The Price Of Caution; To reduce risks to consumers, Europe is putting common chemical products under intense scrutiny.(Cover Story)

Byline: William Underhill

Heavy industry is scarce in the pastoral patch of northern Sweden where Margot Wallstrom spent her childhood back in the 1950s. Is it safe to assume, then, that she was spared exposure to the nasty pollutants that usually accompany factories and cities and other manifestations of economic development? No, it's not. Last year Wallstrom, 49, had her blood tested for the presence of trace amounts of toxins. All sorts of chemicals turned up, from the long-banned pesticide DDT to PCBs, the cancer-causing compounds used in a range of electrical goods. Even her two children probably imbibed the chemicals from Wallstrom's breast milk.

The lesson, says Wallstrom, the European Union's Environment commissioner, is simple. The price of progress--the release of a slew of potentially dangerous chemicals into the environment--has been too steep. In many cases the long-term health implications of trace chemicals are unknown--thousands have never been subjected to a formal test--but they've been blamed for everything from falling sperm counts in men to rising rates of asthma in children to higher cancer rates in the general population. And no one--not even a clean-living, eco-aware Swede from the countryside--is immune. "These substances are turning up where they don't belong and are not expected," says Wallstrom. Consumers have a right to know the risks they're taking each time they apply deodorant or bring an appliance into their homes, she says. "The knowledge gap is unacceptable and must be closed."

To close it, Europe is now proposing a new regime for regulating chemicals. It's based on the "precautionary principle," which holds that products or processes should be presumed dangerous unless proved safe. The new regime will basically make manufacturers responsible for ensuring the safety of almost every chemical sold in the EU in quantities greater than a metric ton a year. This amounts to a tenfold increase in the number of substances under regulation--to more than 30,000 chemicals, including some that have been in use for decades. Industry will have 11 years to test, at its own expense, every such chemical on the market. The results of these tests will go into in a vast EU database, which will be made available to the public. If a chemical is deemed unsafe, the manufacturer will have to apply for special authorization to sell it. Even so, that won't absolve the firm from legal liability should the chemical prove, in subsequent years, to be harmful in ways that cannot be foreseen. The chemicals in the hairspray you've been using for the past 30 years, in the cleaner that takes the stains out of your leather sofa and in a panoply of other common household products will all be tested and filed into the database. If they're judged too risky, they'll be pulled off the market.

Proponents of the new rules point to a string of disasters that advance testing might have prevented. Think only of asbestos, the wonder fireproofing product of the early-20th century that has since claimed tens of thousands of lives through cancer. "If we had been more precautionary in the past, then we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now," says Helen Lynn of the Women's Environmental Network, a British lobbying group. Plenty of other products with questionable characteristics are also lurking in the home, finding their way into the bloodstream, skin, lungs and other organs. "The fact is that so far we have only experienced the tip of the iceberg in terms of exposure to substances like these," says Lynn. Beware that highly effective carpet-stain remover or the flame-retardant chemical in the sofa.

Especially troubling are the so-called endocrine disrupters--chemicals that ...