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Government Should
Pressure Industry to Limit Chlorine's Use
“Chlorine.” There, I wrote it and I’m glad.
I instinctively gaze slowly to my left and then to my right to determine
whether any chemical industry lobbyist, snoop, or public relations
specialist saw me sneer when I started thinking chlorine.
Chlorine is helping to slowly kill this planet and all living creatures on
it. That felt good too. I must be feeling ultra-bold today. Chlorine is the chemical that companies use to make a variety of common products, including plastics, pesticides and paper. Chlorine is also used to treat water. Some of the by-products of chlorine usage are pollutants such as PCBs, DDT, and dioxins.
I just wish that our presidential-aspiring environmental champions, Al
Gore and George W. Bush, could also write or say chlorine. It would be
very exciting indeed if at least one of the candidates reached out to the
American public and actually said something like: Current federal
environmental policy to control the risk of poisoning our country with
chlorine-based chemicals stinks. These substances are building up
everywhere in the environment, food and our bodies.
I would expect the candidate to instinctively gaze to his left and then to
his right to determine which chemical industry lobbyists were already
beginning to twitch.
Those twitches would undoubtedly become big-time spasms should the
candidate take the next vital step and warn that these types of chemicals
so-called organochlorines have been associated with cancer, immune
problems, and fertility and developmental disorders. Try to imagine a presidential candidate who would then propose that the major way to deal with such wide-scale and accumulating toxicity, in this country, and indeed, worldwide, would be to establish a program that would lay out a timetable to reduce the use of chlorine and usher in less toxic manufacturing methods.
But a policy to switch even gradually from chlorine-based manufacturing to
alternative methods would be a dead-on assault on the chemical industry
which has shown itself to be powerfully and skillfully entrenched against
such thinking.
Sure, and aardvarks write poetry.
The sobering fact is that in most cases science isn’t even close to
understanding the potential short-term and long-term impact of these
chlorine-based chemicals on the body and environment. There are hundreds
of them. And science isn’t even close to understanding what levels of
these chemicals can cause damage.
The chemical industry likes to carp on the notion that any policy
suggesting a move away from chlorine doesn’t have the sound science to
stand on.
In the book Pandora’s Poison, Joe Thornton of Columbia University’s Center
for Environmental Research and Conservation contends there is enough sound
science available to understand that chlorine can cause big trouble to the
body and environment and that a wide range of alternatives to this
chemical are readily available.
For example, ozone, ultraviolet light are just some of the alternatives
to chlorine use in disinfecting our drinking water. Wood, metal, glass
and textiles and chlorine-free plastics could replace vinyl applications
in construction and packaging.
Thornton’s book should be important reading to both presidential
candidates who think environmental policy is better management of current
pollutants rather than their reduction or replacement.
Come on candidates, stop looking over your shoulders at the lobbyists. Nicholas Regush produces medical features for ABC NEWS. In his weekly column, published Thursdays, he looks at medical trouble spots, heralds innovative achievements and analyzes health trends that may greatly influence our lives. His latest book is The Virus Within. Nick Regush's Weekly Column can be seen each week at http://abcnews.go.com/sections/living/SecondOpinion/secondopinion.html
Nick Reglush does an incredible job of speaking the truth. If you
haven't shifted over to bottled or filtered water yet, what is stopping
you?
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