Ucilia Wang | February 25, 2009 at 8:23 AM

Know Your Chemicals, Make Healthier Buying Decisions

Do you know what chemicals are used to make the toys and furniture in your home, or the plastic lunch box and bottles that hold your food and drinks?

In California, work is underway to create a database of chemicals and their toxicity levels for public access, thanks to a law that took effect in January this year. State officials hope to use the online database to nudge manufacturers into ditching more harmful ingredients and designing better products.

The state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), part of Cal EPA, is developing the database, which will enable consumers to evaluate and decide whether they want to buy certain products. The state also enacted another law last month that empowers the department to identify and rank chemicals that pose health threats and figure out alternative that manufacturers could use.

“There is a lack of information to choose non-toxic products,� said Maureen Gorsen, director of the DTSC, at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco Wednesday. “What are alternatives to plastics? That’s where the opportunities are for green materials.�

In the past, the state’s efforts to regulate chemicals mainly focused on cleaning up chemical spills and limiting toxic exposures in the workplace. News about high lead content in toys highlighted the public's ignorance on what they touch and use daily.  Autism, cancers and other health problems also have been linked to excessive exposures to toxic chemicals.

The DTSC has created a wiki to allow consumers to pitch in to help to create the rules for collecting the chemical data and assessing the toxicity levels of the consumer products. The two laws came out of the Green Chemistry Initiative launched by the Cal EPA in 2007.

Here are some interesting numbers from Gorsen and the DTSC website:

• The U.S. chemistry market is worth $635 billion. California accounts for $7.2 billion of that pie.

• The worldwide chemical market grows 3 percent each year, doubling every 25 years.

• About 100,000 different chemicals are used to make consumer products today.

• Two million plastic beverage bottles are tossed away every five seconds in the United States.

• 426,000 cell phones are discarded each day in the country.