How a patchwork of state laws leaves children unevenly protected from toxic chemicals

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This is an adapted excerpt from A Healthy Union: How States Can Lead on Environmental Health, 2025, published by Island Press, an imprint of Princeton University Press and reprinted here by permission.

When my older son was two years old, our family moved to a small city that boasts a reputation as politically and environmentally progressive. It is located in a state that not long ago shifted from “red” to “blue.” 

So I was taken aback when, that first May, ChemLawn trucks and landscapers clustered in the streets, spraying weedkiller from backpack containers, thick hoses, and even a tractor, leaving little white flags planted in the bright green golf course-like grass and a strong chemical odor in the air. This included not only neighbors’ yards but the massive lawn of the retirement home that occupied a full square block, just yards from the elementary school my children would attend. 

I was surprised and concerned — and, after my son was diagnosed with asthma a few years later, alarmed. 

As an environmental health lawyer and professor, I knew that children are especially vulnerable to toxic exposures. Their cells are dividing rapidly, they breathe more air relative to their body weight than adults, and their immature organs are unable to excrete and detoxify harmful substances as well as adults’. Even low-level toxic exposures can cause them long-term or even permanent harm. Herbicides are linked with asthma exacerbation and onset, Parkinson’s disease, reproductive problems, and more. When sprayed, they can drift through the air and be inhaled. They can also be absorbed through the skin (and ingested, in the case of food).

I had assumed that this well-educated, liberal town had policies that would protect my son and that my neighbors were well familiar with the issue. But during the years of advocacy that followed, I began to understand why this wasn’t the case. Like forty-plus others, the state has a law limiting local pesticide policies. Its economy is largely agricultural and chemical intensive. There were few pesticide-reduction policies in the region, lessening knowledge of best practices. I found that a slice of the community was environmentally aware, while the overall culture was not. All these factors overlapped and fed into each other. 

With the federal government politically divided nearly to the point of immobilization in recent years, most environmental health protections take place (or don’t) on the state level, and sometimes on the local level. As a professional and a parent, this is where my journey began.

Uneven environmental health protections create inequities

In many parts of this country, a child could go to gym class on a typical Monday and play soccer on a field that was sprayed over the weekend with 2,4-D, a weedkiller that was a component of Agent Orange and has been investigated as possibly causing cancer. Or the school grounds may have been treated with a lower-toxicity herbicide, or with safe, nontoxic products and practices. Which of these scenarios applies depends largely on the laws of the child’s state of residence; federal law provides only barebones protection. State policies can affect community members’ exposure to air pollution and to toxic chemicals like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS — a group of synthetic substances that are added to items to make them oil-, stain-, or water-resistant — and flame retardants, and even whether a product label must list these. While states can be valuable laboratories of innovation, major differences in environmental health laws contribute to inequities in pollution exposures — and, data suggest, health outcomes.

Most Americans — even knowledgeable professionals — assume that when they go to the grocery or hardware store or drop their child off at school, the government has ensured the safety of all products and practices in those places. In fact, due to major policy gaps at the federal level, if a state has not addressed an environmental health issue, then it may be unaddressed. Sometimes it makes sense for states to take the lead in policymaking. Different states face differing environmental health challenges, from hurricanes to flooding to wildfires to varying sorts of pests and pollution. States may have different politics, priorities, climates, and cultures. States have always had an important role as laboratories of innovation. Policies tested out at the state level can help to inform decisions of other states and of the federal government.

“States have always had an important role as laboratories of innovation. Policies tested out at the state level can help to inform decisions of other states and of the federal government.”

But uneven environmental health protections create inequities. For example, those who reside in a state that follows California’s more stringent tailpipe emissions standards — about one-third of the states — probably benefit from breathing less air pollution from that source. 

There are many more examples. Minnesota’s Toxic Free Kids Act requires the health department to develop a list of chemicals of concern for children’s health and communicate the risks; several others have similar laws. States have passed a patchwork of limits on PFAS in products. Providing water- and stain-resistance to everything from fabrics to nonstick cookware, PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because of their persistence in the environment and have recently been linked with a range of troubling health effects.

These policy questions about the role of federal and state governments matter now, not only because of unprecedented environmental health challenges like climate change–worsened heat and smog and expanded travel of pests carrying infectious diseases, and everyday toxic chemical exposures — but because the increasing impacts on vulnerable groups can have lifelong ramifications.

Children exposed to carcinogenic chemicals have many years ahead in which to develop cancer; seventy-year-olds have far fewer. When lead, mercury, or pesticide exposure contributes to a child’s autism or ADHD, those conditions may require specialized education and limit their career options and lifetime earnings. When a fourth grader with asthma breathes a disinfectant cleaner like bleach, they are more likely to wheeze than someone who does not already have that disease; they have been sensitized. When a resident of an environmental justice community encounters heavy truck exhaust while walking to the bus stop due to siting of a new fulfillment warehouse nearby, that toxic diesel exhaust may augment existing air pollution common to such neighborhoods and contribute to more severe lung inflammation. 

Overall, broader, better federal environmental health protections are ideal and should be the overarching goal. But in their absence, states should act. Where it truly makes sense for states to take the lead — as in the case of COVID-19 — the federal government must provide comprehensive, clear, easy-to-access data, information, and guidance to states and localities.

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