THE SET-UP: I’ve got a spoonful of sugar to help today’s medicine go down. It comes in the form of a new study of California’s groundbreaking chemical labeling law. Per the NY Times:
California maintains a list of about 900 chemicals known to cause cancer and other health effects. Under the 1986 right-to-know law, also known as Prop 65, products that could expose people to harmful amounts of those chemicals must carry warning labels.
As the Times notes, that law was “mocked” by critics who said “the warnings were so ubiquitous — affixed to cookware, faux leather jackets, even baked goods — that they had become largely meaningless in the eyes of shoppers.”
The critics were wrong…
A study published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology found that California’s right-to-know law … has swayed many companies to stop using those chemicals altogether.
To assess the law’s effect, researchers carried out interviews at 32 global manufacturers and retailers that sell clothing, personal-care, cleaning, and a range of home products. Almost 80 percent of interviewees said Prop 65 had prompted them to reformulate their products.
A similar share of companies said they looked to Prop 65 to determine which chemicals to avoid. And 63 percent said the law had prompted them to also reformulate products they sold outside California.
Of course, “no other state has a law quite like Prop. 65” and “a 2018 change to Prop 65 has meant products are starting to carry even more specific labels.”
That’s California.
Now comes the medicine.
The Society of Chemical Manufacturers & Affiliates sent Trump a love letter on Inauguration Day … and Trump loved them back. He stocked the EPA with petrochemical shills and put the chemical industry in charge of monitoring the chemical industry. Then he withdraw limits on poisonous PFAS chemicals.
And they’re just getting started, folks. - jp
TITLE: Researchers scrambling to understand implications of forever chemicals found in fish, waters of Lake Huron
https://greatlakesecho.org/2025/02/13/researchers-scrambling-to-understand-implications-of-forever-chemicals-found-in-fish-waters-of-lake-huron/
EXCERPTS: A recent study has found dozens of previously unknown “forever chemicals” in the fish, mussels and waters of Lake Huron, revealing more contamination than previously realized.
Researchers from Clarkson University in New York looked for new contaminants, said Bernard Crimmins, an environmental analytical chemist with the university and a co-author of the study.
“There are thousands of PFAS chemicals in use and potentially out in the environment. We need to expand our understanding,” he said, “to see what the true contamination is in the environment.”
The group of chemicals known as PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, includes around 15,000 chemicals. They are persistent in the environment and commonly referred to as “forever chemicals.”
The chemicals are all human-made and have been produced since the 1940s for use in many consumer products, some labeled as water- or stain-resistant.
Now researchers are scrambling to understand the health and environmental effects of these chemicals.
Crimmins said the study was novel in that it looked not only at the known PFAS chemicals that most other labs study. It also employed what is called a “non-targeted analysis” to find previously unknown contaminants.
Crimmins said chemicals that accumulate in the flesh and fatty tissues of fish, especially top predators and popular trophy species such as lake trout, likely have adverse health impacts on people who eat them.
“If they’re accumulating up the food web, that means that they’re enriching in the body,” he said, referring to the accumulation of the chemicals in the fish.
PFAS manufacturers aren’t required to prove their products are safe before using them in a wide variety of consumer items, including food packaging, non-stick cookware, clothing and carpets.
Gillian Miller is a senior scientist with the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor who was not involved with the Clarkson University study. Miller said the Ecology Center and other environmental advocates have been pushing for government regulation of PFAS as a class rather than individual PFAS chemicals.
“The one-by-one regulation approach is ineffective,” she said. “It’s a start, but it will take forever to regulate this class of compounds in a way that’s protective of human health and, certainly, of ecosystem health and wildlife as well.”
Miller said the current state and federal regulatory structure allows manufacturers to produce and release chemicals without testing first to safeguard human health.
“The system is set up to allow new chemicals to be used with limited information and without putting a burden on producers to demonstrate safety beforehand,” she said.
Many consumer products contain PFAS and federal regulations do not limit most of their uses.
Michigan is one of the few states limiting PFAS chemicals in drinking water. But of the thousands of PFAS chemicals Michigan regulates only seven.
No regulations exist to limit the use of most of the rest, and there is little information on potential health or environmental impacts.
TITLE: How ‘forever chemicals’ devastated Texas family ranchers
https://www.agdaily.com/insights/how-forever-chemicals-devastated-texas-family-ranchers/
EXCERPTS: Tony Coleman walked around a small part of his family’s 325-acre pasture behind his rural house calling for “Tank.” A Black Baldy bull eventually meandered up, and Coleman started to rub the bull’s face.
Tony and his wife, Karen, bottle-fed Tank in their garage after the bull’s mother died during birth. Talking about their poisoned land that has led to at least 47 cows and calves dying from problems like liver disease, the Colemans are emotional about their fear for Tank’s health.
“We became his mom and dad, and so for us, you know, I’ve grown up on the farm, and people have always said, ‘How do you eat what you raise?’ Well, for me, that’s just part of life,” Karen Coleman said. “It’s different to process a cow for your nutritional needs versus having to euthanize everything you have worked for. But if we have to euthanize that bull, that’s going to leave a hole that can’t ever be replaced.”
The Colemans are at the center of one of the most-watched environmental lawsuits in the country against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the company that offers biosolid fertilizer outside of Fort Worth, Texas.
The Colemans, Karen’s mother, Patsy Schultz, and their neighbors — James Farmer and Robin Alessi — shared their story with DTN, describing what they have faced since learning about the term “forever chemicals.”
Contamination on in Johnson County, Texas, has reached a point that the county commissioners court on Tuesday voted to request Gov. Greg Abbott declare the county a disaster area, which could lead to federal support for farmers impacted by long-term biosolid applications.
The Johnson County farmers along with their county government, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, and Potomac Riverkeeper Inc., have collectively sued EPA in federal court for failure to regulate per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in biosolids, also known as sewage sludge.
PFAS make up a group of thousands of synthetic chemicals that are especially resistant to heat and water, leading them to be typically dubbed as “forever chemicals.” PFAS and associated chemicals — including PFOS and PFOA — accumulate over time in land, water, plants, fish, animals and people. EPA has classified them as likely carcinogenic, and they are known to concentrate in organs such as the liver, kidneys and gall bladder.
Over the past seven years, high contamination levels have shut down a dairy farm in New Mexico, at least one beef operation in Michigan and multiple farms across Maine — the only state so far to outright ban the use of biosolids as fertilizer. Michigan requires testing biosolids now before they can be applied to the land.
Based on 2022 data from larger facilities nationally, EPA estimates there are about 1.2 million tons of biosolids applied on farm ground nationally, and another 906,000 tons are used for home gardens, landscaping, golf courses and other uses.
“We never even knew what PFAS was until spring of ’23,” Tony Coleman said. He added, “It’s a very complicated subject just trying to wrap your head around what PFAS and PFOS are.”
The Colemans and Farmers also didn’t actually apply biosolids on their land. Their contamination came from a farmer with property uphill from their land who received biosolids from Synagro but on at least one occasion left it stacked for weeks until he could get around to applying it.
Heavy rains and runoff would wash erosion down into the Colemans’ and Farmers’ land and shallow water table just off the large creek running by.
After a stack of biosolids from Synagro was piled on the neighbor’s farm field in November 2022, it sat there for weeks and smoldered. The neighboring families complained about the stench. The Colemans and Farmers describe the kind of odor from the piles as the kind that would “knock a buzzard off a gut wagon.” James Farmer said it was like rotting carcasses.
“You would walk outside, and it would make you want to throw up,” he said.
After complaints and concerns, the county’s environmental investigator took soil samples, as well as samples from ponds and wells.
The soil tested as high as 6,291 parts per trillion (ppt) of PFAS chemicals. Patsy Schultz’s well water was 268 parts per trillion. Investigators came back and tested dead fish out of the Farmers’ pond that showed 74,460 ppt, and one of the Coleman’s stillborn calves tested at 620,228 ppt of PFAS.
To put that into context, if a person ate 8 ounces of fish out of Farmer and Alessi’s pond, the risk would exceed EPA’s recommended daily exposure levels by 30,000 times. If someone ate the liver from the calf, it would have been 250,000 times EPA’s recommended safety levels.
The county investigator then tested Synagro’s fertilizer and found 27 different PFAS chemicals with the sample hitting 35,610 ppt. High concentrations of at least eight different PFAS chemicals showed up on the Schultz/Coleman and Farmer properties.
Over that time, the Colemans also started losing cattle. They have lost 47 calves and cows in the last two years.
Calves are born stillborn or can die shortly after birth. The cattle often have very specific symptoms, Karen Coleman said. “At the end, they start having a very toxic gate, and you can just tell.” The cows also become more aggressive, even if they go lame and can’t get up. “It’s just heart-wrenching to know there’s nothing you can do. It’s just helplessness.”
After getting the test results nearly two years ago, the Coleman and Farmer families realized they couldn’t sell food from their farms anymore. They also shouldn’t eat fish from their ponds, and they had to install state-of-the-art filter systems on their water even though they no longer use it for drinking.
“There’s no law that says we can’t sell our cattle, but it’s human conscientiousness,” Tony Coleman said. “Why would I want to hurt your family by them eating something I sold? That would make us no better than the people who are producing this crap and coming out here and spreading it on someone else’s farm.”
He added, “It’s been like a nightmare. You do everything you can to try to raise the best beef you can because you want to get the best price for it. Who in their right mind came up with thinking that spreading waste from a city on farmland to grow food was a good idea?”
Karen Coleman has thyroid cancer, and she has had to have a mass removed from her back. Robin Alessi just got out of the hospital as well. She temporarily lost the use of her legs and needed weeks of physical therapy to regain their use. James Farmer said they all have health issues. And their circumstances take a mental toll.
“It scares the hell out of me,” James Farmer said. “I’m not a spring chicken anymore. She’s not. You go out and try to make something that you love and work for yourself and you can’t. You can’t survive on something that you can’t do anything with.”
James Farmer gets emotional talking about his family visiting the place. He built a pavilion around the pond shaded by trees to create a perfect fishing and BBQ spot.
“I have nephews and family that love to fish and want to come out here and have a fish fry, and I have to tell them we can’t eat the fish,” James Farmer said.
Robin Alessi added, “It’s really hard to explain that to a kid. So, we just throw them (the fish) back. We have to.”
On the day DTN visited the Colemans in late January, 300- to 400-pound steers were selling for $4.50 a pound.
“That’s huge, and for the last two years, we haven’t been able to sell anything. Meanwhile, cattle prices have been through the roof,” Tony Coleman said. “Because somebody else did something, it costs you everything you have worked for. That seems a bit unfair.”
TITLE: The Beauty of ‘Slow Flowers’ versus the Pretty Poison of Plants Grown with Dangerous Chemicals
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/look-for-slow-flower-bouquets-plants-grown-without-health-harming-chemicals/
EXCERPTS: [T]he blooms that cram the entrances of supermarkets, big-box stores, downtown florists—most of the places where people buy flowers in the U.S. ... overwhelmingly come from equatorial countries, such as Ecuador and Ethiopia, where cheap labor and minimal environmental regulation make growing affordable. Those flowers are part of an enormously successful international market that sells blooms thousands of miles from their fields of origin and earns more than $25 billion every year.
Multiple global trends have benefited offshore flower growers: larger planes, easier refrigeration, low-cost labor and land. But so has freedom from the rules that protect U.S. workers and consumers. “In California, but also in many other states, there are very strict regulations in terms of pesticides,” says Gerardo Spinelli, a production adviser at the University of California Cooperative Extension San Diego County. “Being in compliance is expensive.” But overseas, “these regulations are not there or are a lot less strict.”
But pesticides and other agrochemicals required to sustain that scale of production can injure workers and their families. One ongoing study of children in Ecuador whose parents work at flower farms has documented deficits in attention and eye-hand coordination, particularly after periods when these chemicals are heavily sprayed. Children born to women who work in floriculture regions have higher-than-normal rates of birth defects, another study found. And the risks extend to people around the world. In Belgium, florists with imported flowers had unhealthy levels of pesticide chemicals on their gloves, levels high enough to burn the skin if it wasn’t protected. And in the Netherlands, prolific use of antifungals on the country’s signature tulips has fostered the emergence of deadly drug-resistant fungi.
In the 1990s, when cocaine flowing from South America was the main focus of drug interdiction, President George H. W. Bush proposed measures to boost legal businesses in the drug’s most important production areas. A 1991 law lifted or reduced tariffs on thousands of products produced in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Cut flowers were on the list, and it gave them an enormous boost. U.S. flower production shrank, and the market for imported flowers skyrocketed.
Jose Ricardo Suárez, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego, saw the changes the tariff exemptions brought. Suárez remembers … how abruptly it changed in the 1990s: “All of a sudden, these greenhouses started popping up in many different parts of the county.”
The explosion of construction was the first bloom of the floriculture encouraged by that 1991 law, which would make Ecuador the third-largest exporter of flowers in the world, a billion-dollar trade that fields a workforce of more than 100,000 people. Ecuador specializes in roses; the cool mountain climate and consistent sunlight of its equatorial days are uniquely suited to producing straight-stemmed, big-blossomed flowers, highly sought after for celebratory bouquets. But those perfect plants don’t grow that way without assistance; they are sprayed routinely with fungicides and insecticides, especially organophosphates, which kill insects by interfering with their nervous systems. As Suárez earned his medical degree in Quito and then his Ph.D. back in the U.S., he became curious about how those compounds might affect the people living nearby.
In 2008 he founded the Study of Secondary Exposures to Pesticides among Children and Adolescents, known as ESPINA for its acronym in Spanish, to explore whether children in Pedro Moncayo were affected by living in the center of greenhouse production and having parents and family members employed there. “We found what we call take-home pesticide pathways, in which the workers are exposed, and then those pesticides adhere to their clothing or their hair and skin, or maybe they bring home tools, or they bring some pesticides to use in their own backyards,” Suárez says. “We’ve also looked at the proximity of homes to different spray sites. We tend to think of greenhouses as totally closed, but the fact is that they’re not: They have windows because you need some circulation of air, so the pesticide is not contained just within the crop.”
The study launched with a cohort of 313 children between four and nine years old and then expanded. Approximately half of the kids lived in the same household as workers from flower plantations. The children contributed blood and urine samples, underwent medical exams, and participated in neurological and behavioral assessments. The team began publishing results in 2012. From the beginning, they found problems in the children of flower-farm households that those with no farm connection did not share: first, changes in enzyme levels that affect neurotransmitters and indicate pesticide exposure—and later, effects on learning ability, depression, thyroid function and blood pressure. In one especially poignant result, they found that children linked to flower farms experienced months-long damage to attention, self-control, and eye-hand coordination after one of the biggest spraying episodes of the year: the lead-up to the harvest to make Mother’s Day bouquets.
In 2009 researchers at the University of New Mexico and the University of Michigan reported on high miscarriage rates among the large number of women who worked in the Ecuadorian flower industry. They had a 2.6 times greater risk of miscarriage than other women. In 2015 a paper about flower greenhouse workers in Ethiopia uncovered a series of health troubles. The country had experienced an explosion of rose cultivation over 10 years thanks to its mild climate and high elevation, going from a tiny industry to the fourth-largest exporter in the world. The research found that a large number of workers had rashes and other skin problems, and some had chronic coughs and shortness of breath.
In 2017 a research team at the Autonomous University of Mexico State showed that birth defects in children born in a floriculture region, to women who worked in or near flower farms, occurred in 20 percent of births. That contrasted with 6 percent among women in the same state who worked outside of the flower industry. That same year a separate team of researchers showed that greenhouse workers in two Mexican states who mixed and applied pesticides had higher levels of pesticide biomarkers in their urine than did workers who had less contact with the chemicals. Then last year another paper reported that men who work in the Mexican flower industry and were often exposed to pesticides and fungicides have high blood levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines—small messenger proteins that normally alert the immune system to fight infection but can trigger chronic diseases when they are too abundant.
The perils posed by extensive pesticide use on flower farms outside the U.S. do not stay confined to those properties and their workers. In 2016 researchers in Belgium, who were alarmed by reports of flower workers’ illnesses, published a study on the hazards of flowers after they were cut and shipped. The blooms were not subject to strict rules imposed on food, because they are not a crop intended for eating. In two studies, the scientists tested flower bouquets sold at florists and in supermarkets and found levels of fungicides and pesticides—especially on roses—that could be harmful to the human nervous system if they were absorbed through the skin.
To ascertain whether any real risk existed, in follow-up research the scientists asked a group of florists to wear cotton gloves for several hours on two consecutive days while trimming flowers and assembling bouquets and then analyzed what the gloves had picked up. They found 111 different agricultural chemicals, mostly pesticides and fungicides, present in concentrations up to 1,000 times higher than are allowed on produce. Several were present in such high concentrations that they represented both immediate and chronic risks to the florists’ health, capable of causing skin burns and eye irritation, risking damage to a fetus or exposing a breastfed child. The researchers noted that wearing gloves while working and not eating or smoking with flowers nearby would reduce the danger.