusted channel - The Associated Press. We also feed news to major news retrieval database services, online publications and to developers of web sites and Intranets.
And AScribe does it at a cost all organizations, large and small, can afford, a fraction of what corporate newswires charge. Click here to see how we do it