President Clinton’s proposal for revising the Clean Water Act, announced on February 1, included what could be a dramatic breakthrough in U.S. environmental policy. It called for a two-and-a-half-year study to develop a national strategy to “substitute, reduce, or prohibit the use of chlorine and chlorinated compounds.” This new national policy has its roots in the Great Lakes region and in the battles fought by the area’s environmentalists. Heading the charge against chlorine for the past five years has been Jack Weinberg, a legendary figure from the 60s student movement who’s now working for Greenpeace in Chicago.
That would be no small matter: chlorine and thousands of organic chlorine compounds–chemicals containing both carbon and chlorine–are used in a vast range of industries: papermaking, electronics, auto manufacturing, metalworking, plastics, pesticides, and dry cleaning, to name just a few.
They also insisted that ecosystems and their inhabitants, including humans, can tolerate some level of any toxic pollution, since there’s a threshold below which chemicals have no effect. They also argued that small doses always have small effects and that organisms have methods of breaking down and dealing with even strongly toxic materials if the dose isn’t too great. And they said that decisions on these issues had to be made only on the basis of science, but that in many cases science hasn’t delivered its final judgment.
He did criticize the science of chlorine’s defenders, but he primarily argued that we have to change the whole way we approach such issues. “We are talking about a new paradigm, a new way of looking at scientific, regulatory, and ethical questions. We start with the premise that the life-support systems on earth are in jeopardy. If this hypothesis is correct, we need an approach that has a chance of solving problems in time. If we follow the strategy of the chemical industry, the only thing we know for sure is that there is no way we can solve problems in time.”
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Testing each of tens of thousands of chemicals at current rates could take centuries to complete. And simply regulating the sources of extremely toxic substances means that more will continue to be released into the environment, even if at a reduced rate. Weinberg argued instead for “the precautionary principle,” the idea that if there are reasonable grounds to suspect a human activity may harm the environment and life on the planet, we should act as if the harm is likely until proven otherwise. To the extent that potential harm is very great, very long-lived, and irreversible, we should be even more cautious.
The IJC staff and independent scientists presented the same arguments as environmentalists like Weinberg, along with evidence to support them. They must have been persuasive, because the IJC’s latest biennial report, released February 17, restated its call for a ban on chlorine and other persistent toxic chemicals in even stronger terms. It embraced Weinberg’s “new paradigm.”
Chlorine is also a catalyst in the production of hundreds of other products. A 1993 industry study claims that chlorine is involved directly or indirectly in the production of $71 billion worth of goods in the U.S. every year. Industry deliberately manufactures and uses roughly 11,000 chlorinated compounds–and accidentally generates many thousands more in the course of production, use, and disposal of chlorine products.
