The Red, White, and Green

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Looks like the BPA ban fever sweeping the nation (hooray, California!) is starting to make the chemical companies nervous. After all, they have a lot of money to lose should Congress follow through on its plan to overhaul the 34-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act and actually do something about the more than 80,000 largely unregulated chemicals on the market in the United States.

So what’s the chemical companies’ plan of action? Well, for starters, forming deceptively named organizations like the Coalition for Chemical Safety and plastering its website with pictures of smiling families, all to make it seem like they actually care about your health and well-being. Don’t be fooled: CCS is a sham, it’s industry-funded, and its “balanced approach to our nation’s chemical safety laws” is code for “we’re going to do everything in our power to make sure real reform doesn’t happen.”

Just take a look at the list of coalition members on the website: the American Chemistry Council, Montana Agribusiness Association, Virginia Coal Association — not exactly a who’s who of the environmental movement.

So check out the awesome chemical industry spoof, above, and tell Congress that we need to strengthen the laws so that chemicals are studied and determined safe before they’re allowed to be put in the products we use. The video was made by an organization that’s really fighting to protect us from toxic chemicals: the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition.

–Jennifer Grayson

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