James Ewell of GreenBlue’s Chemicals Program asked Pete Myers, CEO of Environmental Health Sciences (EHS), for an interview to explain their joint project with Advancing Green Chemistry to work with the scientific community to develop a protocol for testing chemicals for their endocrine disrupting potential. James wanted to share this information with GreenBlue’s readership because it is a unique method for addressing a very important issue using a “front-of-pipe” as opposed to “end-of-pipe” design approach.

Ewell: We understand that EHS and Advancing Green Chemistry are working to develop tools that chemists can use to avoid endocrine disruption. What is this and why should we care?

Myers: Endocrine disruption is the hijacking of the human hormone system—also known as the endocrine system—by chemicals, including man-made ones commonly found in consumer products. Hormones send signals that control human development from the fetus through adulthood. Whether a baby is male or female, whether you have nine fingers or ten, whether your brain works properly, whether you develop prostate or breast cancer—all of these and much more depend on how your hormones work.

Man-made chemicals that behave like hormones are called endocrine disrupting compounds, or EDCs. EDCs look like hormones to the body and interrupt normal hormone signals and throw the whole system off. EDCs are found in an amazing array of consumer products—from shower curtains to baby bottles to cosmetics. The list is long and literally everyone is exposed.

Scientific evidence links, with varying degrees of certainty, hormone-disrupting chemicals to a wide range of human disease and developmental disorders. These include: infertility, a host of cancers, early puberty, immune system disorders, diabetes, and heart disease.

Scientists and clinicians now take this so seriously, in fact, that the world’s largest society of endocrinologists recently identified endocrine disruption as one of their primary public health concerns. In March 2011, 8 scientific societies representing 40,000 scientists and clinicians wrote a public letter, published in Science, stating:

“Currently, the EPA and FDA are charged with safeguarding the health of Americans. This is a daunting task that is hampered by the growing recognition that currently accepted testing paradigms and government review practices are inadequate for chemicals with hormone-like actions.”

Ewell: You mean there aren’t adequate government protections in place?

Myers: In 1996 Congress mandated the US EPA to develop testing and screening methods to guide regulation of EDCs. They have made almost no progress. Meanwhile, the market has paid serious attention—we see states banning specific EDCs, we see companies altering product composition, we see consumers demanding proof that what they bring in to their homes is safe, and Moms essentially having to act as chemical engineers to go shopping for their kids. The federal government has dropped the ball entirely.

Other regions of the world have made progress, such as in Europe with the REACH legislation. But all of this is really hard on companies, as there is a patchwork of standards and little guidance on how to ensure that products don’t contain EDCs.

One way people are responding is by looking for “safer” alternatives. The problem with this approach is that the currently available off the shelf alternatives have been designed using the same incomplete information that led to the original problem chemicals. So many times people are swapping one problem for another.

An example of this involves a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. BPA is used in many applications from plastic bottles to can linings to receipt paper. BPA has been known to be a synthetic estrogen since 1936. After a tidal wave of consumer concern, companies have sought replacements. One that is used to replace BPA in receipt paper is a close cousin, BPS. The little bit of science available about BPS indicates it is likely to be just as dangerous as BPA.

Ewell: What can companies do to make sure their products do not contain EDCs?

Myers: My organization, Environmental Health Sciences, is partnering with Advancing Green Chemistry, another Charlottesville-based NGO, to develop a protocol for chemists and product designers to test for endocrine disruption. We are not attempting to develop this for regulation, but to give people more information on the products they are making.

We have brought together a team of scientific specialists in endocrine disruption and green chemistry to do this. It has been interesting for us to see that, when one removes politics and vested interests from the equation, you can make quick progress.

The idea behind the protocol is that a chemist can use current existing science to test for endocrine disruption early in the design phase of developing materials. If the tests reveal EDC characteristics, the chemist has a choice: either start over or redesign the molecule. The latter point is particularly interesting—chemists can design things to not act like hormones, they just haven’t been asked to do this before now. Using this approach decreases the chances that a lot of money and time will be spent developing a material that might turn out to be a nasty surprise in the future.

Ewell: So when can we expect to have access to this?

Myers: 2012 is going to be big year for us. Stay tuned.

Additional Information

Endocrine Society statement

Environmental Health Sciences (EHS)
The mission of EHS is to advance the public’s understanding of environmental health issues by publishing its own journalism and providing access to worldwide news about a variety of subjects related to the environment and health of humans, wildlife and ecosystems. Founded by Pete Myers, EHS publishes two leading information resources—Environmental Health News and Daily Climate.

Advancing Green Chemistry (AGC)
AGC seeks to advance the practice and agenda of green chemistry by identifying critical leverage points through research, education, training and more informed policymaking. AGC works closely with members of the Environmental Health Sciences community to combine their resources and knowledge to pursue a common agenda for understanding the impacts of chemicals on human and environmental health.

James brings over 15 years of experience working with leading companies on sustainability strategies. Previously he was the Director of Consulting and Senior Project Manager for McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC), where he developed and implemented criteria for designing and manufacturing sustainable products. He worked with leading companies such as Procter & Gamble, Ford Motor Company, Seventh Generation, Herman Miller, Shaw Industries, and others to design corporate sustainability strategies.

James was a member of the original GreenBlue founding staff from 2003-2005, so we are delighted to welcome him back to the organization. We feel fortunate to have someone with his expertise and insight leading this important area of work for us, which we hope will build on the success of CleanGredients to develop more resources for corporate sector innovation in the development of safer chemical products.

We look forward to introducing our stakeholders to James in the months aheads and will keep you abreast of developments in our Chemicals program.

During the GC3 discussion, I mentioned that this could be a situation in which a solution (though not necessarily the solution) might not involve greener chemistry per se. That trip to Cupertino was the first time I’d had the opportunity to use electronic boarding passes for my flights, so the technology was on my mind. It seemed a small jump, then, to the idea that when I shop, the store simply emails me a digital receipt instead of printing one. So I was not surprised to see, in the New York Times online last week, an article about paperless receipts.

Now, I’m not ready to suggest that, from a life cycle perspective, electronic receipts are better than printed receipts. On the one hand, one might predict lower BPA exposures and less energy and resources devoted to manufacturing, transporting, and printing paper receipts; on the other hand, one might predict increased energy use generating and sending all those electronic receipts, greater energy use from the manufacture and use of more computers and smart phones, and greater exposure to different chemicals of concern, like the brominated flame retardants still used in many consumer electronics. Evaluating which option is actually better could be an interesting—and daunting—challenge.

Some enterprising grad student may already be working on it.

Given that this reporting program is the only way the federal government assesses the production and use of widely used chemicals in the US, its expansion is a significant accomplishment, and industry associations such as the American Chemical Council and environmental organizations alike praised the move.

Yet regulation is not the same as innovation, and when we think about a chemicals policy —at the corporate or governmental level—it’s important to consider both. While regulation can inspire new technologies and approaches, the current US approach to chemicals regulation is unlikely to do so, given that it has focused on basic protections (and has sometimes failed there) that companies need to think far beyond. The purpose of most regulation is to protect against worst-case scenarios, not to encourage or enable best behavior.

So while we can look to regulation to provide a minimum baseline for performance, how can we simultaneously encourage innovation to provide true advances in the marketplace—advances that benefit companies, human health, and the environment alike?

Will it be through private investments in the chemical technologies of tomorrow? Will it be new government policies that establish market incentives for companies to develop chemical alternatives? Through efforts to make chemical data more transparent so that consumers will support a shift in the marketplace toward products with greener chemicals?

Innovation is equally, if not more important, than slow-moving regulation to move toward a more sustainable approach to chemicals, and I hope we can continue to think strategically and collaboratively about what it will take to encourage this.

This is where thought leaders like Janine Benyus, who gave a keynote at the recent Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference, play an important role. Benyus, the author of Biomimicry and founder of the Biomimicry Institute, does a beautiful job of providing, in a way that almost anyone can appreciate, glimpses of what our industrial society might look like.

For example, Benyus mentioned a current project on which she’s collaborating with John Warner (co-author of The 12 Principles of Green Chemistry) and others to create a photovoltaic (PV) solar cell built entirely out of common and abundant elements, unlike current commercially available PV cells, which, like so many modern electronics, rely on rare elements.

There are others working on a so-called artificial leaf, but it’s not clear to me whether any of the existing prototypes have embraced the same design challenge to eschew rare elements. In any case, this is just the kind of challenge that helps connect Dr. Anastas’s vision for a green chemistry moonshot with the kind of tangible results that people can get excited about and support. It also highlights the type of design thinking that GreenBlue has long championed in order to make products more sustainable.

It’s a wonderful and evocative way of expressing the daunting challenge of rethinking and remaking our industrial chemical enterprise. As Dr. Anastas observed, this is a tall order, but rising to meet challenges like this is what we do. He reminded us that the technology needed to safely land humans on the moon and return them to Earth was, quite literally, science fiction in 1961.

I love this moonshot idea, although the first obstacle is translating this grand, poetic rhetoric into a vision that resonates for people in general. The proverbial person on the street didn’t need to understand the science or engineering required to send someone to the moon in order to imagine what success looked like, and therefore to support it. But I’m not sure it’s quite so clear to most people what a green chemistry renaissance would look like; it’s more abstract than a rocket and someone in a space suit standing on the lunar surface.

Even relative to renewable energy, which allows people to picture wind turbines or solar panels on rooftops, green chemistry is somewhat elusive. I’d suggest this is akin to the perceived problem (among chemists, at any rate) that many non-scientists don’t appreciate the degree to which life as we know it is chemistry: not just living organisms but the objects and products we create and with which we surround ourselves.

This is one reason the moonshot idea is so exciting and promising. How do we describe a green chemistry challenge in a way that is accessible and inspiring for the person on the street? I’d love to hear ideas about this and will be sharing some recent examples in the coming weeks.