Menu

oehha

SacraCapitol

Postcard from California: Chemical warning labels are everywhere – and they’re working

By Bill Walker

A driver entering an enclosed parking garage in California is greeted by a 20-by-20-inch sign declaring in 72-point type:

WARNING: Breathing the air in this parking garage can expose you to chemicals including carbon monoxide and gasoline or diesel engine exhaust, which are known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

The signs are known as Prop. 65 warnings, after the ballot proposition number of the state Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, which in 1986 was approved by almost two-thirds of California voters.

The law established a registry that is regularly updated with substances that include hazardous chemicals found in common household products, electronics, pesticides, food, drugs, dyes, additives, construction materials and automobiles. All must carry warning labels if they contain threshold levels of a listed chemical. The law also prohibits the discharge of listed chemicals into sources of drinking water.

In the most recent update, the Prop. 65 registry, which is maintained by scientists at the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), has grown to 874 chemicals and compounds. Chemicals are added only after exhaustive reviews by independent expert panels of studies from authoritative national and international public health agencies.

More
Hinkley_California_PGE_Water_Contamination_Case_Erin_Brokovich

Postcard from California: Why the ‘Erin Brockovich’ Chemical Is Still Unregulated

By Bill Walker

In 2001, California lawmakers passed a law requiring the state to set a legal limit for a cancer-causing chemical found in the tap water of more than 9 in 10 Californians called chromium-6. The legislation was spurred by the film “Erin Brockovich,” based on the true story of a small town’s David-and-Goliath battle against the state’s largest utility over contamination of its water supply.

The law ordered establishment of a health-protective standard for chromium-6 in drinking water by 2004. But nearly 20 years after that deadline, the process is still unfinished.

What’s worse, the weak standard recently proposed by the State Water Resources Control Board would leave millions of Californians at increased risk of cancer. And more than a decade after a US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) toxicological review concluded that chromium-6 in drinking water is a likely human carcinogen – a finding reaffirmed last year – there is still no federal standard to protect Americans nationwide.

The tortuous story of California’s long delay and the EPA’s inaction on chromium-6 shows how hard it is to regulate hazardous industrial chemicals in the US. It takes far too long, and a big reason is that polluting industries can stall the process with shady tactics.

In 1993, investigating unexplained illnesses in Hinkley, Calif., for a Los Angeles law firm, Brockovich uncovered decades of chromium-6 dumping by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E). Her firm sued PG&E on behalf of the town, and in 1996 the utility settled out of court for a then-record $333 million. The film based on the case won an Academy Award for Julia Roberts in the title role in 2001.

That same year, the state asked the University of California (UC) to convene an expert panel to assess the chemical’s health hazards. It was well-established that breathing chromium-6 fumes causes lung cancer – the reason California banned its use in chrome plating earlier this year – but there were few human studies of the risks the chemical posed in drinking water. Citing an obscure Chinese study, the panel’s report said a drinking water standard was not needed.

More
glyphosate

California regulators changing language on glyphosate and cancer risk

The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) is proposing changes to its messaging to consumers regarding the cancer risk associated with products made with the weed killing chemical glyphosate.

The language shift is subtle, but is significant for multiple reasons, including the potential for it to impact Monsanto’s efforts to appeal trial losses to the U.S. Supreme Court.

More
Back To Top


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

© Environmental Working Group .