The dirt on bleach - environmental effects of using household bleach - Answering Machine

Vegetarian Times, Dec, 1995 by Lee Reilly

Your caution is admirable, but probably unnecessary. Manufacturers and independent scientists agree that household bleach does pose a significant threat to the environment although use of chlorine by paper mills and plastics manufacturers has wrought significant damage to the Earth's animals, ozone layer, water and air.

How can the same element be so benign in some instances and so damaging in others? This Jekyll-and-Hyde story revolves around chlorine's peculiar nature. Chlorine does not appear in the environment in raw form; it is born when a salt molecule is split with electricity. The greenish gas that results from the split can introduce the molecules of one element to the molecules of another without becoming part of die resulting compound. Chlorine's amazing joining ability is why it is used in the production of some 15,000 commercial compounds sold in die United States, including pesticides, pharmaceuticals and plastics. About 34 percent of America's chlorine goes into plastics and 10 percent into pulp and paper, says Bonnie Rice, a campaigner in Greenpeace's Chicago office. Only 4 percent is used in drinking water and disinfection, and usage in the cleaning of laundry and countertops isn't even big enough to track.

Concern over chlorine usually emanates from widespread publicity about the 1 1,000 or so compounds that result when chlorine reacts with substances that contain carbon, creating what are known as organochlorines, or chlorinated organics. Environmentalists say organochlorines are persistent, toxic, damaging to the ozone layer and sometimes carcinogenic, using DDT and dioxin as examples. Dioxin is best known for its presence in Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant used during the Vietnam War. Both chemical manufacturers and paper manufacturers say the threat posed by organochlorines is overestimated.

This debate is one of the most volatile environmental arguments of this century, and it may well follow us into the next. Among the players is the Washington, D.C.-based International Joint Commission (IJC), an advisory agency founded in 1909 by the U.S. and Canadian governments to assess problems and progress in the Great Lakes region. Since 1992, the commission has advised both countries to set a timetable for "sunsetting," or phasing out the use of chlorine, especially in industrial situations. This recommendation is based on an IJC report that assessed numerous worldwide studies conducted on the effects of organochlorines, says Frank Bevacquah, a public information officer at the IJC. "The bibliography is 60 pages long in six-point type," he says of the 1994 report, tided "The 6th Biennial Report on Great Lakes Water Quality." Among IJC'S findings is a chart summarizing endocrine damage in wildlife, including the failure to hatch in birds, fish and turtles. A new report is due in late winter 1996.

Meanwhile, the staff of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has amassed a similar scientific review of dioxin where it assessed research conducted by more than 100 independent scientists; the resulting 2,000-page 1994 draft report concludes that low levels of dioxin may suppress the human immune system and adversely affect the reproductive system. Now undergoing review by the Scientific Advisory Board, a panel of EPA advisors, the draft is so controversial that the EPA staff is reluctant to talk on record, and rumors about the board's impending assessment circulate regularly.

Greenpeace has taken aim at organochlorines with a comprehensive campaign, and chlorine trade associations--first Chlorine Institute and later the Chlorine Chemistry Council (CCC)--have returned fire. The Washington, D.C.-based Chlorine Institute maintains in press releases that connections between chlorinated chemicals and human health are unsubstantiated and that readers of Greenpeace's report on organochlorines should "bear in mind who issued [the] report." More recently, the Washington, D.C.-based CCC assembled a group of independent scientists to review the same studies that IJC, EPA and Greenpeace cited; the resulting interpretations directly contradict those found in the other reports. For instance, the CCC's expert panel concluded that recent modifications to pulp mills have decreased concentrations of chlorinated dioxins in the environment by a hundredfold and that current levels "would not be expected to cause adverse effects in fish or piscivorous wildlife." Environmentalists aren't impressed with the findings. Peter de Fur, Ph.D., senior scientist at the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Defense Fund, says, "The Chlorine Chemistry Council has as much credibility as a cockroach around here."

With all this fighting it's no wonder that two years ago, Clorox Inc., the nation's leading household bleach manufacturer, started to distance itself with an ad campaign announcing that household bleach is environmentally safe. "We're trying to explain the difference," says Jim McCabe, senior environmental scientist at Clorox's technical center in Pleasanton, Calif "There are all different types of bleaches and all different uses."