Ten Steps to a Less Toxic Future.

• Position: Essay

1. Start Testing

   Eighty-five percent of the 82,000 chemicals registered for use in the United States have never been tested for toxicity. Most of them were grandfathered in free of scrutiny when the Toxic Substances Control Act was passed in 1976; for the rest, the Environmental Protection Agency has been content to look only at the industry's "available" data. If there's no data, then the burden falls on academic scientists to prove a chemical might be hazardous. Most chemicals escape notice altogether.

   Why should we care? Well, for one thing, we know the average American child is walking around with more than 200 industrial chemicals coursing through her bloodstream. These substances are virtually all new to the human race; we did not evolve with them, and our bodies may of may not be good at eliminating them. Some of them accumulate in our tissues and stay there for decades. Many are known to cause reproductive, neurological, and behavioral problems in laboratory animals and in wildlife. Yet, we don't know very much about how they work in humans; nor do we know how they work in combination. We are all part of a vast, uncontrolled human experiment.

   A first priority should be testing the so-called endocrine disruptors, chemicals that interfere with the hormones that orchestrate all human biological processes. Last year, the EPA finally ordered the first such tests on a few dozen pesticides, thirteen years after the program was authorized.

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2. Improve the Tests

   Standard toxicity tests are inadequate and out of date, according to Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. New tests must capture the complexity of exposures together with subtle, but serious, health effects. "We all have different vulnerabilities, such as age, genetics, past exposures, co-exposures, or cross-exposures," she says. "Our old way of looking is at one chemical at a time, and that doesn't protect us."

3. Strengthen the Laws

   The U.S. government has banned only five substances in the last thirty years. Last year, a report to Congress by the General Accounting Office stated, "The nation lacks assurance that human health and the environment are adequately protected." Not only are companies not required to test the chemicals they produce, they are not required to provide any information to regulators regarding how chemicals are released to the environment or who may be exposed to them. By contrast, under...