home > take greenwash to the cleaners > greenwasher of the month > November 2005

Essential2 know more about the ACC

From the producers of CHEERS – the Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study – comes a public relations initative from the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a chemical industry lobbying group.

The essential2 campaign will pepper print, television and online media for the next two years – a “360 communications effort” according to marketing executive David Fowler, highlighting how “the American chemistry industry is essential to safety, health, innovation, the economy and the environment.”

Cheers! Raise a glass to children's health.

The $35 million campaign appears to be a response to the negative press that has plagued the ACC and its members since last year, when the group proposed to fund research by the Environmental Protection Agency on the effects of pesticides and household chemicals on infants and children up to age 3. Critics worried that the study, which offered $970, clothing and camcorders to the families of volunteer test subjects, was targeted at low-income families and that its two-year timeline would fail to address suspected long-term health issues linked to chemical exposure. Basically, the study would show a built-in bias favoring the chemical industry.

In April, the boon for contaminated babies was cut off temporarily, pending independent review. The results of that review led to the EPA’s announcement in September of new rules protecting citizens from unethical testing.

The top of the 30 page document outlining the agency’s human testing policy reads, “We regard as unethical and would never conduct, support, require or approve any study involving intentional exposure of pregnant women, infants or children to a pesticide.” But the body of the document lists a number of loopholes, including the acceptability of overseas industry studies, often performed in countries lacking ethical research regulation. There is also permission for testing of “abused or neglected” children without parental consent. This puts unfortunate kids “one step above pests, flees, and rodents,” says the Alliance for Human Research Protection. Within weeks, the ACC’s research agenda was back on track.

The ACC claims that its work with children is just one example of a commitment to provide the public with comprehensive safety data. Further evidence is the High Production Volume (HPV) Program, a partnership between Environmental Defense, the EPA and the ACC, calling on chemical companies to provide voluntary screening-level data or “sponsor” chemicals produced in the U.S. in annual volumes of one million pounds or more.

Not all of the partners are satisfied with the programs results. In a report published in June 2004, Environmental Defense noted that one fifth of the nearly 3000 HPV chemicals included on the program’s original 1990 list were still not sponsored. Furthermore, of the 735 new HPVs that had emerged since 1990, only 112 had been sponsored. Even if ACC members fulfill their HPV pledge, they will have provided public information on a relative handful of the 100,000 chemicals currently in production. In the U.S., most chemicals come to market without government review. Unless specifically requested to do so by the EPA, producers do not have to provide safety data at all.

Chemical Science can be complex and dangerous. The precautions we take determine our health.

Under intellectual property law, chemicals may belong to their creators, but individuals can claim a form of ownership. Scientists estimate that across the globe, each human body has absorbed at least 700 contaminants. In places such as Europe and California, incredulous citizens are unwilling to let the chemical industry determine their body burden. They prefer the precautionary principle, a reversal of the burden of proof advanced by the European Union’s Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH) program, and by the City of San Francisco.

As the precautionary principle threatened to govern the entire Golden State, the Environmental Working Group acquired a memo written by PR firm Nichols-Dezenhall for the ACC describing a campaign to undermine support for the preventative approach to chemical safety. Elements of the campaign included infiltrating opposition activists and creating corporate front groups backing the regulatory status quo. Once the memo reached the press, the ACC denied that it would ever be so devious.

The ACC has been putting one over on the public since the launch of Responsible Care in 1989, at the tail end of a decade-long fall in the chemical industry’s favorability rating from 30 percent to 14 percent. Responsible Care, which is voluntary among the ACC’s members, fell prey to the ‘free-rider’ syndrome, in which poor-performing companies join just to associate themselves positively with the program. When MIT and NYU professors tracked Responsible Care over its first ten years, they concluded that participants performed worse on health and safety issues than non-participants, and while both sets of companies raised their scores somewhat over time, the outsiders improved at a faster rate.

Green-business expert Joel Makower laments that the American public “seems to have swallowed whole the industry’s concept of ‘Responsible Care’,” blissfully unaware of a recent survey of 23 chemical companies by Oekom Research, an investment rating firm, which finds that: “As a rule, companies provide little or no information about the substances examined and assessed by them. The lack of transparency is just one indication of the fact that the industry is still far from managing chemicals in a way that meets health requirements and is environmentally sustainable.”

Due to potential toxic liabilities, Oekom recommended only 9 of the 23 chemical companies it evaluated for investment. Another new study from the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, states that “the amount of toxic chemicals released into the air is inversely related to the release of information on toxic emissions to the public.” Information is ‘essential2’ health, and the ACC’s latest PR data is no substitute.

home > take greenwash to the cleaners > greenwasher of the month > November 2005