Now that we’d had our eyes opened a bit, and had absorbed Albert Donnay’s assessment of our home, Katherine and I decided to explore the provenance of the myriad toxins streaming into our lives. To follow the river, as it were, to its very source. Not to the wellspring, exactly—we weren’t going to go undercover in any Chinese factories or look inside the cauldrons of a chemical multinational—but to the grand municipal reservoir, where these chemicals accumulate in unimaginable volume before being piped in a steady stream into our homes. Rather than run around from hardware stores and pet shops to furniture outlets and clothing boutiques, we decided to shop where millions of Americans shop every week, for everything from mattresses and toys to cosmetics and even food. It would be a kind of safari, if you will, full of mysterious landscapes and more than a few hidden dangers. We would walk slowly and deliberately through a big box store. We would turn over a few rocks, and see what we could see.

Let me begin by admitting that I have an intense, even neurotic dislike of shopping. When I need something—a tube of toothpaste, a can of paint, a new pair of pants—I zip into a store, grab what I’m after, and zip out. I don’t browse, or linger, or paw through the racks. If I see a couple of brands side by side, I’m likely to pick the one that is cheaper, and I’m not likely to think very hard about why the price might be so low. I’m cheap that way.

Which, I suppose, makes me a pretty typical consumer in a typical big box store. And big box stores attract a lot of typical customers. In 2009, the top ten big box chains, led by Walmart, Costco, and Target, sold merchandise worth more than $1 trillion.

It’s worth saying right up front that there’s very little for sale in a big box store that you can’t find in dozens of mom-and-pop stores. It’s just that in many places, big box stores have put all this stuff under one roof (and in many cases have also put all of those other stores out of business). It’s also worth remembering that big box stores, at least where I live, come in clumps. In a typical mall around Baltimore, you are likely to find a Walmart sharing one wall with a Target, another with a Michaels Arts and Crafts, and a third with a Toys “R” Us. Though their marketing strategies may vary, these stores share a great many products, which in turn share a great many toxic chemicals.

The trouble is, other than price tags, the products for sale in most of these places provide very little useful information. Although virtually everything is stamped “Made in China,” there is almost nothing else to go on. Huge swaths of products, from plastic toys to upholstered furniture, report nothing about what went into making them—not the materials, not the circumstances under which they were manufactured, not whether or not they were “inspected,” nothing. For the products that do list a few ingredients—paints, for example, or caulks, or some laundry soaps—the labels are typically inscrutable, Latinate, and printed in fonts that seem purposefully difficult to read. It’s like the information was created to dissuade you from asking too many questions.

In this way, big box stores are not unlike fast food restaurants: you walk in looking for a very inexpensive product, and that is what you get. Where the thing was made, and with what ingredients, is simply not part of the equation. It’s not what you came looking for, and you’re not going to find it.

Which doesn’t mean that there’s not more to know. Peel back the curtain on fast food, and you’ll find a cheap hamburger whose provenance—the industrial food machine—has successfully hidden a full range of social, environmental, and public health costs. Look a little closer at the products in a big box store, and you’ll find an equally full range of compromises: a huge petrochemical industry; a shocking lack of government oversight; an endless conveyor belt of products moving into this country from factories somewhere in China. There is a lot to look for in a big box store. It’s just really hard to know where to find it.

After parking our car out in the vast acreage of our suburban Baltimore megamall, Katherine and I made our way through the automatic doors and were immediately struck—we were looking with new eyes, don’t forget—by just how perfectly denatured the big box environment was. There were no windows, so once inside the doors we lost all sense of any life going on outside. There were no clocks, so we quickly lost track of time. The store was so big we couldn’t even see its walls; wandering the aisles, I began to feel as though I were adrift in a borderless, rolling sea of merchandise. The space seemed disorienting by design.

And it wasn’t just the visual stimulation that overwhelmed us. It was also the smell. The moment Katherine and I walked through the door, we were hit with a blast of fragrance. Or perhaps I should say “fragrance.” At first, the place smelled vaguely familiar, like the doorway of a shopping mall candle store or a gas station bathroom: there was a powerful bouquet of vanilla and apple cinnamon, coupled with faint notes of … lemon? At the back of the palate, I thought I could detect a few notes of burning rubber, with a subtle chlorine nose. But the finish? What was that? I knew I’d smelled it before, just not in such vivid concentration. What was that? Was that “lavender”?

Katherine and I looked at each other. Wow, she said. That’s very strong. I wonder where it’s coming from? We looked around. To our left was the wing of the store devoted to personal care products. Was that it? Was this olfactory cloud coming from a brigade of shampoo bottles? Or was it drifting in from the laundry detergents? Was it over there, to the right, in among the scented candles and potpourri?

The truth was, it was impossible to tell. Almost every single product in the store, from the paints and caulks to the cosmetics and the baby bottles, had been manufactured, one way or another, from a mix of synthetic chemicals. The smells were all so ambient, so pervasive, that discovering their provenance was clearly going to take some work.

It was about this time that an image popped into my head: Albert Donnay standing atop a giant crane, wrapping the big box store in an enormous plastic bag. For the rest of my visit, I couldn’t shake the image of this bag, sealed for a month, and then opened like a giant Pandora’s balloon.

HARDWARE

Katherine and I decided to look first in the aisles featuring products that had raised so many red flags in our basement. If such a sickly odor in our home had been caused by just a dozen cans of paint, we figured we ought to take a look—or a smell, if you will—at the hardware department.

When it comes to toxic chemicals, the hardware section in a big box store is a red zone. On shelf after shelf there were lacquers and paints, strippers and thinners, grease and stain removers—the same stuff we had fumigating our home from below. These products were, for the most part, canned or shrink-wrapped. But as I held them in my hands I couldn’t help thinking about all the toxic genies waiting to be released from their bottles.

In the first aisle, Katherine and I waded into what I came to think of as the Pond of Caulk. This was a place I imagined spending some money; the grout in our bathroom had begun to chip and crack, and I needed to figure out a way to seal the fissures between the tiles. I picked up a tube and looked. It said it contained ethylene glycol, gamma-aminopropyltriethoxysilane, formaldehyde, ammonia, and acetaldehyde. Some of these things, the packaging said, “may cause kidney, cardiovascular and liver effects.” I put it down, gently. Another label said the product contained “phthalate esters”; this, to be honest, deserved some kind of award. Of the thousands of products in the store that contained phthalates, this was the only one that I saw that actually acknowledged it.

There were sealants guaranteed (on the front) to last fifty years and warning (on the back) that the compound can be fatal if swallowed and “contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.” In microscopic print, there was an advisory about how to dispose of the chemical, along with this bit of news: “Reports have associated repeated and prolonged occupational exposure to solvents with permanent brain and nervous system damage.”

A number of these products recommended that they be applied with rubber gloves and that masks be worn. I found myself thinking back on all the home repair projects I had done over the years: all the painting, floor sanding, and caulking; all the fiberglass I had installed in my attic and the sealants I had put on my porch floor. I thought about the epoxies and resins I had used to fiberglass three canoes I had built out of strips of western red cedar; despite the warnings on the resins’ packages, I had painted it on with bare hands. And since I’d built them outside, I’d never worn a mask.

I’m sure there are some people who wear gloves when they re-caulk their bathtubs. But to be honest, I’d always thought a wet finger was the best way to apply the stuff. And I bet there are plenty of people who, when they see a stray swab of white gunk, simply wipe it up with a bare finger. Ditto for parents painting their kid’s bedroom, or staining a bookcase in the garage, or rolling out a pile of pink insulation in their attic. And then, of course, once the stuff has been applied, we all have to live with it as it breaks down, becomes dust, and begins filling our homes.

Katherine picked up a tube of silicone. This might be better than caulk, she said. Isn’t this the stuff they put in breast implants? How bad can it be?

I don’t claim to have the first idea about what goes into a breast implant. But finding out what was in this particular tube of silicone caulk was tricky. It came with a multipage label, with the ingredients listed inside. When Katherine read it, she found that the caulk “may cause kidney, cardiovascular and respiratory problems.” If she wanted more information, she was offered a phone number.

“Just the fact that you have to go through all these steps to figure out if something is safe makes me nuts,” Katherine said. “And look at this.” She showed me the label. “Manufacturer can’t be held liable for damages in excess of purchase price,” it said. What damages were we talking about, I wondered? Damages to your bathtub? Or damages to your body? And how much damage would $1.97 cover, anyway?

As I was looking these things over—I am not making this up—I saw a man with a woman, apparently his mother, examining a selection of sealants. They seemed to be trying to find a way to keep the winter air from slipping through their leaky window frames. “This will get rid of it,” the man said, and he and his mother took the package to the checkout counter. I couldn’t help but wonder about the quality of the air in his soon-to-be-sealed home, once he got “rid” of the clean air and layered it over with a thin barrier of toxic chemicals.

One thing that distinguished the hardware section was the presence of warnings on most labels. Cans of thinners and strippers were marked with “may be fatal or cause blindness.” There were deck strippers that cause “severe burns to eyes and mucous membranes” and that contain chemicals “known to the state of California to cause cancer.” (This was the second time I had seen this warning. What was it about California? Did these products cause cancer in California and not in other states?) Again, it was hard to tell which chemicals they were talking about, though one package did list sodium hydroxide as a possible suspect. (Another irony: these products were being sold right below the humidifiers. I remembered something Albert Donnay had said about the toxins in bath products, which enter the body all the faster when the pores of a person’s newly bathed skin are wet, warm, and wide open.)

The spray-on “popcorn texture” for ceilings said it contained an ingredient (though it didn’t say which one) “known to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm” (again, in California, anyway). Other ingredients in this product, I was informed, may affect the brain or the nervous system.

The popcorn ceiling spray was, for me, a kind of (unsavory) Proustian madeleine: I immediately thought back fifteen years, to when Katherine and I had briefly found ourselves renting a house in suburban Pennsylvania. We had chosen the house for one main reason: the owner had allowed us to live there with our two dogs. As we toured the house, the landlord had boasted about the popcorn (or, in his words, “Hollywood”) ceilings, including one right above our bed. (He had also boasted about how he had outfitted much of the house with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, but that’s another story.) So desperate were we to find a place that accepted dogs, Katherine and I signed the lease, and we lived there for a year. Now, standing in the hardware section, I wondered: How much of that Hollywood ceiling had ended up in my lungs? And once in there, what had it done?

The hardware aisles were also full of every kind of aerosol spray, each with its attendant warnings about chemicals and their potential effects. Polyurethane (ketones, butane; brain and nervous system damage). Lacquer (acetates, ketones; ditto). Polycrylic finish (dimethyl ether, 2-butoxyethanol; ditto). Peekaboo Blue spray paint (acetone, toluene, aliphatic hydrocarbons; ditto). Rust-Oleum (toluene, acetone, xylene; ditto).

I had always pooh-poohed these warnings, but as Albert Donnay had reminded me, these side effects are symptoms of neurological distress. How many of these exposures does it take to add up to a neurological problem?

The truth was, after a half hour spent wandering around this big box store, I was starting to get a nasty headache. Whether this was from chemicals leaking out of individual products, or from the cumulative “fragrances,” or from straining to read all those microscopic labels, I can’t say for sure. I will also not speculate on whether this headache qualified as “neurological distress.” As I say, I’m not a particularly joyful shopper on a good day.

We kept looking, pushing our cart to an aisle given over to what I came to think of as the Arsenal. Here, it seemed, you could buy weapons to eradicate every living organism smaller than your thumb. There were aerosol ant killers, roach and termite sprays, flea powders, atmospheric “foggers.” “Kills on Contact,” these products brag. “Once and Done!” “Kills 180+ types of insects.” “Kills Bugs Inside and Out.” These products are intended to be shaken or sprayed over the width and breadth of indoor carpeting, and warn that you should wash your hands and clothes after use. They say nothing about the consequences of breathing these poisons for weeks or months; as is true for so many kinds of dust, indoor pesticides tend to linger in carpeting for a very long time without breaking down. Ditto for the aerosol flea “bombs,” meant to be set up in a sealed room until the entire space is fogged with pesticides. Users are advised to call poison control if the stuff got swallowed, but there are no ingredients listed for 96 percent of the contents. Here’s what is listed, labeled as “active ingredients”: linalool, piperonyl, pyrethrins. The last of these represented some of the pesticides the CDC had recently discovered “in much of the U.S. population.”

These chemicals are designed to kill insects living outside the bodies of dogs and cats. But as Albert Donnay pointed out, aerosolized chemicals also enter lungs. And once powders settle into carpeting, they end up on animal fur, adult feet, and infants’ hands—from whence, whether through skin absorption or inadvertent oral consumption, they also enter our bodies. These compounds include organophosphate and carbamate pesticides, chemicals designed to damage a bug’s nervous system.

And in people? While some effects on human health—such as vomiting or tremors—may be immediately apparent, other impacts are more pernicious. Childhood exposure to pesticides—both in the womb and during the first years after birth—has been linked to an increased risk of cancer and to increased risks of injury to both the developing brain and the nervous system. Pound for pound, one study reports, children are at far greater risk than adults “because they live and play close to the floor, breathe close to the ground and constantly put their fingers into their mouths.”

And finally we came to paint. Now, there may be some people who wouldn’t know a sealant from a caulk. I myself remain confused about the difference between lacquer and polyurethane. But everyone knows about paint. We coat our houses with it, inside and out. We spend a great deal of time thinking about texture (forget gloss or semigloss; now companies can set you up with paints that glow with reflected light, or shimmer like sprayed-on metal, or look for all the world like suede). We think about fashion (Sherwin-Williams now sells a paint called Recycled Glass.) Most of all, we think about color (Ralph Lauren boasts that it carries over sixty shades of white).

What we don’t think about, at least not too deeply, is what goes into the stuff we spread all over our walls and ceilings. Or what happens when we breathe it. Or when it breaks down and ends up in the dust in our rugs, which ends up, over time, in our skin, and our lungs, and our food. On the front of one can, I read: “Recommended for family rooms, children’s rooms and hallways.” On the back: Contains crystalline silica. Long-term effects: abrading or sanding “may release crystalline silica which has been shown to cause lung damage and cancer.”

Next to this was a can of interior semigloss paint that offered a block-lettered public health warning—not about itself, but about the old paint you might find yourself replacing: LEAD IS TOXIC. EXPOSURE TO LEAD DUST CAN CAUSE SERIOUS ILLNESS, SUCH AS BRAIN DAMAGE, ESPECIALLY IN CHILDREN. The label also noted, in smaller print: “This product contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects and other reproductive harm.” It also specified that the paint contained “VOC <50 g/l.” “VOC,” I guessed, meant “volatile organic compounds,” the stuff that people with multiple chemical sensitivity find particularly onerous. These compounds are released into the air, or “volatilized,” as paint is spread. But the number? Was that a good number or a bad number? And how was I supposed to know? (When I looked into it later, I found that a VOC level of below 50 grams per liter was actually pretty good. Nonetheless, the EPA notes, during and immediately after the application of paints and lacquers and thinners, levels of VOCs can be a thousand times stronger than background levels. Which is not so good.)

So the hardware section, as Albert Donnay could have told me, was plainly a major pipeline into our collective barrel of toxic chemicals. But at least most of the products made some effort to display their ingredients and to offer warnings, however unsettling and vague. The same could not be said of the next section Katherine and I visited, where we found many of the same ingredients we had seen in hardware, but without the warning on the labels. And these products were not meant to be applied with rubber gloves. They were meant to be slathered directly on your skin.

COSMETICS AND PERSONAL CARE

Walking down a cosmetics aisle, if you pay close enough attention, you can actually notice the smells changing with virtually every step you take. As Katherine and I moved from the fragrance section to the powders section to the lotions section, I could sense the changes with my eyes closed; I am not speaking metaphorically.

Not that your eyes are particularly helpful here. As I’ve mentioned, most labels are not exactly brimming with useful information. It was Katherine who noticed that the children’s bubble baths were marked “Keep Out of the Reach of Children.” This was a few steps down from a nail polish, boasting to be both “Hi Res” and “Hi Def,” that was packaged in a glass container with an ingredient list so microscopic that neither Katherine nor I could read a single word of it—except for “Caution: flammable.”

When I showed Katherine lotions called Velvet Tuberose and Decadent Amber, we agreed that people selling these things must have been thinking about sex toys or the names of their favorite strippers. Over and over, her eyebrows rose when she compared the marketing strategies of the skin care stuff targeted at women with that targeted at men. For women, it was all Satin Luxury, Glowing Touch, and Caress. For men: Snake Peel, Instinct, Dark Temptation, Phoenix, High Endurance. The ingredient lists were equally opaque; despite the lengthy enumeration of contents, it was impossible to tell what any of this stuff was made of. But in an ironic twist on a safety warning, Axe bath products marketed to men featured a silhouette on the back label of a man showering with not one but two women. The label cautioned, “The Axe Effect may result in, but is not limited to, unrelenting female attention and/or late nights.”

Katherine chuckled as she read it. (Interestingly, she noted, the Axe hair products featured a label showing a man with only one woman. It’s not clear why this would be. Perhaps monogamous men are more likely to wash their hair.)

At one point, Katherine pulled down a body lotion billed as containing “shea and cocoa butter”; the third ingredient, far ahead of shea and cocoa butter, was petroleum. She also found petroleum in the deodorants. She examined an “exfoliating body wash.” The stuff claimed to be made with “microbeads,” tiny bits of plastic that, along with a vigorous scrubbing, help slough off dead skin. When she turned the bottle over, she found that the wash’s second ingredient was petroleum. Was that what the microbeads were made of? Or were they made of the acrylonitrile/methacrylonitrile/methyl methacrylate copolymer? It was hard to tell. Either way—and regardless of the effect these bits of plastic might have on warm, damp skin—all I could think of were all those fish out there in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, swimming around in the countless trillion microbeads that end up flowing down the shower drain. And where these microbeads would end up, once those same fish were caught in someone’s fishing net. What goes around comes around.

As for the lotions that make the hair fall off your legs so you don’t have to shave, Katherine said she didn’t even want to know. All she could tell from the label was that they were toxic enough to merit a warning about getting the stuff too near your eyes, your nipples, or your genitals. “For a store that’s trying to sell to people who are trying to save money,” Katherine said, “there’s so much here that people just don’t need. There’s another way to save money: don’t buy anything.”

The cosmetics section was remarkable mostly for the radical shift in its marketing slogans. There were no “Unbeatable” price signs here. What there were instead were dozens upon dozens of photographs of beautiful, rich, toothy, bronzed celebrities. There were countless claims about products being “natural” (or, in some cases, “naturale”). Others boasted of their products’ “science,” its powers of “therapy” or “healing.” This was as true for the colognes as it was for the shampoos and hair colorings and nail polishes. If you believed the signs, this would be the healthiest section in the whole store.

Which, of course, is just the way the cosmetics industry wants you to see its products, and its marketing is plainly working. The average American applies some form of personal care product (toothpaste, shampoo, moisturizer, lipstick, nail polish) a dozen or more times a day; many of these products contain carcinogens like coal tar and 1,4-dioxane; neurotoxins like lead and mercury; and hormone disruptors like parabens. Fully one-third of women over eighteen in North America, Japan, and Europe (and 10 percent of men over forty) use some form of hair dye, which can contain formaldehyde. All told, the personal care industry sells some 6 billion products a year, for roughly $50 billion a year in revenue.

Do you know what’s in any of it? Do you have any idea what’s in your shampoo? How about your moisturizer? Your baby’s moisturizer? Another way of thinking about this: What do you think is in this stuff, and where are you getting your information?

For decades, the health effects of personal care products were of no concern. Newspaper and magazine advertisements in the 1950s urged women to buy Satura, a skin cream boasting that it contained hormones to “plump up skin” and “smooth tiny lines.” In the 1980s, ads in Essence magazine urged African-American women to buy Le Kair hair treatment with “Hormones Plus Vitamins,” and Hask Perm-Aid with Placenta.

But in recent years, researchers have been finding striking evidence that chemicals contained in all sorts of personal care products are altering hormones in both animals and humans. More confounding is the veil that surrounds the ingredients in these products. If the hardware department is where you find the most explicit warnings about toxic chemicals, there is probably no section in a big box store with less information than cosmetics, even though you can find some of the same chemicals at work. Nail hardeners can contain formaldehyde, used as a resin and preservative, and toluene, a clear, colorless liquid that acts as a solvent and helps suspend colored pigments in the polish. Like phthalates, which can be found in everything from soaps to baby lotions, toluene is a possible reproductive and developmental toxicant. And the growing use in cosmetics of so-called nanoparticles—chemicals that are a thousand times smaller than a human cell—is raising a new set of eyebrows. Researchers at the University of Delaware recently found that synthetic nanoparticles are readily taken up by plants (in this case, by pumpkins), can accumulate in their tissues, and can thus readily enter the food chain. Of particular concern seem to be zinc oxide and titanium oxide, used to make products like sunscreen transparent.

A couple of years ago, after leaving a classroom discussion of toxic chemicals in consumer products, a female student of mine went home and wrote a journal entry about looking at her cosmetics shelf with new eyes. Of particular interest was a bottle of nail polish that boasted that it was a “formaldehyde and toluene free formula.” She had just learned that the European Union had recently banned some 1,100 toxic chemicals from personal care products and that in the United States, the Environmental Working Group had launched Skin Deep, the world’s largest database of chemicals in these products. The database, she discovered, had found that one-third of personal care products contain at least one ingredient linked to cancer; 45 percent contained an ingredient that can be harmful to reproduction or child development; 60 percent contain chemicals that can mimic estrogen or disrupt other hormones; and 89 percent of the ingredients have never been assessed for safety by the Cosmetic Ingredient Review panel.

The young woman found some startling information in the Skin Deep database. Her shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, mascara, eyeliner, and toothpaste were all listed as having “moderate” hazard levels. Her conditioner, for example, contained ingredients that had been linked with cancer and immunotoxicity and were known to linger in body tissue for “years or even decades after exposure.”

“Before then, I had never once thought that doing something as seemingly innocent as getting my hands ready for spring could be introducing carcinogens into my body,” she wrote about her toluene-free nail polish. “Had it not been for the label stating that it was absent, I would never have realized that it is, in fact, present in other nail polishes. The fact that I know nothing about toluene’s effects on the human body does nothing to calm my nerves, and looking at the list of all the ingredients in the polish, none of which I recognized, only made me more anxious.”

Research is building that breast growth is starting as much as two or three years earlier than in the past, and that menarche begins as much as a year earlier. There has been a big jump in the number of girls developing secondary sex characteristics by the age of eight, and environmental estrogens may be causing this change. Other studies have shown troubling signs of early-onset puberty in African-American girls, possibly from the use of hair products that contain estrogen or placenta, products that are left unregulated by the FDA. (African-American women are less likely than white women to get breast cancer, but at any age they are more likely to die from it.) In May 2009, CBS News reported on a girl in La Mirada, California, who underwent a mastectomy as part of her fight against breast cancer. She was ten years old. “I feel like she’s been robbed of her childhood,” the girl’s mother said. “It’s beyond shocking. You know. She’s ten. She has breast cancer. It’s unheard of.”

And these troubles can arise even at levels of exposure well below accepted norms. In 2000, an independent panel convened by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program found evidence that some endocrine disruptors can affect animal body functions “well below the ‘no effect’ levels determined by normal testing.”

All of this, Theo Colburn and her colleagues write, suggests that over the last fifty years, “synthetic chemicals have become so pervasive in the environment and in our bodies that it is no longer possible to define a normal, unaltered human physiology. There is no clean, uncontaminated place, nor any human being who hasn’t acquired a considerable load of persistent hormone-disrupting chemicals. In this experiment, we are all guinea pigs.”

This notion of a hormone-disrupting chemicals being inescapable felt truer in the big box store than anywhere I had ever been. They were not just in the products themselves; they were literally in the air we were breathing. Throughout our visit, Katherine and I had not just been astonished by what we’d found on the labels; our noses and our throats had been assaulted by the stuff. Especially that “lavender” smell. We needed to find out where it was coming from.

At first, we had been sure it was coming from the shampoo aisle, but that was more a symphony of “mixed-berry,” “tropical fruit,” and “coconut.” Then we figured it was coming from the home cleaning aisle, but that proved more a source of lemon mixed with chlorine. Finally—at this point I felt like a bloodhound, my nose in the air—we discovered the Lavender Epicenter, right near the intersection of three departments: pets, home, and kitchen. It came in waves I could practically see. Lavender body washes. Lavender foot washes. Lavender potpourri, dried (to be placed in a bowl in a bathroom). Lavender potpourri, liquid (to be placed in a pot on the stove and simmered). Lavender laundry soap. And, most overwhelming of all, lavender-scented candles.

It was here that I almost vomited.

On a shelf of deodorizers. I found a fist-sized air freshener that comes equipped with a motion sensor: you attach the thing to a wall, and it squirts fragrance into the air whenever someone walks into the room. I was marveling at the product’s list of warnings (call poison control if ingested; beware of electric shock) when Katherine snuck up behind me and asked me to take a whiff. She held up a glassed-in candle and removed the lid under my nose. What came out was a blast of “peach cobbler” so overpowering that I gagged and almost lost it.

Good God, I said. Get that away from me. I thought of people with multiple chemical sensitivity and how this place, for them, would represent a rather deep circle of hell.

Katherine laughed. She showed me another product, this one an aerosol can of “home-made apple pie.” No need to fill your house with “heaping barrels of brightly colored spices,” the label said. “Just give it a spray or two!”

As I tried to collect myself, Katherine pondered the meaning of these smells. Selling a product that uses a combination of chemicals to make people imagine a “peach cobbler” or a “home-made apple pie” was selling nostalgia to people too busy or too overwhelmed to get the smell the old-fashioned way: by baking a peach cobbler or an apple pie.

“It’s pretty sad that you have to spray the smells that you crave,” she said. “What do these smells represent? That Grandma is home taking care of you. These things are marketed to overworked people. It’s all so nostalgic—for cleaning, and cooking, and comfort and security. Why bake an apple pie when you can spray an apple pie?”

Some of these products, especially the lavender aerosol sprays, were marketed specifically to “deodorize” the home. This is also true of the various sprays on display in the pets section, where the shelves are also full of deodorizers and cleanup products. (I’d like to tell you what was in these products, but none listed a full set of ingredients. The best I can say is that some of them featured a “pleasant cut-grass scent.”) Not to state the obvious, but “deodorizing” is one thing these products do not do. What they do is replace—or overlay—one set of smells with another, and the new smells, it turns out, come freighted with petrochemicals and, especially, phthalates.

There they were again: phthalates, the family of chemical compounds added to everything from shower curtains to baby pacifiers to crinkly disposable drinking-water bottles. But phthalates are also added to cosmetics, soaps, and shampoos—almost anything containing “fragrance.” In short, phthalates are everywhere. The Natural Resources Defense Council recently examined fourteen air fresheners and found phthalates in twelve of them, including in products advertised as “all natural” or “unscented.” More confounding, not a single one had phthalates on its list of ingredients.

Nearly 5 million metric tons of phthalates are consumed by industry every year. For industry, this has been a boon. “The fact of life is that phthalates are a remarkably useful product that … allow people without a lot of money to have a first-world lifestyle,” Marian Stanley, manager of the Phthalate Esters Panel for the American Chemistry Council, has said. “The risk is a theoretical risk. If you had the smallest baby with the most exposure for the longest time, you theoretically have a risk. Practically, do you have a risk? Nobody’s seen it yet.”

This doesn’t mean that scientists aren’t looking. Researchers at the University of Washington and the Centers for Disease Control tested 163 wet diapers from infants born between 2000 and 2005. Then they asked the mothers if they used powders, creams, baby wipes, shampoos, or lotions. Then they asked how many hours a day their babies played with soft plastic toys, teethers, or pacifiers. All 163 diapers contained urine contaminated with at least one phthalate, and more than 80 percent of them were contaminated with at least seven. More than half the mothers said they had used baby shampoo, and more than 30 percent said they had used baby lotion or diaper cream. Infant exposure to phthalates was “widespread,” the study reported, and “strongest in infants who were younger than eight months.” Especially for people who thought children got exposed to phthalates only by sucking on plastic toys, this was troubling news: infants under eight months were apparently exposed to phthalates through their skin. This was particularly worrisome given the size of baby bodies: a palm full of body lotion is a bigger dose for an infant that it is for an adult. And since infants have not fully developed their metabolic systems, they are not as equipped to shed toxins as adults.

The researchers expressed their frustration that figuring out which products contain phthalates is difficult in part because manufacturers do not specify phthalate contents in the ingredient list. “Parents may not be able to make informed choices until manufacturers are required to list phthalate contents of products,” the study concluded. “If parents want to decrease exposures, then we recommend limiting the amount of infant care products used and not to apply lotions or powders unless indicated for a medical reason.”

You can see where this is going. Phthalates are used in an unimaginable array of consumer products; people are exposed to phthalates from the moment they apply perfume in the morning to when they take the plastic wrap from the refrigerated leftovers to when they slide into their cars or spray pesticides on their lawns. Phthalates migrate; they end up in our bodies. As with flame retardants, the trouble with phthalates is that they do not bind chemically to the products to which they are added; instead, they leach out into the air as dust, or into liquid, if they are used in things like plastic bottles. Once ambient, phthalates are quick to find their way into our skin, our lungs, and our food. With all these pipes coming in, it’s no wonder our barrels fill up fast.

In state after state, phthalates show up in every person who gets tested for them. In the Maine body burden study, phthalates were found in all thirteen participants; three phthalates, including those used to make car interiors, shower curtains, and personal care products, were found in more than 75 percent of all Americans who had been tested for them. In a “Pollution in People” study done in Washington State, ten out often participants were contaminated with phthalates. In Oregon, the numbers were the same: ten out of ten people had three phthalates in their bodies. Seven people had six.

In September 2000, CDC researchers went looking for seven types of phthalates—those used in detergents, cosmetics, lubricating oils, and solvents—in the bodies of 289 people. They found at least four in 75 percent of the people tested. But a more revealing statistic emerged when the CDC broke the data down by age and gender. Perhaps because of their use of “perfumes, nail polishes, and hair sprays,” women between the ages of twenty and forty had exposure levels five times greater than the average person. “From a public health perspective,” the report said, “these data provide evidence that phthalate exposure is both higher and more common than previously suspected.”

A study of 85 people published in June 2005 linked fetal exposure to phthalates to structural differences in the genitalia of male babies. Researchers measured phthalate levels in pregnant women and later examined their infant and toddler sons. For pregnant women who had the highest phthalate exposure, their baby sons, on average, had smaller genitalia and were more likely to have incompletely descended testicles. Most striking was that these boys had a shorter perineum, the space between the genitalia and the anus, which scientists call the AGD, for anogenital distance. In rodents, a shortened perineum in males is closely correlated with phthalate exposure. A shortened AGD is also one of the most sensitive markers of demasculinization in animal studies.

Strangely enough, federal guidelines require that phthalates be listed on ingredient labels for things like nail polish, but not when they make up part of the “fragrance” or the “secret formula” for many other products, such as perfumes and hair mousse. And as so often is the case, federal regulation of personal care products seems hamstrung at best. The journalist Nena Baker, using the Freedom of Information Act, discovered that the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Cosmetics and Colors employs only thirty people and has an annual budget of $3.4 million. In Baker’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, she writes, the city’s office that controls traffic signals has forty employees and a budget of $22 million.

So, once again, we are left with companies policing themselves. If you turn to the website cosmeticsinfo.org, whose name makes it sound like a neutral party, you will have to work to find out that it is in fact sponsored by the cosmetics industry. Much of what you will read there trumpets the strong regulatory relationship the industry has with the FDA. “Right now in laboratories across the country and around the world,” the website reports, “experts in chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, molecular modeling, engineering, formulation and toxicology are at work stringently testing and assessing ingredients and formulas for safety, quality, stability, purity, skin efficacy and performance.”

Such rhetoric does not always seem reassuring, either for individual consumers or for the 400,000 people who work in nail salons, where the fumes—not only phthalates but toluene, formaldehyde, acetone, and other volatile compounds—are in the air all day, every day. Nail salons have grown 374 percent in the last decade; in 2005, there were some 57,000 nail salons in the United States, employing just under 400,000 workers—95 percent of whom were women, and 57 percent of whom were “women of color,” including many Vietnamese. The customers at these salons are also mostly women—about 95 percent. So what you have, in both employees and customers, is an enormous group of women of childbearing age, all exposed to toxic chemicals thought to damage the reproductive systems of developing children. OSHA and states are supposed to enforce compliance with work safety regulations, but in California, for example, there are only 15 inspectors for 9,000 salons.

My near explosion in the air freshener aisle—and the headache that was not going away—made it pretty clear that I needed a break. I located a bathroom, found a water fountain, and took a long, deep drink. The bathroom itself was pretty nice, I have to admit. It had no exterior doors, which I have always taken to be a good public health measure—no doors means no door handles, which means no spreading of germs. It had hands-free faucets and soap dispensers, another good sign. But especially given the context of my journey, the place was—how else can I say this?—incredibly smelly. Or perhaps I should say it was incredibly “deodorized.” Either way, the bathroom was overwhelmingly saturated with the smells of detergents, floor cleaners, and—I’m here to tell you—“lavender.”

HOME

After I pulled myself together, Katherine and I decided to take a look at the children’s pajamas. Well-meaning relatives had been giving our kids synthetic pajamas as gifts since the day they were born, and we had never once stopped to think what went into making them. Why would we? What could possibly be worrisome about a pair of foot pajamas with polar bears on them? Sure, somewhere in the back of my mind I knew the things were “flame resistant,” but did I ever wonder what that meant, or if these chemicals could somehow make it into our bodies’ tissues? I can’t say that I did. It’s not like our kids were eating their pajamas. Katherine, a bit more suspicious than I, usually bought cotton pajamas rather than synthetic ones. She knew she was buying the right ones because the pajama labels would say “not intended for sleepwear.” I was never that clever.

In a big box store, the kids’ pajamas are arranged according to their tie-ins to movies and television shows. In the girls’ section, you can choose from Dora the Explorer, a variety of Disney princesses, and Winnie the Pooh. Boys are offered an even wider selection: Thomas the Tank Engine, Spider-Man, SpongeBob, Buzz Lightyear, and any number of sporty-themed pajamas (though none with any professional team affiliation, since these are presumably protected by licensing agreements). So what does a parent see? A familiar face (Dora, Cinderella, SpongeBob); a cheap price; and a tag, typically in block letters, reading: “Flame Resistant Sleepwear: Sleepwear should be flame resistant or snug fitting to meet U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission sleepwear requirements.” The federal Consumer Product Safety Commission, it turns out, requires that fabrics used to make children’s pajamas “must self-extinguish after exposure to a small open flame.” Sounds pretty good, right?

You’ll find similar tags in the home furnishings aisle, attached to the mattresses and cushions of the swivel chairs. Read the fine print of the pamphlet that comes with a new computer or a new television, and you’ll likely discover the same. Although you sometimes may not. Even when products are made with flame retardants, it’s not always possible to tell. When my wife and I replaced an old mattress recently, I yanked the label off the old box spring (the one warning that it should not be removed “under penalty of law” by anyone except the consumer). The tag was stamped with almost illegibly small print; when I looked for an ingredient list, all I could find was that it was made of “100% SYN FIB PAD/UNKN KIND.” This was not exactly helpful information.

So what’s the story with all these flame retardants? Are they beneficial?

When I was a kid, my youngest brother and I slept in a bunk bed on the second floor of our house. One night, asleep on the top bunk, I awoke to a noxious smell coming from below. I leaned over and saw that my brother had fallen asleep with a reading light still burning hot under his blanket. Acrid black smoke rose from the cheap foam mattress. I leapt out of bed, jostled my brother awake, and—in a move that remains part of family lore—heaved the entire mattress out the second-story window. The next morning, my parents—who had slept through the whole ordeal—looked outside and saw the mattress, with a nasty black hole in the middle, out on the lawn. As designed, it had smoked but had not burst into flames.

Did the flame retardants save our lives? Who can say? According to the National Academy of Sciences, each year about 90 people, most of them children, die in fires in upholstered furniture that were started with matches, cigarette lighters, or candles. Another 440 people are injured, and property losses amount to $50 million annually.

Some say that flame retardant chemicals save lives. Others say that foam cushions are among the most toxic objects in a home. It comes down to costs and benefits.

People have been inventing ways to prevent the spread of fire since, well, since people first discovered fire. Over the last couple of centuries, fire prevention has fallen in large part to the chemical bromine. Since its discovery in a salt marsh in France in 1826, bromine—a reddish liquid with three times the density of water—has been used to interfere with the oxidation reaction that causes a material to burn. A couch or a pillow made with untreated foam will burn. Treated with brominated flame retardants, it will only smolder. Its name reflects the way bromine smells: bromos is Greek for “stench.” For more than thirty years, companies have combined bromine with oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon to make flame retardant compounds known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs. The most common of these are known by their nicknames: penta, octa, and deca. Though they were banned in Europe in 2004 (and discontinued in the United States soon afterward), penta and octa were used for decades—penta to make blown polyurethane foam for furniture cushions, octa to make injection-molded plastic housings for computers, televisions, telephones, and automobile parts—and products containing these compounds are still very much among us. Deca, which is still being manufactured, is also used for high-impact polystyrene resins for electronic equipment, as well as in upholstery fabrics and plastic furniture and toys.

These additives are not incidental: flame retardants can make up as much as 30 percent of overall material weight, and they have become the second-largest class of additives used by the plastics industry. Penta can account for as much as 30 percent of a cushion, for example. As much as 15 percent of the plastic casing around your television is probably made of deca, as are as much as 27 percent of your upholstery fabrics.

Here’s the problem: the chemical structure of these compounds closely resembles the structure of far more notorious compounds like dioxins and furans—the acutely toxic chemicals created during the incineration of plastics—and of PCBs, the fire-resistant fluids found in electrical transformers that were considered so toxic they were banned thirty years ago. They’re also structurally similar to thyroxine, the growth-regulating hormone created by the thyroid gland; scientists believe that once they begin circulating in the body, flame retardants may block the movement of thyroid hormones. This, in turn, can affect both physical growth and energy levels and disrupt prenatal development. Thyroid hormones are responsible for regulating many essential metabolic functions and are extremely important in promoting normal brain development in infants. The disruption of thyroid-hormone regulation has frequently been associated with permanent behavior problems and brain damage. Rodents exposed to the chemicals showed an increased risk for liver and pancreatic tumors, and for thyroid cancer.

Flame retardants are one of the most common of a group of chemicals known as persistent organic pollutants. POPs are troublesome not only because of their toxicity but also because they are hardy and because they can travel. Since the compounds do not chemically bind to plastics, they are prone to “migrating,” or leaching out as dust. Wipe your fingers along the baseboard of your house, and look at your fingers; you’ll find flame retardants. Vaccum your carpets, and you’ll find them in the dust. You’ll also find them in the lint in your dryer. Researchers have found increased levels of flame retardants in the air of office buildings, especially during business hours. Once thrown away, cushions and computers and television sets will, eventually, begin to break down. But their chemical components, apparently, do not. After being crushed in a landfill and exposed to sun and rain, flame retardants, like everything else, turn to dust. Not a little dust, a lot of dust: each year, 1.75 million tons of carpeting are thrown away. From there, it’s into the air and the soil and the water. And from there, it’s into our lungs, into the food chain, and into us.

So there’s a cost.

As Katherine and I stood pawing through the racks of children’s pajamas, I had to wonder. Flame retardant compounds are built into products. So why don’t they stay there? Do I need to worry that my kids are wrapped in pajamas treated with these chemicals, and are laying their heads on mattresses made with them, and are watching commercials for these very same products on televisions made with them? Suddenly, all those familiar cartoon faces staring out at me from the pajama racks seemed slightly less inviting.

Toxic flame retardants were first identified in living organisms in 1981, when they were found in fish samples from western Sweden. Since then, they have been found all over the world: in birds, fish, shellfish, amphibians, marine mammals, sewage sludge, sediments, air samples, meat, dairy products, and even vegetables. They have been found in North America and Europe and Japan. They have been found in the Arctic. A Canadian report issued in 2002 found that contamination had become widespread even in wilderness areas; levels were doubling every two to five years in lake trout, herring gull eggs, and beluga whales in the St. Lawrence River estuary.

The quantity of flame retardants detected in people and wildlife appears to have doubled in North America every four to five years for three decades, a pace unmatched by any other contaminant. The chemicals turn up in human blood, fatty tissue, and umbilical cord blood in every region where scientists have conducted studies. In many areas, concentrations in humans have been increasing exponentially.

But it wasn’t until flame retardants started showing up in breast milk that people began to pay attention.

Flame retardants are “fat-soluble,” which means the body tends to store them in fat tissue. They are thus prone to stick around in a person’s body longer than something that is, say, “water-soluble” and that the body readily excretes. So when researchers go searching for flame retardants, they tend to look for them in places like the blubber of seals or the breast milk of women. In 2000, Swedish scientists reported that flame retardants had become widespread in women’s bodies. The study surveyed nearly thirty years of research into the presence of long-banned industrial chemicals like PCBs and pesticides like DDT and dieldrin in the breast milk of healthy, nonsmoking women living in Stockholm. Some of what they found was encouraging: over time, it seemed, the presence of several of the compounds had decreased after they were banned in the 1970s. An infant’s exposure to banned organochlorine compounds in 1997 was one-tenth what it had been in 1972, the report found.

But when it came to flame retardants, the findings were far more ominous.

The levels of flame retardants in people’s bodies had doubled every five years, and were now roughly fifty times greater than in the early 1970s.

As public concern grew, the Swedish government reacted quickly, moving to prohibit the use of PBDEs in late 1999. Simultaneously, large Swedish companies like IKEA and Volvo moved to phase them out as well.

The effects? A follow-up study found that from 1997 to 2000, PBDE levels in Swedish breast milk had dropped 30 percent.

In just three years.

So how flame retardant are American breasts? It turns out that American women have breast milk that is considerably more contaminated than European women, yet regulators have done considerably less to address it. In 2004, a team of researchers led by Arnold Schecter of the University of Texas Science Center studied breast milk taken from forty-seven nursing women in Dallas and Austin, Texas. They discovered the highest levels of flame retardants ever reported—ten to one hundred times higher than levels found in Europe. They found elevated levels in women with no known occupational exposure. The women were white, African-American, and Hispanic, and the research team found no apparent difference in flame retardant levels between those groups.

And if you think those women in Texas were contaminated, consider this: one year later, researchers examined tissue taken from fifty-two people who had undergone liposuction with a New York plastic surgeon. Since flame retardants tend to accumulate in fat tissue, it was not surprising that some would show up. But how much showed up was stunning. Most researchers find flame retardants in human blood and milk at levels between 4 and 400 parts per billion. A thirty-two-year-old man had levels of nearly 10,000 parts per billion. A twenty-three-year-old woman registered over 4,000 parts per billion. Linda Birnbaum, then the director of the EPA’s National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory, called the findings “a big shock.” And skinny people should take heed: since toxins can be diluted by greater quantities of fat, people with less fat may in fact have higher concentrations, the study said.

As you can see, once you start thinking about flame retardants, it’s a pretty quick jump from children’s pajamas and sofa cushions to breast tissue. But there’s another link in this chain that we need to think about, and that has to do with food. Studies in Japan and Europe have shown a link between flame retardant levels in women’s breast milk and the amount of fish in their diet. Farmed salmon turn out to have “significantly higher” levels of flame retardants than wild fish, likely because they are fed ground-up fish that are themselves contaminated. And since farmed salmon has become so popular, the risk of broad exposure to flame retardants continues to increase. In the last two decades, global consumption of salmon has risen from 27,000 tons to more than 1 million tons annually.

All of this news compelled Arnold Schecter and his team in Texas to push their shopping carts through three major supermarkets in Dallas and take a good, long look at thirty different kinds of food—mostly meat, fish, and dairy products. They found levels of flame retardants that were as much as twenty times higher than levels reported for food from Spain or Japan. They even found deca in soy infant formula; to the best of his knowledge, Schecter reported, this was the first time that a persistent synthetic toxin had ever been found in a vegetable product. How does soy formula get contaminated with flame retardants? Was the crop contaminated or did the formula get tainted when it was processed or by its packaging? If you’re a mother, does it matter?

And even if you feel confident that a single exposure to toxins in food will not cause you any problems, what do you say, walking through a big box store, when products containing these chemicals fill your shopping cart? How about a lifetime of shopping carts? And what happens when these chemicals, once inside you, mix with the chemicals you get exposed to from, say, your paint? Or your cosmetics? Or, more directly, when they simply release their toxins straight into your children’s mouths?

TOYS

Big box stores are frequently criticized for serving as the end point of a Chinese assembly line, and no section reinforces this idea as vividly as the toy department. But as Katherine and I made our way into the toy aisles, it occurred to me that this is not, in fact, the end of the story. All of this stuff—in the toy, home, and hardware departments, everywhere—will one day pass through our homes, end up in landfill or in the air, and begin breaking down. At least some of the ingredients will turn into airborne dust, or particles filtering up through the food chain, or molecules of volatilized aerosols, and will end up in our bodies. It’s just a matter of time. But somehow, the link between plastic toys and toxic chemicals seems particularly insidious—and, in recent years, particularly common.

We’ve all spent time in these aisles, flanked by plastic toys from floor to ceiling. In the store Katherine and I visited, virtually every duck, dinosaur, princess, and superhero was made out of plastic and had been manufactured in China. I’m not talking about a handful of toys in a small corner of the store. I’m talking about acres of toys. As in the pajama section, a sizable majority of the products were movie or television tie-ins: Star Wars, Batman, Ultimate Fighting action figures, Thomas the Tank Engine trains. Others were slightly more original. During our visit, Katherine looked at a product called the Pink Princess Stepstool Potty, which claimed to play four “royal” tunes as a “reward.” She looked bemused, but then her eyes darkened. Though we had never bought a musical toilet, we had offered our daughter rewards for learning to use the toilet. We had taken her to a store not unlike the one we were now in, and encouraged her to pick out a small toy. She had chosen a play umbrella. Some weeks later, rewarded again, she had picked out a pair of play gardening gloves. Six months later, both toys were recalled because they had been coated with lead paint. So much for enlightened parenting.

Just two years before our big box safari, the United States experienced what will, in some circles, be remembered as the Year of the Toxic Recall. In the spring of 2007, Chinese-made pet food was recalled because it contained melamine, a toxic synthetic used in cleaning products, plastics, fertilizer, and paint; it killed some four thousand American dogs and cats. In China, melamine found in baby formula and in chicken eggs killed four babies and sickened tens of thousands of others.

In May, almost a million tubes of Cooldent toothpaste imported from China were recalled because they contained diethylene glycol, a solvent, typically found in antifreeze, that can lead to kidney damage or liver disease. The toothpaste had been distributed to jails as well as to expensive hotels. No deaths were reported from the tainted toothpaste, but Panama claimed that hundreds of people died, and hundreds more were poisoned, after using cold medicine imported from China that contained the same chemical, diethylene glycol.

But the Year of the Toxic Recall will be remembered most for an astonishing number of contaminated toys. In June, a toy eyeball made in China was recalled after it was found to be filled with kerosene. Around the same time, RC2, the company that makes Thomas and Friends wooden railway toys, recalled 1.5 million toys because of lead contamination—a small number, really, when you consider that in the previous three years some 20 million pieces of children’s jewelry had been recalled because of lead. In August, Toys “R” Us offered customers refunds for about 1 million baby bibs, after tests showed that some, made in China, had also been contaminated with lead. A month after that, Target recalled 350,000 gardening toys because of lead, and Target and RC2 announced the recall of an additional 550,000 train toys, also because of lead contamination. RC2’s chief executive apologized for the “burden that recalls create for parents.”

A burden indeed. Most Americans thought lead had disappeared as a consumer threat thirty years ago, when it was phased out of gasoline and banished from things like paint. But in the Year of the Toxic Recall, this was just the beginning. The day after the Target recall, a group called the Center for Health, Environment and Justice tested fifty plastic toys and discovered high lead levels in eleven of them. Ten were made of PVC plastic, and three others contained “extremely high lead levels”: a Go Diego Go backpack, a Superfly monkey, and a pair of Circo Lulu boots. The backpack had lead levels nearly eight times the health standard set by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

“It’s absolutely astonishing to us that lead continues to be found in children’s toys, despite the fact that consumer and environmental groups have been warning the government about the issue for more than ten years,” a group spokesman said.

So what was going on? In 1973, car fumes were considered the biggest source of lead in the air, dust, and dirt. A year later, under provisions of the Clean Air Act, the EPA set a timetable to phase out lead in gas, and within a few years average lead levels in children plummeted. What was it doing, creeping back into our lives like a shadow from the past? A toy train is made of wood (or plastic) and a bit of rubber and metal, all held together with glue and painted green or blue or red. Pretty simple. But what’s in the plastic? What’s in the paint? What’s in the glue? What happens when the whole thing is in your child’s mouth? Do you have a right to know the answers to these questions?

Children put toys in their mouths that are “intended” to go in their mouths, and they put things in their mouths that are not intended to go in their mouths. What we’ve discovered, in recent years, is that neither category guarantees that a product is made without hazardous chemicals.

The hazards of lead have been described in medical writings for two thousand years, and concerns over lead-contaminated water were acknowledged in England as far back as the late 1700s. Lead is known to be toxic to the reproductive system, the liver and kidneys, and the immune system. Studies throughout the 1970s and 1980s showed that even low-level lead poisoning can cause neurological damage in the developing brain, and that children exposed to lead are at higher risk of developmental deficits. And although the link between lead and cancer in humans is less clear, lead has been shown to cause kidney and brain tumors in animals. Recent studies indicate that lead may increase the risk of cancer by compromising a cell’s ability to protect or repair its DNA that has been damaged by other chemical exposures.

Despite scientific warnings about lead that have been voiced for decades—or centuries, depending on how you look at it—lead poisoning continues to be a significant public health concern. In this country, lead has been banned from paint since 1977, but in the late 1980s 3 to 4 million children were still being poisoned each year. Getting rid of lead proved remarkably effective: during the phaseout of leaded gasoline, women of childbearing age experienced dramatic decreases in blood lead levels, and the number of children under six years old with elevated blood lead has declined from 88 percent in the 1970s to 1.6 percent in 2005.

These changes were hard-won, but lead remains a major problem, especially for the urban poor; African-Americans and other nonwhites have higher mortality rates at lower blood lead levels than whites. Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins who has been awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” for her work on lead poisoning, has been particularly critical of the lead industry. Big Lead, she writes, has been as sophisticated as Big Tobacco in deflecting blame for the health impact of its products—in this case, by blaming lead poisoning on “decaying cities,” and thus on the people who live in them. Lead poisoning is called a “social problem,” in which “mothers and children [are blamed] for causing lead poisoning: mothers for their neglectful or ignorant childrearing practices, and children for being stupid a priori and thus prone to eat lead paint,” Silbergeld writes. Some eight decades ago, Felix Wormser, the secretary of the Lead Industries Association, once referred to the poor, black, and lead-poisoned children of inner-city Baltimore as “little rodents.”

Dr. Silbergeld, whose work figured prominently in the push to ban lead from gasoline, will have none of this. “These defenses,” she has written, “avoid the obvious: only lead—not inadequate mothers, stupid children, or blighted cities—can cause lead poisoning.” And new studies back her up: in Ohio, researchers at the University of Cincinnati followed hundreds of poor urban children from childhood to maturity, and found that exposure to lead can lead to measurable losses in the very parts of the brain that control impulses, emotions, and judgment. The practical result? For every 5 microgram increase in a person’s blood lead level as an infant, their chance of being arrested for a violent offense later in life jumped 30 percent.

More recently, Dr. Silbergeld has found that lead can cause a number of problems for women in many stages of their adult lives, including pregnancy, breast-feeding, and during menopause. Lead, like calcium, is stored in the bones, and during these stages both can be released into the bloodstream. As a woman’s bones begin to thin during menopause, her blood lead level can rise as much as 25 percent, causing a rise in blood pressure, diminished cognitive skills, and declining kidney function. Men can suffer from leaching lead as well; studies have shown that men with higher blood lead levels have lower scores in manual dexterity, decision making, and verbal skills. Other research has begun asking whether early exposure to lead might worsen the cognitive decline associated with aging.

Yet during the Year of the Toxic Recall, it wasn’t just mothers in cities who were worried about lead poisoning. It was everyone. If American laws had removed lead from paint and gasoline but we were buying our toys from a country with less regulatory muscle than our own, had we traded one peril for another? For a child, the danger of lead paint is the same, after all, whether the paint is flaking off a windowsill or sucked off a toy train.

Here, at least in part, is what happened. In just the last decade, imports of Chinese consumer products nationwide have surged from $62 billion to $246 billion. Nearly 20 percent of the consumer products for sale in the country today are Chinese-made, compared to 5 percent in 1997. China now makes roughly 80 percent of the toys sold in the United States, and the toy companies that sell them here are largely—does this sound familiar?—self-regulated. A month after the recall, RC2 launched a “Multi-Check Safety System” to reassure consumers that the company’s products were safe. This would include greater scrutiny of its manufacturing partners, frequent lab tests of paint, and random plant inspections. “Going forward, the truest measure of our success is and always will be the trust parents place in our products,” the company reported on its website. “We are working very hard to preserve and strengthen that trust. And, we hope that you and other parents recognize that our products have been subjected to intense internal scrutiny and testing and are the safer for it.”

In the Frequently Asked Questions section on its own website, the company posted this: “In the United States, toys and other articles intended for use by children are required to meet a regulatory standard for lead (16 CFR, Section 1303) established by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1977. The standard requires the concentration of ‘total lead’ in any children’s product not to exceed 600 parts per million (PPM). In addition, the American Society for Testing & Materials (ASTM) has published a voluntary consensus standard (ASTM Standard F963-07) that establishes a 90-PPM maximum for what’s called ‘soluble lead.’ While compliance with this standard is not obligatory, most U.S. manufacturers, including RC2, take steps to ensure that their products comply with this standard as well as with the mandatory standard for total lead.”

Do you find this reassuring? Can you even tell what it means? Are you heartened or anxious to learn that products are subjected only to “internal scrutiny” and that federal standards are “not obligatory”? Do you consider the list of benchmarks—the ASTM’s standards for PPMs—enlightening or perplexing? It’s easy to understand why a manufacturer might feel comfortable with a “voluntary consensus standard” on toxic chemicals. But how about consumers? And what is the ASTM, anyway?

These thoughts had just begun to form in my mind when, during our walk through the toy section, I was startled by manic laughter coming from a shelf just below my knee. When I looked to see what was making such a racket, I noticed the spinning, cackling head of a “Royal Giggles Cinderella.” The laughter did what it was apparently supposed to do: Katherine picked the toy up.

“Made in China,” she said. “Let’s see if it has an ASTM label. Yep, there it is: ‘Conforms to ASTM F963.’

“I always look for the ASTM label when I buy toys for our kids, or for other kids’ birthdays,” she said.

“What does that label mean?” I asked.

“To be honest, I don’t really know,” Katherine said. “I figured if a toy qualified for the label, it must be safe. Now I’m pretty sure that most of the toys I bought were later recalled.”

A few hours later, I looked at the ASTM website and found that it was once known as the American Society for Testing and Materials. Formed a century ago to address faulty tracks in the nation’s growing railroad system, the ASTM is now “one of the largest voluntary standards development organizations in the world.” The group serves as a “trusted source” for setting production standards for an unimaginable array of industrial materials and consumer products. ASTM F963, to which the cackling Cinderella conforms, “relates to possible hazards that may not be recognized readily by the public and that may be encountered in the normal use for which a toy is intended or after reasonably foreseeable abuse.” If I would like to order the full fifty-six-page list of standards for this kind of product, I was informed, I could do so for $60.

What federal oversight there is for toys—and it isn’t much—is offered by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a beleaguered regulatory body that, ever since it was created by Congress in 1972, has been seen as an onerous bureaucratic obstacle by manufacturers and business groups. Until last year, it hadn’t adopted any major regulations in nearly two decades. The staff in 2008 was just four hundred workers—half what it had been in the 1980s. Charged with monitoring the unimaginably wide conveyor belt of goods coming into this country every year (in 2007 it was worth $614 billion) is a staff of—wait for it—fifteen people.

Not only that, but in the two years prior to the Year of the Toxic Recall, the Bush administration cut the budget and the number of inspectors overseeing the country’s vast network of ports, warehouses, and stores. The commission’s shrinking budget was just $62 million in 2007, even though the agency regulates an industry that sells $1.4 trillion worth of toys, tools, and televisions every year. The Food and Drug Administration, with a $2 billion budget, spends nearly twice as much monitoring the safety of animal feed and drugs. All told, the CPSC has just 81 field inspectors, who work out of their homes, compared with a network of field offices with 133 employees in 2002. Among their missions? Oversee tens of billions of dollars’ worth of toys and other consumer products sold in the country each year. Here’s what that looks like: in Los Angeles–area ports, through which 15 million truck-sized containers move a year, a single agency inspector, working two or three days a week, spot-checks incoming shipments.

Here’s what else it looks like: when The New York Times sent a reporter to the agency’s product-testing lab, which operates out of a former missile-defense radar station in Gaithersburg, Maryland, he found a single lab worker using a magnifying glass and a mechanical stopwatch to help conduct a fabric flammability experiment—the same equipment she had used for three decades. The toy laboratory, down the hall, was an office so cramped that the only space dedicated to a drop test to see if toys will break into small pieces and cause a choking hazard was the spare space behind the office door. “This is the toy lab for all of America—for all of the United States government!” said Robert L. Hundemer, the one agency employee who routinely tests toys, as he held his arms up in the air. “We do what we can.”

In the absence of adequate disclosure by industries or oversight by government regulators, some of the most dramatic recent reporting on toxic products has been done by several of the country’s leading newspapers, which have in the toxic chemicals story a chance to do what newspapers have traditionally done best: shine a light on information that is usually kept in the shadows. This is a fact you either find reassuring, if you are an old-fashioned believer in the critical role the press plays in a democracy, or deeply depressing, if you consider the speed with which newspapers are shrinking, laying off reporters, and going out of business altogether.

Wherever newspaper reporters bothered to look, they saw toxic chemicals. And when they turned these products over, they saw China.

In the middle of the Year of the Toxic Recall, Jane Kay set out to look into toxic chemicals for the San Francisco Chronicle (a paper that itself was recently losing a million dollars a week in 2008 and is in danger of closing). Kay picked a selection of sixteen common baby toys, had them tested for phthalates and bisphenol A (BPA), and found some startling results. A rubber ducky sold at Walgreens contained a carcinogenic form of phthalate known as DEHP at thirteen times the city’s health limit. The face of a Goldberger Fuzzy Fleece baby doll contained one phthalate at twice the health limit. The ring on a Baby Einstein rattle contained BPA, as did a Walgreens-brand baby bottle decorated with colorful fish and the plastic covers on two Random House waterproof books (Elmo Wants a Bath and Dr. Seuss’s One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish). The books also contained phthalates.

Around this time—November 2007—the Chicago Tribune began running a series of stories on dangerous children’s products that would win the paper the year’s Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Reporters for the Tribune tested some eight hundred children’s toys from major city retailers, supermarkets, and discount outlets, and discovered that many of the stores routinely sold toys contaminated by lead paint—some with levels more than ten times the government safety limit. Tests done at the University of Iowa found a fourteen-inch-tall Godzilla with lead levels of 4,500 parts per million, more than seven times the federal and state legal limits. There were twenty-nine recalls of children’s products because of lead in October 2007 alone—the highest monthly total since the Consumer Product Safety Commission was founded in the 1970s, the paper reported. The “vast majority” of the toys had been made in China.

The Tribune found that even award-winning toys, like colored blocks sold by the Baby Einstein company, had lead levels more than twenty times the Illinois safety limit, which, along with California’s, is among the nation’s strictest. An inflatable yellow disk showed lead levels twenty-seven times higher than the state limits. A Christmas figurine sold at Walgreens, the nation’s largest drugstore chain, had red paint with lead levels eight times the state limit. Yet several toys considered unsafe by state standards were considered safe by federal standards, because of different regulations for lead used in vinyl products.

All this news—again, prompted in large part not by voluntary disclosure on the part of industry but through research done by reporters laboring away in a dying newspaper industry—finally led, in 2008, to some important changes in consumer product safety regulations. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act bans lead and a handful of phthalates from children’s toys; requires toys to be tested by third-party laboratories before being sold; increases the CPSC’s oversight budget; and has created a searchable database of consumer complaints about a product’s safety. The database was a particularly contentious point; in the past consumers had been forced to file Freedom of Information Act requests just to get their hands on this information, and companies could block their requests.

During the back-and-forth, industry giants got some concessions. The conglomerate Mattel, Inc.—which in the last few years has recalled more than 14 million toys for, among other things, lead paint—convinced Congress to allow large toy makers to test their own products, rather than submitting them to independent labs. Once again, consumers will be left to trust in corporate self-policing.

The Mattel Loophole, continuing the American tradition of industry self-regulation, remains in place. And the law is full of real-world problems. There are plenty of other phthalates still available for use in children’s toys, and there are still plenty of products—plastic shoes, for example—that are not considered toys, and are thus not covered. The law does not apply to jewelry as long as the jewelry is not “intended” for children under twelve. In other words, a plastic ring marketed to thirteen-year-olds is not covered, though it stands an equally strong chance of ending up in the mouth of a baby. And the law doesn’t apply to plastic packaging (plastic bags, bubble wrap), which, as any parent knows, can be every bit as intriguing to a child as the product itself. And play cosmetics—commonly made with phthalates—are covered only if they are packaged with toys. If the cosmetics are sold separately, they are subject to completely different regulations, overseen by the FDA. Which, as we have learned, means they are not covered at all.

THE KITCHEN

Of all the sections in the big box store, none got Katherine more worked up than the “food” aisles. I put “food” in quotation marks because every last bit of it—with the exception of some quarts of milk and a few dozen eggs—had been as processed as any piece of plastic in the store. Aisle after aisle was stuffed with soft drinks and snack cakes, cookies and potato chips, Pop-Tarts and doughnuts and ice cream. Even the few “ingredients” for sale—five-pound bags of sugar and bottles of corn syrup—seemed to be marketed at people trying to create processed foods at home.

“It’s like a five-year-old went into a food store and waved a magic wand,” Katherine said.

The parallels between the food section and the rest of the store were hard to miss, and raised difficult questions. If you are what you eat, this thinking goes—if you are what you put in your body—then aren’t you also what you put on your body? Or what, in your home, you use to surround your body? In another parallel with the food industry, a discussion of the products sold in big box stores inevitably brings up questions of class. Like organic foods, nontoxic products tend to be more expensive. Does this make them an indulgence available only to the wealthy? Is it reasonable to expect people to spend more money on nontoxic products when they can get similar products cheaper in a big box store? By extension, is it fair to criticize a business that caters—first, last, and always—to people trying to save money?

But what if the question is asked another way? What are the ethics of limiting a person’s consumer choices to products made with unhealthy ingredients? If someone living in a poor city neighborhood can choose only between eating at a fast food restaurant and from a convenience store, their chances of becoming obese and diabetic skyrocket. Is that a fair trade? So what do we say about the impact on people’s health from the myriad products for sale in a big box store? Take, for example, nonstick cookware. Of all the brands pushing their products, only one line boasted of its green bona fides. “No PFOA. No lead. No cadmium,” the label on one pan claimed. As interesting as the claim was (it was, after all, one of the few products in the entire store that specifically claimed not to be made with toxic chemicals), the packaging could not help but make a shopper wonder about what had gone into the other brands on the shelf. If this pan wasn’t made with heavy metals or PFOAs (the so-called Teflon chemicals that were killing lovebirds in Maine), what did that say about all the other pans? Were they made with them? And if those pans were made with heavy metals or PFOAs, and this one was bragging that it wasn’t, did that mean that those pans were somehow dangerous? And if you only had a few dollars to spend, which one would you choose?

The toxic chemicals associated with food preparation have received considerable attention in recent years, and I’m not talking about the pesticides sprayed on vegetables. I’m a pretty strict consumer (and grower) of organic produce, so my concern here was not about what gets sprayed on my food. My concern was about how food gets packaged.

Katherine is a fine cook, and we both do everything we can to eat as locally and organically as we can. In Maryland, thankfully, this is pretty easy. Seven months of the year we get fresh, organic produce from a local organic farm. We have a modest-sized vegetable garden of our own, which produces an array of heirloom tomatoes, collard greens, okra, and peas. But winter is tough. In winter, we turn to canned vegetables.

One of Katherine’s favorite dishes involves a homemade tomato sauce (the secret is in the shredded carrots). In cooler months, when our garden is moribund, she typically uses cans of organic, fire-roasted crushed tomatoes from a company called Muir Glen that feature a picture of a tan, smiling, polo-shirted man in a field of organic vegetables. “Inside this can are the richest, sweetest tomatoes you’ve ever tasted,” the label reads. “We’re like winemakers and you’re holding our pride and joy. All that flavor and goodness came from just the right fertile soil, just the right water, just the right California sunshine. If you love the photograph of the organic tomatoes on the front, we hope you’ll agree that they taste just as wonderful as they look.”

A big green symbol on the label says the can is recyclable. Another one says that the tomatoes are “USDA Organic,” and a third that the contents have been packed in “lead-free enamel.” A perfect product in a feel-good container.

Yet something still nagged. One recent winter, Katherine became curious—not about the quality of the tomatoes, which she loved, but about the can itself. She had been hearing stories on the radio about the plasticizer bisphenol A showing up in unexpected places—water bottles, apple juice containers, even the inside of cans used for vegetables. She decided to find out what was lining the cans of her favorite organic tomatoes.

There was nothing on the label about bisphenol A, so Katherine picked up the phone and called Muir Glen. After being patched through a couple of times, she spoke to a woman at the company who confirmed that, yes indeed, cans of Muir Glen organic tomatoes were lined with BPA.

Huh. What do we do now? Given a growing body of evidence that says toxic chemicals leach out of containers into whatever the containers hold, should the tomatoes still be considered organic? Should food containers be required to tell consumers not only what is in the food but what goes into the containers themselves? Are we satisfied with a system that requires consumers to do their own research to find these things out?

And what, exactly, is bisphenol A, and why had we never heard of it before? Even Katherine, who had gone to medical school, had never heard a peep about the stuff. Granted, that was ten years ago, when medical students were told to ask patients if they kept a gun in their homes. No one ever trained them to ask about bisphenol A (or any of the other toxins in their homes, for that matter, save, perhaps, lead paint). In response to customer demand, General Mills, which owns Muir Glen, announced in April 2010 that it would be switching to metal cans made without BPA. The company, however, said it had not found BPA alternatives for many of its other products.

What were we to think about the fact that 95 percent of Americans tested by the CDC had traces of BPA in their bodies, and that the compound has been linked to infertility, genital tract malformations, and increasing cancer rates, especially breast cancer? Or that it was a common ingredient in all kinds of baby products—like baby bottles? And apple juice containers? And the Nalgene water bottles I had been drinking from for twenty-five years?

For years, Katherine and I had taken the kids on road trips every summer to visit friends and family from Virginia to Maine. Being more or less “green,” we always brought our own water bottles with us: Nalgene bottles for us, plastic baby bottles for the kids. If a trip lasted more than a day, as they often did, we would leave the bottles in the car. If the trip happened to be during the summer, which they often were, the bottles (and the water inside them) would heat up in the car. If we were in a rush, as we often were, we would forget to refill the bottles, and just pass them around the next day. The water was always warm, and tasted funny, but it was right there.

Like Amy Graham, who, with her husband, had used Nalgene bottles along the Appalachian Trail, I’d always considered these containers the safe way to go. I’d used them for years on backpacking and canoeing trips; they are bigger and more durable than other bottles, and their looped caps make them easy to hang off a backpack or cinch to the thwart of a canoe. Best of all, Nalgene bottles are perfect for carrying hot tea, a luxury in the outdoors. For years, Nalgene bottles have also served as a subtle symbol of undergraduate hippieness; most of my “green” students have them hanging from their backpacks. They’re reusable, so they don’t end up in the garbage. And they aren’t made with phthalates, like all those crinkly disposable bottles.

But a couple of years ago, some mountaineers began asking questions about the plastics that were used in Nalgene bottles, and their questions reached the ears of a group of researchers at the University of Cincinnati. The scientists bought one batch of Nalgene bottles from a local outfitter, then went to the local climbing gym and borrowed a batch of others that had clearly been well used.

What they found was startling. Nalgene bottles were traditionally manufactured with bisphenol A, which makes the polycarbonate bottles stiffer than bottles made with phthalates. This is why they’re so durable, and so good for carrying hot tea. The trouble is, the bisphenol A leaks from the plastic into the liquid, and it leaks fifty-five times faster when the bottles are filled with hot liquid.

Bisphenol A has long been known to be an endocrine disruptor, and has been shown to affect reproduction and brain development in animals. Even before the Nalgene experiment, studies had shown that repeated scrubbing or washing released BPA from bottles—a fact that sent chills through parents used to feeding their babies warm milk in plastic baby bottles (with nipples frequently made with phthalates). But the Nalgene experiment was the first to show how dramatically heat speeds up this leaching. The study found that nine-year-old bottles released the same amount of BPA as brand-new bottles. So it’s not like your bottles get cleaner with age. They just keep leaching.

Where else can you find BPA? As with phthalates, the answer is: pretty much everywhere. It’s now one of the highest-volume chemicals produced worldwide: global BPA capacity in 2003 was 2,214,000 metric tons, or more than 4.9 billion pounds, and demand has been growing 6 to 10 percent a year. Between 1980 and 2000, industrial production of BPA jumped fivefold.

BPA is used to harden cell phones and laptop computer cases. It lines water pipes. It’s even used in dental sealants. A chemical derivative of BPA called bisphenol A diglycidyl ether (BADGE) is used to make epoxy resins that are found widely in the linings of metal food and drink cans. In 1995, researchers in Spain found that the BPA that lines food cans leaches not only into the liquid in the can but into the vegetables themselves. Peas, artichoke hearts, corn, mushrooms, green beans—they all pick up BPA. The data “strongly suggest that some foods preserved in lacquer-coated cans acquire estrogenic activity,” the study said.

And the effect of all this plastic in our lives?

“There is a large body of scientific evidence demonstrating the harmful effects of very small amounts of BPA in laboratory and animal studies, but little clinical evidence related to humans,” Scott Belcher, one of the Nalgene study’s authors, said. “There is very strong suspicion in the scientific community, however, that this chemical has harmful effects on humans.”

Like countless researchers before them, Belcher and his colleagues acknowledged that the links between Nalgene bottles and health problems are not necessarily direct. But they warned that the cumulative effect of long-term exposure to BPA and other toxins may be dire.

As with flame retardants and phthalates, one problem with assessing the harm of BPA exposure is that there are so few long-term studies of children—or anyone else—exposed to these chemicals. The federal government’s eighteen-year-old guideline for BPA considers it safe for a nine-pound baby to swallow 200 milligrams of BPA per day. Last year, researchers at Tufts University exposed pregnant lab rodents to BPA levels proportionately two thousand times lower than that—and found changes in their mammary glands. In humans, such changes are associated with a higher risk of breast cancer. Other research has shown that BPA is connected to the early stages of prostate cancer.

And as with other chemicals, the research into the effects of low-dose exposure to BPA is fairly young. This, of course, allows groups like the American Chemistry Council to question links between the low-level presence of these chemicals and disease—even to the point of speaking directly to women of childbearing age.

“As a mother, I can understand the concern with the confusing and contradictory information about the safety of plastic beverage containers and cans. But as a scientist, I have confidence in what the science says,” said Sharon Kneiss, vice president of the products division for the American Chemistry Council. “As the manufacturers of plastic products, we are committed to the safety of our products. We owe it to the public to correct the inaccuracies and mischaracterizations about plastic bottles and the materials used in their manufacture.”

As they had done so many times before, newspaper reporters set to work trying to untangle all the competing rhetoric. In March 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that a Bush administration agency responsible for determining the dangers of toxic chemicals to reproductive health had hired a private company with close ties to the chemical industry to determine the safety of BPA. A month after the story surfaced, the company was fired. A few months later, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reviewed 258 scientific studies of BPA and found that “an overwhelming majority” showed that the compound has been linked to breast cancer, testicular cancer, diabetes, hyperactivity, low sperm counts, and “a host of other reproductive failures” in laboratory animals. Of equal concern, the few studies that found bisphenol A to be benign were paid for or partially written by scientists hired by companies like Shell Chemicals and Dow Chemical. Two others, paid for by General Electric (which made BPA until two years ago), did not even undergo peer review.

In a follow-up report a year later, the Journal Sentinel tested ten products marketed for infants or considered “microwave safe” and found bisphenol A leaching from all of them at levels that can cause neurological and developmental damage in laboratory animals. The newspaper found BPA not just in hard plastic bottles but in frozen-food trays, microwaveable soup cans, and plastic baby-food packaging.

In May 2008, Toronto’s Globe and Mail reported that traces of BPA had been found in every one of fourteen samples of canned goods, with levels especially high in foods often consumed by children, including tomato sauce, chicken noodle soup, and apple juice. “These results provide further evidence that Canadians are marinating in this chemical on a daily basis,” Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence, a Toronto advocacy group that has been lobbying Health Canada to ban bisphenol A from food and beverage containers, told the paper. That same spring, Health Canada said it planned to add BPA to its list of toxic chemicals and would soon ban BPA from baby bottles, thus making Canada the first country in the world to take precautionary action against low-level BPA exposure. The decision was part of a larger, nationwide plan to review some 23,000 “legacy chemicals” and concentrate immediately on the health risks associated with 200 problem chemicals found in the environment and in consumer products. Soon after Canada’s announcement of a ban, several corporations—including Nalgene, Walmart, Toys “R” Us, Playtex, and CVS pharmacies—said they would stop producing and selling certain products made with BPA.

“In Canada, at least, I can tell you that people are voting with their feet and voting with their pocketbooks, and indeed, for the past several weeks or months now, there’s been practically zero demand for infant baby bottles that have BPA in them,” Canada’s health minister, Tony Clement said. “You know, this is how you get new moms to buy your products, saying, ‘Buy here, they don’t have any BPA in them.’ ”

More than a decade ago, the Japanese reduced the amount of bisphenol A in the lining of food cans by 95 percent. Until American companies do the same, Frederick vom Saal, a leading researcher on the effect of synthetic chemicals on human reproduction, has said, “I eat nothing out of cans.”

CLEANING PRODUCTS

It was time to move on. Katherine and I left the kitchen section and made our way into what might as well have been called the cleanup department. I could tell we had arrived when the smells shifted, temporarily, from “lavender” to “lemon.” Or, more accurately, “lemon swimming pool.” We were suddenly in a kind of chlorine wetland.

As I had in the bug-killer department, I felt momentarily overwhelmed by the array of choices. I knew most of this stuff contained chemical compounds designed to kill things—in this case, not insects but microscopic bacteria. I picked up a large white bottle and held it before my eyes. Right on the front of the label was the first warning, in all-capital letters: CAUTION: EYE IRRITANT. MAY BE HARMFUL IF SWALLOWED. SEE CAUTION ON BACK PANEL. I flipped the bottle around and read, KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN. CAUTION: DO NOT GET IN EYES. DO NOT TAKE INTERNALLY. FIRST AID—FLUSH EYES WITH WATER 10–15 MINUTES. IF IRRITATION PERSISTS CALL A PHYSICIAN. INTERNALLY—GIVE LARGE AMOUNTS OF WATER OR MILK. CALL A PHYSICIAN.

What was inside this bottle that made it so dangerous? It was hard to tell. Under “Ingredients,” it said only “cleaning agents (anionic and/or nonionic surfactants).” That was it. The label then noted that the detergent contained no phosphates. “The surfactants (sudsing/cleaning agents) in this detergent are biodegradable and break down naturally into simpler compounds, helping to eliminate suds and foam from lakes and streams.”

So the stuff won’t add foam to rivers, but it might hurt my eyes. Do I use it? What happens when it gets in my lungs?

The next bottle was a 96-ounce jug of bleach, which boasted that it “Cleans and Deodorizes, Removes Stains, Eliminates Odors.” This one also had a warning on the front of the label: DANGER: CORROSIVE. SEE BACK PANEL FOR ADDITIONAL PRECAUTIONARY STATEMENTS. KEEP OUT OF THE REACH OF CHILDREN. And again, this bottle alerted me to the product’s active ingredient: sodium hypochlorite (3 percent), in addition to other ingredients (the rest). What these other ingredients were, it did not say.

What the label did say was that the bleach was toxic. On the back, some two hundred words were dedicated to a list of problems the product might cause, including: “severe skin and eye irritation or chemical burns to broken skin. Causes eye damage. Wear safety glasses and rubber gloves when handling this product. Wash after handling. Use with adequate ventilation.”

Farther down, the label advised consumers to call poison control for treatment advice and not to induce vomiting unless advised to by poison control or a doctor. Then it warned that the bleach is a “strong oxidizer.” “DO NOT use or mix with other household chemicals, such as toilet bowl cleaners, rust removers, acid or ammonia containing products. To do so will release hazardous gases.”

Then, as usual: Keep out of the reach of children. I should think so.

When I put the bottle back, I could swear I smelled chlorine on my hands. Did the stuff somehow seep through the plastic bottle?

Katherine looked at me. “I wonder with some of these products if you’re supposed to smell what’s inside them, and others you’re not,” she asked. It was a good question. Clearly, the smell of chlorine has come to represent a version of “clean,” though not exactly the version of which Albert Donnay would approve.

For most people, chlorine conjures images of summertime pools and white whites and squeaky-clean bathrooms. And it is widely used for everything from water treatment to the production of bright white toilet paper and synthetic agricultural fertilizers. But it also has other roles: chlorine has been used for a hundred years as a chemical weapon—deployed against humans, not just bacteria. (Germany used it to horrific effect during World War I; it killed soldiers by burning out their lungs.)

Even before the jug of bleach reaches your home, chlorine production releases dioxins into the air, which can then enter the food chain—through cow’s milk, for example. Chlorine factories are major emitters of mercury, which ends up in fish. Once it has been manufactured, chlorine is so toxic that just transporting it from one place to another becomes a major security risk. About 1.8 million carloads of hazardous chemicals move along the country’s railways every year; some 100,000 of these loads—mostly chlorine and anhydrous ammonia—are especially dangerous. A cloud of gas released from a chemical train wreck is not something any mayor wants to see.

In July 2001, just two months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, a train carrying the solvent tripropylene derailed inside a Baltimore tunnel and shut down the entire city center. Rail lines still pass within feet of the stadiums where both the Baltimore Orioles and the Ravens play; when President Bush attended an Army-Navy football game in the football stadium, chemical shipments had to be suspended.

If you accidentally mix chlorine with ammonia, it can create lethal vapors called chloramines. But you knew that, right? You are warned right there on the bottle.

So a question: Does it strike you as odd that we’ve become so comfortable with a substance that Saddam Hussein used to make chemical weapons, a substance that is so toxic that just moving it around endangers entire cities? Just so you can have clean floors and white toilet paper? It’s not like bleaching toilet paper with chlorine makes it any safer. For most products, chlorine bleach is purely for aesthetics; Americans have grown accustomed to white paper, so this is what the industry provides. In Europe, chlorine use is restricted, the toilet paper is typically brown, and nobody seems the worse for it.

You have doubts about these things. How could you not? Common sense may tell you one thing—that chemicals we once used as weapons might best be left outside the home—but saturation marketing has a way of changing your mind. Much of this marketing, not surprisingly, has taken its cues from the tobacco industry, which—despite decades of dire scientific warnings about the hazards—has managed to convince people that there is still some doubt about the dangers of smoking.

And so it goes with the chemical industry. One narrative, cultivated by industry, is that consumer products and the chemicals of which they are composed are safe. Consumers need not worry whether the products have been tested. Companies have the health and safety of consumers foremost in mind. Besides, they say, toxic chemicals are also found in nature. Lead is natural. So is salt. In small doses, both make life better. And it’s not as if chemical companies need to convince you that a compound is safe for you to use it. All they need to do is make you doubt whether it is unsafe, and you’ll keep on buying. “The whole thing is basically a front,” said Mike Belliveau of Maine’s Environmental Health Strategy Center, which directed the body burden study there. “They’re seeking to manufacture uncertainty.”

Our compulsive reliance on synthetic chemicals has insulated chemical companies from the public scrutiny one might expect from epidemics of mysterious environmental cancers and other illnesses. Belching DuPont plants dot the landscape near the University of Delaware, where I work. Driving by them is like driving by a slaughterhouse: you have a vague idea of what goes on in there, but beyond that, you’d rather live with an uncomfortable ignorance. In 2005, DuPont agreed to pay the EPA $16.5 million—including the largest administrative penalty the EPA has ever imposed—for covering up the health effects of the chemicals used to make Teflon at a West Virginia plant. Four years earlier, the company paid $107 million to settle a class action lawsuit brought by residents who claimed the company contaminated local waterways; the Teflon chemicals, which have been linked to both cancer and birth defects, were found in blood samples from both pregnant women and their fetuses. Yet the DuPont name graces a number of elegant buildings on my campus. Which impression, do you suppose, will my students remember?

Yet as consumers get more interested in buying “green” products, companies shift their marketing to take advantage of it. This “greenwashing” strategy only muddies the water further, Mike Belliveau told me.

“The people who make paintbrushes with plastic handles say, ‘Buy our brushes because no trees were cut down,’ ” he said. “The people who make wood-handled paintbrushes say, ‘Buy our brushes because our brushes aren’t made with plastic.’ At this point, Home Depot could pretty much call every product in their stores ‘green.’ This doesn’t hold up to the scrutiny even of common sense.”

A competing narrative is that industry has always had a financial interest in not testing its products adequately, in not disclosing all that it knows, and, when it is presented with evidence of possible toxicity, of fighting the accusations in court and the media rather than changing its formulations. Industry has long known the value of hiring its own scientists, and reaching into its deep pockets to fund studies that reflect favorably on its products. Independent research, funded in large part by federal grants, tends to ebb and flow, and an administration’s ties with industry can greatly impede the competing narrative. With less funding for independent laboratory studies, there are few opportunities for a competing narrative to gain traction. This is a strategy Big Tobacco mastered and Big Chemical has taken to heart.

“But body burden studies are incredibly powerful and effective,” Belliveau notes “Industries are very threatened by the idea that pollution is now in people. It used to be that the public thought that pollution was in the air, or in the water. But now they’re starting to realize that pollution is in us.”

So where do we turn?

In the home-cleaning aisles of some big box stores, a few mainstream companies are beginning to offer less toxic products. In the store we visited, we found two bottles of Clorox Green Works products, but we had to look hard for them. Theirs hardly seemed like a thriving market, at least under this roof. But their very presence was evidence of a shift. Just as mainstream supermarkets (and the industrial food makers that supply them) have responded to the demand for organic foods, so have mainstream big box stores begun to stock less toxic alternatives. Pick up a bottle of Seventh Generation 2X Ultra Natural Laundry Detergent, and here’s what you’ll find on the front label: First, a big pink square at the top of the bottle that says: “You have the right to know.” A whole different marketing approach, right up front. I could tell just by looking at the bottle that I was about to get educated.

The back of the label features the Seventh Generation credo, taken from the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy: “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” Immediately beneath that, you’ll find a note from Jeffrey Hollender, Seventh Generation’s “President and Chief Inspired Protagonist.” At Seventh Generation, he says, “We Disclose All Ingredients.”

The label presents a box chart showcasing the plant-derived cleaning agents (“low-foaming, stain removing power”) and the non-animal derived enzymes (“premium-performance protein and starch stain removers [blood, grass, wine]”).

Blood. Grass. Wine. Presumably, the typical user of Seventh Generation detergent would be sullying their picnic blanket by pricking their thumb on a corkscrew. But the marketing idea—selling products based on how nontoxic they are, in packages that go overboard in their listing of ingredients—made me curious. I decided to talk to the man who designs them.

Martin Wolf, a soft-spoken, middle-aged man with light blue eyes and a trim white beard, is the director of product and environmental technology for Seventh Generation, the Vermont-based company that has been a leader in making and selling nontoxic products for twenty years. A chemist, Wolf began his career working for the chemical giant eventually known as Ciba-Geigy. Later, as a consultant for the EPA, he got a firsthand look at the toxic by-products of manufactures from paper mills to electronics factories, and the incredible trouble citizens and governments have cleaning up industrial waste. He worked on notorious cleanup sites like Love Canal, and the Woburn, Massachusetts, water-poisoning site that became the basis for the bestselling book A Civil Action. Things have been a bit less dramatic since Wolf arrived at Seventh Generation, in 1990. These days, he devotes himself to designing things like liquid detergents, dish soap, all-purpose sprays, and glass cleaners.

But the work, in its way, is equally quixotic.

Americans spent over $432 million on all-purpose cleaners in 2007. Forty percent of that market was owned by three Clorox products: Pine-Sol, Clorox Clean-Up, and Formula 409. Seventh Generation has just 0.3 percent. But the ground is beginning to shift, and both Wolf and his counterparts at Clorox know it. Sales in the $2.7 billion household cleaning products market have been flat of late, but sales of “natural” cleaning products have been growing at 23 percent a year. Wolf bet years ago that the more people learn about what’s in the products they buy, the better his company will do.

“Most American consumers don’t make the connection between their shopping habits and the environment,” Wolf told me. “But most people are concerned with their health, and the health of their family. Studies have shown that when women become pregnant, they get much more concerned about these things, things that could affect the health of their babies. Right now, most Americans say their grandmother used Tide, their mother used Tide. They say, ‘That’s what I’ll use.’ But that’s changing.”

When people first start thinking about reducing their exposure to toxic chemicals, they typically begin by thinking about food. They start looking at labels, noticing whether a vegetable is organic or a processed food has been made with trans fats. People may not keel over from eating a single head of lettuce sprayed with toxic chemicals, Wolf said, but that hasn’t stopped organic food from becoming a bona fide “movement.”

People have been much slower to recognize the connection between their health and the products they use in their homes. Phthalates, for example, are not only used in cosmetics and plastic bottles, they often serve as solvents that keep fragrances suspended in things like laundry detergent. Butoxyethanol, a cleaning compound found in engine degreasers, is also an ingredient in conventional household cleaners like Formula 409, Fantastik, and Windex. (In its Household Products Database, the National Institutes of Health reports that the compound has been shown to cause problems—in lab rats, at least—with the central nervous system as well as in the kidneys and liver.)

“People eat four to five pounds of food a day, but they breathe twenty pounds of air a day,” Wolf said. “If you are active, you breathe forty pounds of air a day. Who thinks about Formula 409 having butoxyenthanol, and thinks about the effect it has? It’s cheap. Who thinks about synthetic fragrances on their clothing? Conventional manufacturers want you to smell their product when you walk down the aisle in the supermarket, they want you to smell it when you put it in the wash, they want you to smell it when you put on your shirt. These companies spent a lot of money on research getting these fragrances to be recognizable. But fragrances are volatile. There is a lot of chemistry in this.”

The interplay between body chemistry and environmental toxins is so complex that, especially once you account for the debate over low-dose exposure rates, “proving” that an individual product is dangerous will always be elusive. Martin Wolf knows this. So do the people running Big Chemical, who learned it from Big Tobacco.

“Do we really know how low that risk is? The experiments still haven’t been done. And they never will be, frankly,” Wolf told me. “A really good carcinogenic study is done with fifty rats. So fifty rats represent three hundred million people. That means each rat represents six million people. If three rats out of fifty get sick, is that a significant deviation? If you’re working with fifty rats, those three sick rats represent eighteen million people.

“We have three hundred million people in this country. Twenty-five to thirty percent are smokers. So you’re looking at seventy-five to ninety million ‘rats’ in your control group, and we still can’t ‘prove’ smoking causes cancer. Our systems are so complex. You just can’t isolate toxins like that. And you never will. The quest for a smoking gun is a hopeless quest. And industry will always hide behind that fact.”

When he begins designing a new product, Wolf will consult with chemists at the company’s manufacturing plants. “I’ll say, ‘Here’s a formula for an existing product. We want to find substitutes for this, and this, and that,” Wolf told me. The chemists will test them—though never on animals, a company policy—and see whether or not they work. It’s a process that moves up from the company’s philosophy, rather than a process driven only by a goal of maximum chemical effectiveness.

Wolf acknowledges that designing products without being able to rely on toxic compounds restricts his chemical palette. Instead of phosphorous, for example, which costs 15 cents a pound, Seventh Generation uses sodium citrate, which costs 40 cents a pound—a significant expense when you’re talking about 20 percent of a product. “Industry always brings the same arguments,” Wolf said. “ ‘It can’t be done,’ they say. ‘There’s not enough of the bad stuff in there to make a difference.’ When companies say it can’t be done, what they really mean is that it can’t be done and still maintain the same profit margins. We say you can make products that are equally effective. We say the standard products are hazardous.”

Take chlorine. Seventh Generation uses no chlorine in the pulp for its diapers, feminine hygiene products, or toilet paper, a practice in line with standards in a number of European countries, but not in the United States.

Chlorine seems to be something of a bête noire for Martin Wolf. Before the late 1990s, paper mills produced 15 pounds of chlorinated hydrocarbons for every ton of pulp, Wolf told me. If a company made 200 tons of paper per day, that also produced 3,000 pounds of chlorine a day, most of it discharged into streams or as solid waste. This toxic waste was in addition to the other common wastes from paper production, like dioxins and PCBs.

In 1998, over the loud objections of industry, the EPA passed a “cluster” rule setting contaminant levels from chlorinated products. This quickly reduced the amount of the “absorbable organic halogens,” or AOX, by “almost an order of magnitude,” Wolf said.

Europe and Latin America do far better at using recycled pulp for their toilet paper: 20 percent versus 2 percent in the United States. The impact of such a difference is vivid, and not only in the volume of chlorine we produce: Greenpeace claims that Kimberly-Clark, which makes the Cottonelle and Scott lines of tissue, gets nearly a quarter of its pulp from two-hundred-year-old trees in Canada’s old-growth forests.

“There is something absurd about cutting down two-hundred-year-old trees for a three-second application,” Wolf said. “Even cutting down eighty-year-old trees from a tree farm for this is absurd. Recycled paper is the only sensible thing.” (“Recycled toilet paper” is a phrase that would raise the eyebrows of any eight-year-old, and Wolf is quick to point out that in this case, the recycling happens before the paper is used, not after. In Seventh Generation’s case, 20 percent comes from recycled magazines.)

As companies like Seventh Generation—and Method, Mrs. Meyer’s, and Ecover—have made their way into the mainstream—and a bigger share of the market—much larger corporations have responded by refining their formulas, or by buying the competition. SC Johnson boasts that its Shout and Scrubbing Bubbles products have been cleared by the EPA’s Design for the Environment program; for good measure, it also bought Mrs. Meyer’s, another leading manufacturer of cleaning products marketed as nontoxic. Colgate-Palmolive introduced its Palmolive Eco dishwashing detergent and claims that it’s the first mass-marketed automatic dishwashing detergent brand to eliminate phosphates—and it bought Tom’s of Maine. Clorox has added the Green Works line to its $4.8 billion family of household cleaning products—and it bought Burt’s Bees.

Martin Wolf is unmoved by such alliances. He points out that Procter & Gamble still takes its cue straight from the Big Chemical playbook (claiming more research is needed) and that the “green” Clorox line still uses chlorine in its cleaning products, butoxyethanol in its spray cleaners, and petrochemical based surfactants in its detergents. He also knocks Clorox for listing the ingredients on its Green Works cleaners, but not on its regular products. “Clorox is in the position of having told people for a hundred years that their products have been as safe as they can possibly be, and now they’re telling people they have a new ‘safe’ product,” Wolf said. “If you confuse people, they become incapable of action.”

To Martin Wolf, this rhetoric leaves a hole in the marketplace big enough to drive a Seventh Generation truck through—a hole made wider recently by progressive legislation. Since September 2006, a New York State law has required schools to use cleaning products that do not contain carcinogens, reproductive toxins, or scents that could aggravate asthma. Other states are also encouraging changes in the way public buildings are cleaned. For years, Wolf lobbied California legislators to pass a pair of bills to regulate the use of household chemicals and create a database so consumers can find more information on what goes into them. In September 2006, the state legislature passed both. Two years later, the state passed a law requiring dry cleaners to stop using older perc machines by 2010, and to stop using the chemical altogether by 2023. California has also established a list of chemicals next up for regulation, based on how ubiquitous they are in the environment and on their potential impacts on infants and children.

In the last couple of years, Seventh Generation has begun making concerted—and not uncontroversial—inroads into mainstream supermarkets. In January 2007, Stop & Shop added the company’s products to three hundred supermarkets from New Hampshire to New Jersey. Then, eighteen months later, the unthinkable happened: a deal with the mother of all big box stores, Walmart. Walmart launched a “retail concept” called Marketside, initially in four small stores in Arizona, which now sell prepared meals, natural and organic food—and a line of cleaning and paper products from Seventh Generation. It’s not as if Walmart makes such moves out of the goodness of its corporate heart. It has seen a market for nontoxic products, and it has responded by providing them.

“I’ve said that hell would freeze over before Seventh Generation would ever do business with Walmart,” said Seventh Generation’s Jeffrey Hollender after the deal was announced. “Now I’ve got to concede that I was wrong.”