phthalate
Male infertility crisis in US has experts baffled.
The sudden rise in male infertility is a scary national crisis, and we can't blame it on Trump—or can we?
Hagai Levine doesn’t scare easily. The Hebrew University public health researcher is the former chief epidemiologist for the Israel Defense Forces, which means he’s acquainted with danger and risk in a way most of his academic counterparts aren’t. So when he raises doubts about the future of the human race, it’s worth listening. Together with Shanna Swan, a professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Levine authored a major new analysis that tracked male sperm levels over the past few decades, and what he found frightened him. “Reproduction may be the most important function of any species,” says Levine. “Something is very wrong with men.”
That’s something you may not be used to hearing. It may take a man and a woman—or at least a sperm and an egg—to form new life, but it is women who bear the medical and psychological burden of trying to get—and stay—pregnant. It is women whose lifestyle choices are endlessly dissected for their supposed impact on fertility, and women who hear the ominous tick of the biological clock. Women are bombarded with countless fertility diets, special fertility-boosting yoga practices and all the fertility apps they can fit on their phone. They are the targets of a fertility industry expected to be valued at more than $21 billion globally by 2020. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fixates on women, tracking infertility in the U.S. by tallying the number of supposedly infertile women. “It is as if the entire medical realm is shaped to cater to women’s infertility and women’s bodies,” says Liberty Barnes, a sociologist and the author of Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity. “For men, there’s just nothing there.”
That absence might be understandable if women were solely responsible for the success or failure of a pregnancy. But they’re not. According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the male partner is either the sole or contributing cause in about 40 percent of cases of infertility. Past infections, medical conditions, hormonal imbalances and more can all cause what is known as male factor infertility. Men even have their own version of a biological clock. Beginning around their mid-30s, male fertility gradually degrades, and while most men produce sperm to their dying day, those past 40 who help conceive have a greater risk of passing on genetic abnormalities to their children, including autism. “Men are a huge part of this problem,” says Barbara Collura, the president and CEO of Resolve: the National Infertility Association.
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Startling new evidence suggests male infertility may be much worse than it appears. According to Levine and Swan’s work, sperm levels—the most important measurement of male fertility—are declining throughout much of the world, including the U.S. The report, published in late July, reviewed thousands of studies and concluded that sperm concentration had fallen by 59.3 percent among men in Western countries between 1973 and 2011. Four decades ago, the average Western man had a sperm concentration of 99 million per milliliter. By 2011, that had fallen to 47.1 million. The plummet is alarming because sperm concentrations below 40 million per milliliter are considered below normal and can impair fertility. (The researchers found no significant declines for non-Western men, in part because of a lack of quality data, though other studies have found major drops in countries like China and Japan.) And the decline has grown steeper in recent years, which means that the crisis is deepening. “This is pretty scary,” says Swan, who has long studied reproductive health. “I think we should be very concerned about this trend.”
Although there have reports of declining sperm counts before, they were easy to ignore. Research on sperm levels has been spotty, using different methodologies and drawing from varying groups, making it difficult to know that the declines some scientists observed were real, and not a function of miscounting. Skeptics of the latest conclusions countered that the new report was a study of many studies—it could only be as good as the work from which it drew. And even if the conclusions of the meta-analysis are accurate, the average sperm count still leaves most men on the normal side of fertile. Just barely.Yet fertility rates—the number of live births per woman—have drastically declined in the same countries with falling sperm counts. That includes the U.S., where fertility rates hit a record low this year, and where women are no longer bearing enough children to replace the existing population. Women need to average roughly 2.1 children—enough to replace themselves and their partner, with a spare bit to offset kids who don’t survive to reproductive age—to keep a country’s population stable through birth alone. The U.S. is at 1.8 and dependent on continued immigration to keep the population growing. Sociological and economic factors play a role in the changing size of the American family. Fertility rates were above the replacement level until the 2007 recession, then they plunged. And despite a years-long economic recovery and low unemployment, they’re still falling. Pair that with studies showing that nearly one in six couples in the U.S. trying to get pregnant can’t do so over the course of a year of unprotected sex—the medical definition of infertility—and it’s clear that something beyond economic insecurity is preventing Americans from having as many babies as they want. “When I see birth rates going down, I worry as a fertility doctor that men’s sperm counts are declining,” says Harry Fisch, a urologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.
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This would seem to be the moment for the medical world to throw everything it can at understanding what is happening to male fertility. Yet researchers on male reproduction are forced to rely on less-than-perfect data because the kind of comprehensive, longitudinal studies that might conclusively tell us what is happening to sperm counts have never been done. The irony is that the medical establishment has been accused—with reason—of ignoring the particular needs of women over the years, yet in reproduction it is men whose problems are poorly studied and often misunderstood. Some experts even wonder whether an unconscious desire to ignore threats to male fertility may be tied up in fears over the future of masculinity itself. “Here is direct evidence that that function of reproduction is failing,” says Michael Eisenberg, a urologist and an associate professor at Stanford University, referring to the latest sperm-level research. “We should try to figure out why that is.”What we do know about declining sperm counts tells us a great deal about not only reproduction but also the overall health of men—and what it tells us isn’t good. Young men may think themselves invincible, but the male reproductive system is a surprisingly temperamental machine. Obesity, inactivity, smoking—your basic poor modern lifestyle choices—can dramatically reduce sperm counts, as can exposure to some environmental toxins. Low sperm counts may presage a premature death, even among men in the prime of their lives who might seem otherwise healthy. “Sperm count decline is the canary in the coal mine,” says Levine. “There is something very wrong in the environment.” Which means there may be something very wrong with men.
Why Johnny Can’t BreedThe study of sperm has always been murky. In 1677, the Dutch draper and amateur scientist Antony van Leeuwenhoek collected his semen immediately after having sex with his wife, examined it under a microscope of his own creation and saw millions of wriggling, tiny “animalcules” swimming in the seminal fluid. The Dutchman was the first person to observe human sperm cells, though he insisted that the sperm alone made an embryo that was merely nourished by the female egg and ovaries. Van Leeuwenhoek was simply following the example of classical thinkers like Aristotle, who believed female partners at most provided a fertile bed of soil in which the seed provided by a man could germinate and flower into a child. It wouldn’t be until the 19th century that the true roles of the sperm and the egg were finally sorted out.All those wriggling “swimmers” van Leeuwenhoek saw are what you would see if you magnified the sample of a healthy fertile man. A sperm cell is built for one thing: motion. Its torpedo-like head is a nugget of DNA containing the 23 chromosomes the male partner contributes to his future child, connected to a long tail or flagellum that propels the sperm to the egg, all running on the cellular rocket fuel of fructose, which is in the semen. Most sperm will never come close to an egg—while a fertile man ejaculates 20 million to 300 million sperm per milliliter of semen, only a few dozen might reach their destination, and only one can drill through the egg’s membrane and achieve conception. The chemical makeup of the vagina is actively hostile to sperm, which can only survive because semen contains alkaline substances that offset the acidic environment. That’s the paradox of sperm counts—although one healthy sperm is enough to make a baby, it takes tens of millions of sperm to beat the odds, which means that significant declines in sperm counts will eventually degrade overall male fertility. Notes Swan: “Even a relatively small change in the mean sperm count has a big impact on the percentage of men who will be classified as infertile or subfertile”—meaning a reduced level of fertility that makes it harder to conceive.
The fears about male infertility go beyond the stuff of dry science. “It’s the virility and fertility dilemma,” says Sharon Covington, an infertility therapist in Maryland. “How a man sees himself, and how the world sees him as a man, is often tied to his ability to impregnate a woman.” So perhaps it’s not surprising that the argument over how much sperm counts are declining—if they are declining—has been less a courteous scientific debate than a ferocious battle that has gone on for more than two decades.
This war began in Denmark, in 1990, when Danish pediatric endocrinologist Niels Skakkebaek began looking into male reproductive health. For years, he had been troubled by the rise in testicular cancer, as well as an increase in the number of boys with malformed testes. He thought assessing sperm quality and quantity might give him a clue to what was happening to his patients.
In 1992, Skakkebaek and colleagues reviewed all the published studies of sperm counts from around the world. (Sperm counts are done by tallying the number of sperm cells in one microliter of semen and then multiplying by 10,000 to estimate the total sperm in a milliliter—not dissimilar from the way police try to estimate the size of a large crowd from a geographic sample.) They calculated that the average sperm count in 1940 was about 113 million per milliliter of semen, and that by 1990 it had fallen to 66 million. In addition, they saw a threefold increase in the number of men with a sperm count below 20 million, the point at which infertility becomes a serious risk.Skakkebaek’s 1992 paper raised concern about the ability of the human species to continue reproducing itself, but skeptics immediately attacked, questioning the reliability of the original sperm studies the analysis was based on. The studies drew from very different groups of men of varying age and fertility. (Sperm count tends to decline with age, and men who gave a semen sample in a visit to a fertility clinic can reasonably be expected to have a lower count than, say, healthy men selected as donors for a sperm bank.) Some scientists believe older and less precise techniques for sperm counting may have artificially inflated the sperm levels of our fathers and grandfathers, which would make the drop to current counts appear steeper than it is.That’s why the new meta-analysis is so important. Swan, Levine and their international colleagues carefully sorted through more than 7,500 peer-reviewed papers before narrowing their search to 185 papers involving 43,000 men from around the world. By excluding studies before 1973, they cut out some of the less reliable older measurements, and they discarded any studies of men with known fertility complications or who were smokers, since smoking lowers sperm count. It’s not perfect—no meta-analysis is—but this evidence is the best we currently have, and the conclusions are disturbing. “The community is coming around on this,” says Eisenberg. “There have been some good counterarguments about sperm-level decline, but this paper really puts a lot of those arguments to bed.”Environmental CastrationProving that sperm levels are dropping has been difficult enough, and teasing out the cause is even tougher. Obesity, which has risen dramatically in Western countries while sperm counts have supposedly dropped, is linked to poor semen quality, as is physical inactivity. A 2013 study of American college students found that men who exercised more than 15 hours a week had sperm counts 73 percent higher than men who exercised less than five hours a week. And men who watched 20 or more hours of TV a week had much lower sperm counts than those who watched little to no TV. Stress is also a risk factor, as is alcohol use, which is on an upswing in the U.S., and drug use, which is increasing thanks to the opioid epidemic. Some scientists have theorized that electromagnetic fields from devices like cellphones could degrade semen quality, leading to weak and immobile sperm. Even heat can play a role. We know for certain that high temperatures can kill sperm, which is why the testicles are outside the body, keeping them up to 5.4 degrees cooler. Researchers know that birth rates decline nine months after a heat wave, leading some infertility experts to believe that climate change may actually be a factor in sperm count decline.Age also matters. In a recent study, Laura Dodge of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center looked at thousands of attempts at in vitro fertilization (IVF) performed in the Boston area and tried to gauge the impact of both male and female age on success. Female age remained the dominant factor, but male age factored in as well—women under the age of 30 with a male partner between 40 and 42 were significantly less likely to give birth than those whose male partner was between 30 and 35. That dovetails with other research showing that as men age, their sperm suffers increasing numbers of mutations, which in turn can make it slightly more likely that their children will be born with disorders like autism and schizophrenia. Older mothers may get the blame for infertility, but a new study found that new fathers in the U.S. are on average nearly four years older than they were in 1972, while almost 9 percent of new American fathers are over 40, double the percentage from 45 years ago. “We tell men that age is not an issue, but now we know that the male biological clock is real,” says Fisch.So is it simply modern life itself—obesity, inactivity, stress, cellphones, even older parenthood—that’s driving down sperm levels? It’s the beginning of an answer, but not the full one. Tobacco use definitely hurts sperm counts, yet smoking has fallen significantly in the U.S. That’s one reason a growing band of researchers have come to suspect the influence of toxins in the environment—specifically, endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in compounds like bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates.The theory is straightforward enough: These chemicals mimic the effect of the feminizing hormone estrogen and can interfere with masculinizing hormones like testosterone. The chemicals, which are found in many plastics throughout the environment, may be rewiring the sensitive male reproductive system, eroding sperm quality and quantity and even contributing to the sort of testicular disorders that first alarmed Skakkebaek years ago. The production of sperm is tightly regulated by the body’s hormones, and so any interference with those hormones—say, through exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals—could make itself felt first through damage to sperm quantity or quality. “You could still have sperm, but [levels] might be significantly lower than your father’s,” says Germaine Louis, the director and senior investigator at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.Most of the evidence for how these chemicals affect sperm comes from animal studies. A 2011 study found that mice who received daily BPA injections had lower sperm counts and testosterone levels than mice who received saline injections. A startling study from 2016 of fish in U.S. wildlife refuges in the Northeast found that 60 to 100 percent of all the male smallmouth bass studied had eggs growing in their testes—a startling feminization—which researchers linked to endocrine disrupters in the waters. Other studies have shown that phthalates appear to disrupt the masculinization of young lab rats. Animal models aren’t perfect, but as University of Texas toxicologist Andrea Gore notes, “the biology of reproduction is incredibly similar in all mammals. We are all vertebrates, and we have the same reproductive organs and processes that develop similarly with the same hormones.”Scientists can’t expose humans to endocrine disrupters in a controlled experiment, but some recent research has found associations between exposure to BPA and phthalates in the world, and declining sperm counts and male infertility in adults. A 2010 study of Chinese factory workers by De-Kun Li at Kaiser Permanente found that increasing levels of BPA in urine were significantly linked with decreased sperm count and quality, even among men who were exposed to levels of BPA comparable to men in the general American population. Another study from 2014 followed about 500 couples trying to conceive and found that phthalate exposure among men was tied to reduced fertility. These findings are all associations, which means that while exposure to endocrine disrupters is more likely to be found in men suffering from reduced fertility, it doesn’t mean that the chemicals themselves are definitively the cause. But the studies are stacking up. “For some of the endocrine disrupters like phthalates, the basic evidence is strong that they affect reproductive health,” says Louis, who carried out the phthalates study.Even more concerning, but harder to prove, is the damage endocrine disrupters may be doing in utero. As a fetus develops in a mother’s uterus, it is barraged by hormones and other chemicals that sculpt development. That includes the male reproductive system—testicles are formed in the womb, and although sperm levels can be altered in adulthood, they seem to be largely set before a boy is born. That means we could see sperm levels continue to decline for years, as boys who were exposed to endocrine disrupters before birth reach reproductive age and run into problems trying to have children of their own. “This trend hasn’t turned around, and it’s not going to turn around on its own,” says Swan, who has been studying the effects of endocrine disrupters for decades. “We don’t have a lot of time to lose.”The Baby Un-BoomIf this is a crisis, why is the medical establishment still arguing over the accuracy of statistical methods that approximate sperm levels from a variety pack of studies? Trying to figure out what is happening to sperm levels isn’t like trying to create an HIV vaccine. Researchers could follow a cohort of representative men from early adulthood through their reproductive years, taking regular semen samples under the same conditions and tracking lifestyle and environmental factors, including exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Such long-term studies aren’t easy or cheap, but somehow we’ve managed to pull them off for certain illnesses, like cardiovascular disease and cancer. The future of the human race—whether it has one—would seem to qualify as an important topic to explore in depth. “Why are we messing about with this?” says professor Allan Pacey, a male fertility expert at the University of Sheffield. “Let’s just answer the question.”A major, comprehensive study of semen quality has never been funded, however. Doctors are reluctant to even ask men for semen samples, and most men seem reluctant to give one—even though, as Eisenberg wryly notes, “it’s a lot more pleasant for the patient than a blood draw.”
“Male infertility has been ignored for 30 years,” says Christopher Barratt, a professor of reproductive medicine at the University of Dundee in Scotland. “What we understand can be written on a postage stamp.”The average man knows much, much less. Few men could even name the medical specialty that covers male reproductive health—it’s urology—and fewer still have ever seen a urologist, given that there are fewer than 12,000 of them in the U.S., about one-third the number of OB-GYNs in the country. Aside from a few online forums, there are no real support systems for men with infertility issues. Many men lack basic knowledge about risk factors for infertility. A 2016 Canadian study found that men could identify only about 50 percent of the potential risks to sperm production, largely missing out on known threats like obesity and frequent bicycling. “Most men just assume that when they want to have children they’ll be able to,” says Phyllis Zelkowitz, the director of research at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal and the lead author on the study. “But that isn’t the case for a certain number of people.”The continued ignorance of male infertility is, in its way, another form of male privilege. Pretending that pregnancy is almost entirely a female responsibility means that women are forced to carry the burden and the blame when it goes wrong, while men, who are just as vital to healthy conception, rarely worry about how their lifestyles impact their own fertility or their possible children. “Women will often be sent to invasive, expensive procedures for fertility before a sperm test is ever done,” says Resolve’s Collura.So men are getting off free while their female partners put themselves through painful and expensive fertility treatments. Well, not exactly. The constant production of new sperm cells makes semen highly sensitive to toxins and disease, making it an ideal surrogate for male health—“like blood pressure,” as Louis puts it—beyond what it might signal for fertility. Poor sperm levels and infertility are a clear sign that men’s health is failing. One 2015 study found that men diagnosed with infertility have a higher risk of developing health issues like heart disease, diabetes and alcohol abuse, while another connected infertility to cancer. “Semen quality isn’t just about a couple getting pregnant,” says Louis. “There is increasing evidence at the population level that men with diminished semen quality die earlier and have more chronic diseases. This is as important to health as any disease state.”That male reproductive health goes mostly ignored in the face of those concerns is a striking example of what Cynthia Daniels, a political scientist at Rutgers University and the author of Exposing Men: The Science and Politics of Male Reproduction , calls the “paradox of male privilege.” A society that values men over women would presumably pour money and resources into determining exactly what is happening to sperm counts and reproductive health. But that would risk confirming that men, who are socially conditioned to think of themselves as indestructible, are in fact vulnerable—and vulnerable in that part of themselves most vital to manhood. At a moment when other talismans of masculinity, like the ability to financially support a family, are under assault, acknowledging the risk to reproduction may feel even more threatening to men. “Recognizing the male reproductive health problem unravels the notion of who men are and how they achieve masculinity,” says Daniels. “It seems to be more important to protect our norms of masculinity and traditional gender relations than it is to address the real health needs of men.”
One way to accomplish that goal is to enable men to take responsibility for their reproductive health. That’s what Greg Sommer, the chief scientific officer of Sandstone Diagnostics, is trying to do with Trak, a kit men can use to evaluate their sperm levels. It’s one of several similar do-it-yourself sperm testing services that offer men the chance to assess their own fertility without stepping inside a doctor’s office. That approach is more than a mere convenience because men are significantly less likely to go to the doctor than women, especially men in their prime reproductive years, when their health is otherwise likely to be good.Real, substantive change is needed from the medical and funding communities to address the male infertility crisis. It may be true, as skeptics countered after the publication of Swan and Levine’s meta-analysis, that we’re a long way from declining sperm counts heralding the end of the human race, at least as portrayed in works of pop art like The Children of Men and The Handmaid’s Tale . Millions of men and women are having children every day—even if an increasing number need artificial help like IVF. Yet more and more countries find themselves unable to raise their fertility rates above the level needed to replace their population, leading one prominent demographer to prophesy that the world has already reached “peak child.”It’s difficult not to wonder and worry about what will come next. “It’s an inconvenient message, but the species is under threat, and that should be a wake-up call to all of us,” says Skakkebaek. “If this doesn’t change in a generation, it is going to be an enormously different society for our grandchildren and their children.”Assuming, of course, they can have them.
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Label salon products to disclose risks.
Imagine that your favorite hair product’s label read, “Warning: may cause infertility,” or listed “formaldehyde,” a cancer-causing embalming fluid, as an ingredient.
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Opinion
Label salon products to disclose risks
By David KleinAugust 17, 2017
Imagine that your favorite hair product’s label read, “Warning: may cause infertility,” or listed “formaldehyde,” a cancer-causing embalming fluid, as an ingredient. Whatever our products contain, you and I remain blissfully ignorant of our exposure and risk because professional cleaning and salon products often do not label their ingredients (although our hair probably looks fabulous).
The Legislature is debating AB1575 and SB258, two bills to improve labeling for salon-grade nail polish, shampoos and hair coloring, cosmetics and skin cleaning products, as well as toothpaste, household cleaning products and automotive industry cleaning products. If you or your loved ones use these products, you should ask your representative to ensure the bills pass. Let me tell you why.
Unlike medications, commercial chemicals undergo little, if any, testing before being introduced into our world. Currently, 9.5 trillion pounds of commercial chemicals pass annually through the United States: enough to dump a new 14-ton sack of industry-grade mystery dust on each American’s pillow each night of each year. Though some may temporarily irritate the skin and lungs, many are endocrine-disrupting chemicals like diethylstilbestrol, or DES, that disrupt our hormone systems and cause disease even in low doses.
The story of DES is one well-studied, notorious example of chemical harms. It was prescribed during the Baby Boom era to prevent pregnancy miscarriage, and is now linked to infertility, obesity and cancer in women who were exposed to this drug in the womb. New data suggest that even the grandchildren of women prescribed DES bear higher disease risks. Chemicals like DES can change the ways that inherited genes are turned on and off, their negative effects to ripple through our genes for generations.
Though industry does respond to public concern, poor transparency remains problematic. Take bisphenol A, or BPA. We know that BPA negatively affects adult fertility and babies’ neurologic development, so “BPA-free” stickers helped companies market their products to safety-aware consumers. While we were looking for stickers, BPA was merely replaced with similar chemicals.
Similarly, the so-called “Toxic Trio” (formaldehyde, toluene, dibutyl phthalate) found in numerous nail polishes prompted companies to claim their product was toxin free. A 2012 report by the California Environmental Protection Agency revealed that these claims were often false.
Some will complain that change is onerous. Surely, products often contain many ingredients, and chemical names read like over-hyphenated alphabet soup. It can be a confusing list. But this is not cause to conceal information. A legal requirement of disclosure will help to ensure the manufacture of safer, faithfully-labeled products.
Moreover, there are solutions. Small pictograms, such as a picture of a pregnant woman with an overlying “X,” will cut through the confusion and convey a message as clear as the modern skull and crossbones. In some cases, that may be appropriate too.
Keep our communities safe and informed. Tell your representative that you vote for transparency.
David Klein is a resident ob-gyn physician at UCSF.
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Cheese powder and other hobgoblins: A double standard in risk reporting.
When a company claims its products are safe, journalists are rightly skeptical. Why do alarmist claims from environmental groups get a free pass?
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Cheese Powder and Other Hobgoblins: A Double Standard in Risk Reporting
When a company claims its products are safe, journalists are rightly skeptical. Why do alarmist claims from environmental groups get a free pass?
08.11.2017 / BY David Ropeik
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IMAGINE a news story about a study that detected trace amounts of an industrial chemical in a popular food. The funder of that research claims it shows good news, that the doses of the chemical we’re exposed to aren’t high enough to worry about. But the funder was the chemical industry. That would set off all sorts of alarms about the honesty of that research, right? And it should, for you and for the reporter.
Now imagine a story about a study that detected trace amounts of that industrial chemical in popular foods or in drinking water, and the sponsors of that research claim that the findings show bad news, that the doses are high enough to pose a serious threat to human health. But that research was funded by environmental advocacy groups. Same situation, right? In both cases, organizations with points of view paid for research that produced findings that supported their point of view. That should prompt the same skepticism in you, and certainly in the reporter, right?
Well, it should. But often in cases like this, it doesn’t. As two recent examples illustrate, there is a dangerous double standard in news coverage of environmental and public health risks. Research funded by industry, playing down the risk, almost always prompts appropriate skepticism and challenge. Research by public health and environmental advocates, almost invariably playing up the risk, almost never does.
The first story, “The Chemicals in Your Mac and Cheese,” was published on The New York Times’ Well site on July 12. It reported that a study of 30 cheese products (solid cheese, cheese slices, the cheese powders that come in packets in macaroni-and-cheese boxes) detected trace levels of phthalates in all but one sample. Phthalates are industrial chemicals that have long been a subject of environmental groups’ alarms: Research suggests phthalates are endocrine disruptors — chemicals that interfere with our sensitive hormone system, potentially causing health problems in newborns and infants.
The story begins, “Potentially harmful chemicals that were banned from children’s teething rings and rubber duck toys a decade ago may still be present in high concentrations in your child’s favorite meal.” The language “high concentrations” is taken right out of the research funders’ summary. It needed to be questioned, but it wasn’t. The decade-old ban covers only products with phthalate concentrations of 0.1 percent or higher, and the highest concentration detected in the study samples was 0.0002523 percent.
Of course, one might fairly question the appropriateness of comparing chemical concentrations found in toys and those found in food, particularly given that some of the levels found in cheese actually exceed federal guidelines for things like bottled drinking water — arguably a more apples-to-apples comparison. But neither the advocates nor the journalist bothered to even make that case.
Moreover, when the story provides a link to the “study,” you are taken not to the research itself but to a summary written by an advocacy group, the Coalition for Safer Food Processing and Packaging. The summary starts with several paragraphs warning about the danger from phthalates, and only then describes the study itself. And the summary even includes a link to a website called “KleanUpKraft.” That fact alone should have been a red flag to The Times; it might have prompted the reporter to note that the funders of the research chose the cheese products to send to a lab for analysis, and out of the vast range of cheese products on the market, one-third of the samples they chose just happened to be Kraft products. While it’s true that Kraft is a major player in the global cheese market, this so-called research is a clear case of advocacy masquerading as science to advance a point of view. It cries out for some reasonable journalistic skepticism. The story contains none. (The Times did not respond to my requests for comment.)
Example two: the coverage of the Environmental Working Group’s release of a ZIP-code-searchable database of industrial chemicals that have been detected in trace amounts in public drinking water supplies. Widespread coverage ran under headlines like “Is Your Drinking Water Full of Dangerous Chemicals?,” “Is Your Drinking Water Safe?,” and “Cancer-Causing Pollutants Found in Mamaroneck Drinking Water, Study Shows.” All 18 versions of the story I read emphasized the EWG’s worrisome claim that many of these industrial chemicals have been associated with cancer and various other health problems.
While all the stories identified EWG as an environmental group, not one challenged its sweeping claims that at any dose at all, any of these chemicals can cause harm — even though in almost all cases, the levels were below state and/or federal safety levels. An advocate might reasonably point out that some of the chemicals measured are unregulated altogether, but the fact remains that the prima facie assumption of harm is a gigantic leap beyond what any respectable toxicologist or epidemiologist will tell you. Dose matters, not only to whether a substance causes any harm, but to what kind of harm, and how much. Yet every story merely accepted and repeated the worst-case interpretation of the science, the interpretation of an avowed advocate. Any reporter would surely have challenged this research had it been done by corporations claiming that it showed a reassuringly low potential for harm.
WHY DO JOURNALISTS raise concern about the reliability of science when it’s financed by corporations and industry, but not when the funders are environmental or public health advocates — who of course are also trying to advance their cause, honorable as it may be? The likely explanation is trust. We instinctively trust those we perceive to be on our side, and mistrust those who aren’t. Environmental and public health groups may have their own agendas, but they are on our side, the public’s side. Corporations and industry are on their own side, and selfishly put their profit above public interest.
I made the same gullible mistakes during my years as an environmental reporter, for the same reason. But such journalistic imbalance can do real harm. Reporting that fails to apply reasonable skepticism to the scientific claims of environmental and public health advocates — claims that generally play up risk and danger — leaves us more afraid of some things than the evidence suggests we need to be: genetically modified food, radiation and nuclear power, industrial chemicals. All of these things pose some risk, but not nearly as much as the most adamant advocates claim. Excessive fears lead to choices and behaviors that can have significant and harmful impact, both for us as individuals and for society. Fear of radiation that vastly exceeds the actual risk, for example, fuels opposition to nuclear energy, which emits no greenhouse gases and could help in the fight against climate change.
We need better from our science and environmental and health journalists. We rely on them to keep us informed about threats to our health and safety, so we can make the most intelligent evidence-based choices about how to keep ourselves healthy and safe. Stories like “The Chemicals in Your Mac and Cheese” and “Is Your Drinking Water Full of Dangerous Chemicals?” don’t help.
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Far-north warming and changes are accelerating, say Arctic Council groups.
The Arctic Ocean is now on track to become ice-free in summers as soon as two decades from now, while autumn and winter temperatures in the Arctic, if carbon emissions are not controlled, will be about 22 degrees higher in 2100 than they were at the end of the 20th century.
The Arctic Ocean is now on track to become ice-free in summers as soon as two decades from now, while autumn and winter temperatures in the Arctic, if carbon emissions are not controlled, will be about 22 degrees higher in 2100 than they were at the end of the 20th century.
The new forecasts of accelerated warming mark the condition of the Arctic at the end of the two-year U.S. chairmanship of the eight-nation Arctic Council, according to reports released by the organization's Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program.
Scientists are warning the pace of climate change demands a quick response against its causes.
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An aerial photo from NASA of sea ice, melt ponds and areas of open water in the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean, last July. In mid-November, parts of the Arctic were more than 35 degrees warmer than observed averages, scientists said, and at the pole itself, mean temperatures for the month were 23 degrees above normal. (NASA via The New York Times)
An aerial photo from NASA of sea ice, melt ponds and areas of open water in the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean, last July. In mid-November, parts of the Arctic were more than 35 degrees warmer than observed averages, scientists said, and at the pole itself, mean temperatures for the month were 23 degrees above normal. (NASA via The New York Times)
The reports come two weeks ahead of the council's ministerial meeting in Fairbanks, an event that will cap U.S.' two-year tenure and pass leadership to Finland. The reports were released at a four-day Arctic science conference in Reston, Virginia, and outlined in a pair of teleconferences held Tuesday.
With Arctic warming outpacing climate change in the rest of the world, the reports show why immediate action is needed to reduce global carbon emissions, said one of the scientists involved.
"The changes are cumulative, and so what we do in the next five years is really important on slowing down the changes that will happen in the next 30 or 40 years," said Jim Overland, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration oceanographer and a co-author of the Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic report, or SWIPA. "The emphasis on action and immediacy is one of the key findings" of the report, he said.
The new SWIPA report shows major Arctic trends documented in past years have accelerated.
Since the last SWIPA report in 2011, the Arctic has heated up to its highest temperatures ever measured by weather instruments. Arctic sea ice hit a record-low extent in 2012 and last year tied for the second-lowest level in the satellite record, according to the new report.
Greenland, the Arctic's biggest contributor to global sea-level rise, in 2011 to 2014, lost ice at twice the rate observed from 2003 to 2008, the report said.
The "big picture" described in 2011 is now more certain, as are projections for the future, said Martin Forsius, chairman of the monitoring and assessment program and research professor at the Finnish Environmental Institute.
"The difference is the confidence in the results is much greater," Forsius said at one of the teleconferences.
Dramatic warming and Arctic ice losses in recent years are behind the SWIPA projections for an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the late 2030s — an earlier date than is suggested by most models.
Predictions about when that milestone will arrive vary widely, from the 2060s to just a few years from now, Overland said. The new SWIPA report uses extrapolation of recent observations to come up with an estimate, he said.
"It's hard to pin down," he said. "But this last summer, the ice was particularly thin and diffuse. So it's not just the extent. The ice is changing within the pack."
Also new since 2011 is emerging information about how amplified Arctic warming affects the rest of the world. There is new information about far-north warming causing the jet stream to slow, meander and exacerbate midlatitude weather problems, the SWIPA report says.
Rising sea levels, of which a third is now attributed to melt of Arctic land ice, is already causing flooding, erosion and property damage in southern cities, the report says.
Another challenge is posed by newly discovered contaminants, many related to flame retardants, in Arctic air and water, according to a separate AMAP report on chemical pollution.
Chemical contaminants, many of them from pesticides and industrial products used in faraway southern latitudes, have plagued the far-north marine environment for decades.
There has been significant progress in controlling those legacy contaminants, known as persistent organic pollutants, thanks to an international treaty — the Stockholm Convention — and national-level controls, according to past Arctic Council monitoring.
But the new contaminants are adding to the legacy load, and some, like pharmaceuticals, have local sources, the report said.
[The Arctic Ocean has become a garbage trap for billions of pieces of plastic]
Microplastics, newly documented in Arctic waters, are posing growing problems. The tiny plastic bits, broken down pieces of voluminous trash dumped into the seas far to the south, provide a way for contaminants to get into the Arctic food chain, according to the report.
Chemicals like phthalates, a possible toxin, adhere to plastic and are absorbed by it, so fish, birds and other creatures that mistake microplastics for plankton and other food are ingesting the contaminants.
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Europe circles the circular economy.
Tempers flare over how to deal with hazardous chemicals in closed loop systems of the future.
Tempers flare over how to deal with hazardous chemicals in closed loop systems of the future
By Alex Scott
COVER STORIES
Can everything old be made new again?
Cleaning the clothing industry
Europe circles the circular economy
Jumping from a linear economy, in which materials and products are used once and then discarded, to a circular one, where products are designed to be recycled and their raw materials endlessly reused, has become a goal—a lofty one—for the European Union.
Backers see the circular economy as a win-win for the economy and the environment. Successful implementation could offset the European chemical industry’s lack of fossil-fuel-based feedstock while also meeting the region’s ambitious environmental goals. Critics call the concept idealistic and unworkable.
Either way, EU regulators are now in negotiations to develop waste-related regulations as a first step to a circular economy in the region. The European Parliament will vote on whether to adopt the regulations in the fall.
[+]Enlarge
Panelists at the recent Helsinki Chemicals Forum discuss which chemicals should be included in the circular economy. Seated from left: Puoskari, Smith, the Netherlands government environment coordinator Hans Meijer, Singhofen, and Warhurst.
Credit: Alex Scott
Rare bedfellows, the chemical industry and environmental activists both welcome the circular economy, but as recent clashes between the parties show, they have very different views on how it should be implemented.
The European Chemical Industry Council, or Cefic, Europe’s largest chemical industry association, likes the idea of being a first mover on the circular economy. The concept could provide the cheap raw materials the European chemical industry desperately needs, but it also presents major risks, said Peter Smith, Cefic’s executive director of product stewardship, speaking recently at the Helsinki Chemicals Forum in Finland.
“The devil is in the details,” Smith said. One devilish detail is which chemicals would be included in closed-loop recycling systems and which would be excluded on grounds that they present an unacceptable hazard to society. Inclusion or exclusion should be made on a case-by-case basis by looking at costs and benefits, Smith said.
Some environmental experts, though, want tough rules to apply from the outset. “Circularity alone could even increase problems when you have hazardous materials,” said Axel Singhofen, an adviser on health and environment policy to the European Parliament. “Toxics out, then recycle; not the other way around,” said Singhofen, who advocates excluding flexible polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and other chemicals from recycling systems.
Environmental activists say the 169 substances of very high concern,which include some phthalate plasticizers used in flexible PVC, that are already controlled under the EU’s Registration, Evaluation & Authorisation of Chemicals (REACH) chemical management law, should be automatically excluded from recycling systems under any circular economy legislation.
The circular economy explained
What is it?
A circular economy is one that is restorative and regenerative by design and that aims to keep products, components, and materials at their highest utility and value at all times. It distinguishes between nonbiodegradable materials for recycling and biological materials for composting.
Is it more than recycling?
Yes. Its goal is to minimize waste and maintain the value of materials rather than downgrade them. It also promotes sharing, reuse, and maintenance.
What are the benefits?
Potential economic and environmental gains.
Shortcomings?
There are no standards or fixed targets.
Challenges ahead?
Whole supply chains will have to work together, hazardous materials could undermine recycling streams, and waste regulations must be reoriented to promote resource reuse.
What groups are involved?
The European Union, United Nations, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, Product-Life Institute.
Many other chemicals—fluoropolymers and nanotubes, for example—have good properties but also unwanted qualities, so traceability is needed, said Mari Puoskari, strategy director for Nordic waste recycling firm Ekokem.
But industry executives at the Helsinki forum indicated that they aren’t about to be steamrollered on the issue. Giuseppe Malinverno, Solvay’s head of government and regulatory affairs, called out from the audience floor during an on-stage discussion to tear into Michael Warhurst, executive director of CHEM Trust, a U.K. environmental group.
A visibly angry Malinverno lambasted Warhurst, an environmental activist and chemist, for naming companies that he said had failed to substitute known hazardous substances in their products. “We’re not producing just for fun,” Malinverno said.
Ultimately, though, the chemicals to be included in—or excluded from—closed-loop waste streams will be decided by regulators. The European Commission’s broad thinking on the topic is that the region could extend its behemoth REACH regulation to manage chemicals in waste recycling streams.
In essence, Europe would create a hybrid chemical manufacturing and waste management regulation, said Bjorn Hansen, head of the European Commission’s chemicals unit.
Geert Dancet, who runs the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), the body responsible for implementing REACH, proposed that ECHA could become the body responsible for overseeing the tracking of chemicals in a circular economy. In this role, ECHA would provide information about exposure to chemicals to help evaluate their suitability for recycling, Dancet said.
But Cefic questions whether a REACH-style approach would be suitable. For example, in certain recycling systems, substances of very high concern may be diluted to such an extent that they no longer present a risk, Smith said.
Cefic also complains that a recent EU proposal to align waste management legislation with the circular economy doesn’t go far enough to remove barriers that prevent waste from being reused as raw material. “The proposal should have been more ambitious,” Cefic said in a recent comment on the proposal. Criteria for enabling the reuse of post-consumer residues should be reassessed so that valuable resources can be returned to the production process, it argued.
Beyond the question of what to recycle, the circular economy raises questions about how to recycle. The role of chemists and the chemical sector would be to develop novel materials that can be readily separated or novel processes for separating existing materials, such as the depolymerization of plastics. “This needs research, and we could help,” Smith said.
Funding for such research is already available in Europe via the Horizon 2020 research fund. This year and next, the EU will provide a total of $60 million to finance the development of technologies that support a circular economy. A further $400 million will be allocated to resource-saving processes.
Efforts to create a circular economy are already under way in parts of Europe, especially in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. For example, Swedish construction firm Skanska already applies circular principles to some building projects. The company’s biggest challenge is determining which substances are suitable for recycling.
“Our suppliers are the key. We need them to develop green products and provide clear and easily understood information,” said Eva-Lena Carlén-Johansson, sustainability program manager for Skanska.
The firm recently built a $1.9 billion hospital in Stockholm designed to be completely recycled at the end of its useful life. The client sought to avoid both PVC and phthalate plasticizers, Carlén-Johansson said.
For the project, a Skanska supplier, Hilti, developed an injectable tile mortar that is free of acrylates and has reduced dibenzoyl peroxide content. Advantages are that the mortar is not classified as hazardous waste and construction workers don’t have to wear protective clothing, Carlén-Johansson said.
Skanska has created a database of the materials used to build the hospital so that all components can be recycled. “This is an important approach for the circular economy,” Carlén-Johansson said.
In another move to reorient construction materials toward the circular economy, the chemical maker Saudi Basic Industries Corp. (SABIC) collaborated with the U.S. architect William McDonough and the building design firm WonderFrame on buildings made from polycarbonate sheets and aluminum that can be disassembled and reused.
The partners have used the approach to construct a building near Amsterdam in an area dubbed Circular Valley. Here, companies, the local government, and nongovernmental organizations are working together to convert the area into a “living lab” and international hub for testing approaches to the circular economy, SABIC said.
Other circular economy initiatives are also in play. Earlier this year, the U.K.-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation, created by former yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur and headed by former McKinsey & Co. partner Andrew Morlet, introduced a circular economy initiative for companies in the plastics value chain. Named the New Plastics Economy, it sets out a three-year program for consumer goods firms, packaging producers, plastics companies, and chemical firms.
The initiative seeks to create a mechanism for bringing all links of the value chain together and rethinking packaging materials and postconsumer handling. More than 40 companies have signed on, including Dow Chemical, Coca-Cola, and Unilever.
According to the foundation, the program is not just an exercise in being green but a way of recouping some of the 95% of the value of plastic packaging material, worth as much as $120 billion, that is lost annually as waste. A 2012 McKinsey report stated that EU manufacturing could realize net raw material cost savings of up to $630 billion annually by deploying a circular economy approach.
“We know this is the right thing to do for the environment, and there is also an opportunity to create value for business,” said Neil C. Hawkins, head of sustainability for Dow.
Dow recently took a step forward in this field with the introduction of polyethylene for making food packaging pouches that are fully recyclable. Standard pouches feature ethylene vinyl alcohol or polyamide barrier layers that won’t finely disperse in polyolefins during recycling. Dow’s approach is to use reactive polymer modifiers that coat polar components of the barrier layer to help it disperse during recycling.
“Technology is a key enabler in closing the loop,” Hawkins said, cautioning that society must be realistic. “Due to the complexity and cross-sector collaboration requirements to support a circular economy, adoption of this practice takes time.”
But not everyone considers the current approach to the circular economy to be robust enough to deliver truly sustainable resource reuse.
“Definitions of circular economy can be watered down to be almost anything that relates to an environmental agenda,” said Michele Field, an independent environmental consultant based in the U.K. “At present, organizations that commit to a circular economy approach do not need to meet any tight time goals or standards.”
It’s far from clear whether the circular economy will become a system Europe uses to transition to a new manufacturing paradigm or whether it will end up as just another environmental buzzword. But for now, the circular economy merry-go-round is turning. It’s an approach to sustainability on which European regulators, environmental activists, and even businesses are looking to hitch a ride.
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