Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families
A national effort to protect families from toxic chemicals.
Tribute to Andy Igrejas, environmental health hero
We lost a dear friend, colleague, and extraordinary public health champion this past weekend. Andy Igrejas was all of the above and more, and we’ll miss him greatly. Over these last dozen years, he founded Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families and led us in an ambitious marathon of a national campaign that resulted in the first major update to our broken chemical safety law, the federal Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), in forty years.
Annual retailer report card will rank a dozen new companies this fall
As the federal government continues to roll back and undermine critical environmental and public health protections, we are amplifying our efforts in the marketplace to drive hazardous chemicals out of our homes and communities through our Mind the Store campaign.
One way we continue to do that is through our annual Who’s Minding the Store? retailer report card, which benchmarks the progress of the nation’s biggest retailers toward requiring products they sell utilize safer chemicals for consumers and workers.
Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle show concern about PFAS water contamination crisis at hearing
This week the House Energy and Commerce Environment Subcommittee held a hearing on perfluorinated (PFAS) chemicals in the environment. Millions of people across the United States are exposed to drinking water contaminated by toxic PFAS chemicals.
Protecting the safety net for new chemicals under TSCA
Few aspects of the new TSCA law have been at more risk than the section 5 premanufacture notice (PMN) program, which provides critical safeguards against unsafe new chemicals entering commerce. The amended law put considerably more teeth in this program, but from day one, the chemical industry has sought to block EPA from implementing the tougher review process that the law required.
Walmart joins other retailers with ban on deadly paint removers
Walmart announced today that it will phase out the use of the toxic chemicals methylene chloride and N-methylpyrrolidone (NMP) in paint removal products it sells in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America, and on walmart.com by February 2019.
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In our second annual report card on safer chemicals in consumer products, the Mind the Store Campaign found that one-third of 30 major U.S. retailers are leaders, but two-thirds remain serious laggards.