Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families

A national effort to protect families from toxic chemicals.

Beth Kemler

Beth Kemler

Mobilization Director

Beth Kemler is the Mobilization Director for Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. She has been organizing public interest campaigns for fifteen years, focusing on both policy and markets-based campaigns. Most recently, she served as the Virginia Director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, leading a team that got bills for climate solutions passed and exposed the commonwealth’s top climate-polluting companies. Before that, Kemler worked on Oceana’s successful campaign on mercury in seafood and organized students with Free The Planet! and the Connecticut Public Interest Research Group. Her professional organizing career started in college when she was a door-to-door canvasser in her hometown of Philadelphia.

Entries by Beth Kemler

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Eight reasons to actually celebrate on National Teflon Day

Today is National Teflon Day—but that is NOT cause for celebration. It is one of the worst “holidays” we can imagine because it’s the anniversary of the accidental invention of the first non-stick chemical that would eventually become Teflon in 1938. Since then, chemical companies have invented many other chemicals in the same class—per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). And these chemicals, which are used for stain, grease, and water resistance, have gone on the market with little to no testing, ending up in everyday products and contaminating our food, air, water, and bodies.

Although the Trump administration has fallen down on the job of protecting us from PFAS, public health advocates have worked alongside Congress, states, cities, and retailers to pick up the baton and run with it. And we’re making good progress!