Ladies, you may want to read this interview if you care to find some clues into skin issues.
AMY GOODMAN: Developing a “green economy” has been one of President Obama’s central promises while on the campaign trail and since taking office. Well, my next guest believes that tightening environmental and consumer safety regulations on the American chemical and manufacturing industry is not only necessary for the health of the environment, but is good for the economy.
Do you know what’s in the mascara you wear or the toys your kids play with? Has the American chemical industry blocked regulation of products that may be linked to cancer, infertility, neurological and hormonal disorders? Do these lax environmental standards mean US companies are losing out on one of the world’s most affluent markets: Europe?
Europe’s stringent regulations require companies seeking access to their lucrative markets to eliminate these toxic substances and manufacture safer and greener electronics, automobiles, toys and cosmetics.
Award-winning investigative journalist Mark Schapiro is the author of Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power, just out in paperback. He writes, “The European-led revolution in chemical regulation requires that thousands of chemicals finally be assessed for their potentially toxic effects on human beings and signals the end of American industry’s ability to withhold critical data from the public.” Mark Schapiro is the editorial director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, joining us here in the firehouse studio.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
MARK SCHAPIRO: Thank you. Good to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about makeup. When a woman puts on mascara or lipstick or powder—I mean, someone’s tested it, haven’t they?
MARK SCHAPIRO: Well, I’d like to think so, since I just had a little bit put on myself backstage there. Unfortunately, this is an illusion that a lot of Americans have, basically, that somebody out there in the government is assessing the safety of the ingredients in the cosmetics that they put on their body. And I think this strikes really at this kind of—there’s a deep mythology I think people have here in this country that the government is looking out for their health and safety, when it comes to chemicals. And what I talk about in the book is really how that is unfortunately not the case and what the consequences are for our health, but also for our economic and political status in the world.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to get to the issue of the economy and the fact that you say that deregulation is actually bad for business. But let’s talk about health for a minute. Talk about how the FDA got started and why cosmetics aren’t being regulated by the FDA.
MARK SCHAPIRO: Yes. Well, good question. So we’re back in the 1930s, coming out of that hole, you know, there in Depression era. This is the Roosevelt era. And the Food and Drug Administration was created at that time to monitor the types of food and the types of drugs that Americans were taking. Well, at that time, there was a proposal to include cosmetics under the purview of the Food and Drug Administration. That effort was derailed by the cosmetics industry, which was a little more nascent than it is now but succeeded in essentially exempting the cosmetics industry from regulation by the FDA.
The only thing the FDA really looks at now is hair dyes. But anything else, whether it’s your nail polish, eye shadow, actually shampoo, essentially personal care products, is not regulated by the FDA. The FDA doesn’t even have the power to regulate it. And numerous times in the Senate over the last fifty years, there have been efforts to actually expand the purview of the FDA, and it’s been repeatedly beaten back by the cosmetics industry.
AMY GOODMAN: Lipstick, lead in lipstick—is this an issue today?
MARK SCHAPIRO: This, you know,—I mean, it’s actually fascinating. There’s an environmental group, Health Care Without Harm, which demanded from the FDA its data about lead in lipstick. And the response that it got repeatedly was, you know, “We’re looking into it, we’re looking into it, we’re looking into it,” and basically, in the end, wouldn’t provide the data about lead in lipstick. So the answer as to whether it’s still there is yes, and—which is kind of extraordinary when you think of what lead does. I remember being a kid. You’re not supposed to chew a lead pencil, because it’s like going to affect your brain.
AMY GOODMAN: Right. And here, people who wear lipstick are licking it all day.
MARK SCHAPIRO: Yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And then they’re reapplying it.
MARK SCHAPIRO: Yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And then they’re licking it again.
MARK SCHAPIRO: Yes, yes. That is what people do with lipstick. And they put, you know—I mean, the skin is—one of the interesting things, medically speaking, is actually—it was fascinating for me to learn that the skin is actually an organ. The skin is an organ. It’s a living organ. It’s not just a covering of the human body; it’s actually a living organ. So whatever you put on the skin ultimately makes its way into the body.
And so, when you look at cosmetics—and there are array of ways we get exposed to toxic chemicals, but when you look at cosmetics, you have an array of substances that actually—some of which mimic estrogen, for example, the female sexual hormone, and which is—many scientists have a lot of concern about that idea.
And so, what we’ve discovered, and the reason—the reason I can—I know some of this information and the reason I can even tell you about it and obviously the reason I wrote about it in the book, or where I got that information, is, one, you have scientists who have been studying it in America, but, two, you have this whole other body in the European Union which has actually decided to ban a whole array of these substances, things that cause cancer, mutation of human genes, reproductive damage. So the reason I even know what kind of material is in cosmetics is not because the FDA has told us; it’s actually because the European Union has taken the action to remove that stuff, and they have a list.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the stuff?
MARK SCHAPIRO: The stuff is an array of ingredients that cause—that are determined to cause cancer, that are determined to cause reproductive damage, and that are determined to cause mutation of human genes. They’re called CMRs.
So the European Union actually looked at cosmetics, determined what kind of ingredients are being used, which of them cause—are potential contributors to—it’s important to remember that when I say “caused” because people need to understand how, like, chemicals work. It’s complicated. It’s not like you put lipstick on, and you’re going to get sick. That is not how it works. But we’re talking about an accumulation over life, over the course of your life, over years and years, multiple times repeated, very, very minute amounts over the course of many years. And that’s where the concern lies in many of these substances.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about a product you don’t hear very much about in this country, you’re not going to see on the ingredient list on cosmetics or other things, and that is phthalates.
MARK SCHAPIRO: Oh, boy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Phthalates, the more I found out about phthalates, the more I couldn’t believe people—we were contending with these things on a regular basis.
AMY GOODMAN: And “phthalates” starts with a “p.”
MARK SCHAPIRO: Right, “phthalates” starts with a “p.” It’s a very unusual spelling, a lot of consonants. But phthalates are basically a plastic additive that makes plastic soft. And so, I have on the cover of the book a little rubber ducky. The rubber duck is traditionally made soft with phthalates. Kids play with these things, as they do with many other toys. And what’s interesting about that is that studies have been done for years now—ten, fifteen years—suggesting that the phthalates, which soften plastic, contribute to the reduction of testosterone in young male infants and are very potent, you know, endocrine disruptors, in an early stage in life, in particular. And these are used in a whole array of things, from children’s toys—kids suck on them. Kids play them. You know, they’re soft, so they play with them and squeeze them and throw them at their mothers and all that and their fathers. And they’re also in our shower curtains, dashboards in automobiles, you have phthalates.
So, what I talk about here and what’s interesting is about—starting about ten years ago, the European Union began removing phthalates from the children toys. Why? Because children suck on these things, and when they suck on these things, their levels of phthalates are elevated, and they—and there could be a potential contribution to disrupting a very vulnerable endocrine system. Back and forth, back and forth, there’s been massive lobbying by the American chemical industry to try to prevent the Europeans from moving forward. They did move forward, and we, finally, in America, ten years later, have actually banned—about six months ago, the US Congress finally banned phthalates in the United States in certain children’s toys, number one, ten years after the European Union did, which means the European companies got a big advance on finding alternatives, and two, they’re still selling out the inventory, so they’re permitted to sell the inventory in America until it runs out.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you mean, for example, China makes these rubber toys—
MARK SCHAPIRO: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —not only China; US companies, I presume, too. They can’t go to the United States, but they—they can’t go to European countries, but they come to the United States—
MARK SCHAPIRO: Yes, yes, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —because European countries said no.
MARK SCHAPIRO: Yes, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: So, we get the toxic toys.
MARK SCHAPIRO: We get the toxic toys. We get toxic electronics. We get the toxic material that other countries around the world are protected from. And that is what I found most, you know, alarming in writing the book, because to find out that the United States has become the dumping ground—we used to be the country that banned a product and dumped it overseas somewhere in the developing world somewhere. And now, we, after, you know, a decade of retreat from environmental ideas, are the country that is the dumped-upon country. And you can see, time after time after time, with electronics, with toys, with the cosmetics—
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, electronics?
MARK SCHAPIRO: Electronics—there was a law passed by the European Union saying, let’s remove mercury, lead, chromium, cadmium, very potent neurological toxins, from electronics, because they leak into the water supply when they decay and the air and the soil.
And so, the large multinational companies largely adapted to the European laws, which is very interesting, because, one, we’re talking about the Intels and Apples and etc., etc., of the world. That made the EPA completely irrelevant. EPA has basically dug itself into a hole of becoming totally irrelevant to the decisions of major corporations, which are aligning themselves increasingly with the European standards.
However, if you’re a small operator in China or elsewhere in the spokes of the global economy, and you want to sell stuff to—you only care about the American market, the American and the African and Latin America market, you can manufacture goods that you could never sell in Europe. And that’s what’s happening.
AMY GOODMAN: You attended a number of meetings in Silicon Valley. Explain what you watched unfold there, Mark Schapiro.
MARK SCHAPIRO: Yeah. Well, what we’re talking about here is an enormous global shift in power. We are really talking about the notion that Americans think that we sort of set the tune, whether it’s environment, whether it’s economic policy, financial policy. There’s still an idea that we are the ones setting the tune, and everybody follows. And the power shift that I write about here and that I think is fascinating is the emergence of the European Union as an enormous economic and political force in the world.
So I watched—in Silicon Valley, for example, I sat in on these meetings where consultants came in from the European Union to explain to American engineers the changes that were being required in Europe to enable them to sell their products in Europe. These are major—these are the major name-brand electronic firms. And I watched them explain that, you know, starting in six months—starting in six months, you’ve got to remove the lead, the mercury, the cadmium and chromium and synthetic flame retardants from your electronic products. And you could see—you could see the world changing in front of their faces. These are guys who design these things. They made all these great things we have in our pockets, in your homes and on your desk here. And suddenly, this new entity from far off in Brussels, in this case, the head of the EU, was dictating what was going to be inside them. It was a transformative moment, I think, and actually quite revealing of this kind of shifting global dynamic that we’re in.
AMY GOODMAN: So you now have lobbyists not only going to Washington; they’re going to Brussels.
MARK SCHAPIRO: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they’re on express flights to Brussels, K Street.
AMY GOODMAN: To do what?
MARK SCHAPIRO: To lobby, to lobby. K Street basically—K Street, of course, the center of American lobbying in Washington. When the Europeans began trying to do these things, trying to change the production system or trying to protect people from some of the dangers of what’s in these products, the US chemical industry manufacturers, they began flooding Brussels with lobbyists. And what’s happened—and I’ve walked around the European Parliament, the European Commission, which is essentially the Congress and White House of the European Union, quaintly put, are now surrounded by the Burson-Marstellers, the Hill & Knowlton companies. All the lobbying firms that we’ve become so familiar with in America moved wholesale to Brussels and have launched essentially a transatlantic, very aggressive lobbying campaign. It’s been fascinating. If you need a portrait at all of the changed dynamic in the world, you can see where the action has moved.
Now, one of the reasons the action moved there is because over the last eight years the only threat really coming to major corporate interests, the only major threat, was coming from Brussels. Now we’re in a somewhat different dynamic, of course. Somewhat. I mean, we’ll see what happens. It’s still panning itself out. But those firms have not left. They are there. And if you go to the American—the American Chamber of Commerce has a huge presence in Brussels. And what they’ve tried to do is actually lobby—what’s interesting is you can’t lobby in the same way in Europe that you can here. I mean, you don’t have campaign contributions, so you can’t do those whole things. And so, the lobbying has a very different form. And I talked to actually some of the lobbyists, and they were kind of thrown off, because you’ve got different languages, the lobbying is very different, the way you exert influence is very different. And to a great extent, a good deal of the American lobbying didn’t work and has been causing backfires.
