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.

Each October, companies from the NFL to KFC use Breast Cancer Awareness Month to engage in “pinkwashing.” Happily, this October, there’s a Breast Cancer Awareness month promotion I can get behind.

The House unveiled a new version of the TSCA Modernization Act (H.R. 2576) last week and it will be voted on by the full House Energy and Commerce Committee tomorrow. We’ve generally been positive about the direction of this effort, in spite of the problems in the original discussion draft for a few reasons: The […]

States have been where most of the action to protect people from toxic chemicals has happened in recent years. So the the Udall-Vitter bill is rightly drawing fire for limiting the ability of states to act in several ways.

The chemical industry should not get to dictate the terms by which it is regulated.

The jockeying among presidential hopefuls in recent weeks has generated a new round of criticism of what’s called the “Wealth Primary” – the informal, but often decisive vetting of candidates by mega-donors.

The new Vitter-Udall legislation isn’t just “not good enough.” It’s not good.

The Democrats on the relevant House subcommittee proposed fixes to the Chemicals in Commerce Act, the deeply flawed reform legislation sponsored by the subcommittee’s chairman, John Shimkus (R-IL). Rather than engage on the proposed fixes, the industry dismissed it…

It was back in 2008 when I was sitting in a café, not to far from the Minnesota state capitol that I heard about the veto. Governor Tim Pawlenty had just vetoed two bills our coalition hard worked hard to garner bi-partisan support for. One of the bills he vetoed was a ban on certain […]

This past year has been both amazing and incredibly hard. We’ve had a rollercoaster of a year filled with land mines and successes, but we’re still making progress.  Thanks to you.  As we look forward to 2014, we can only imagine what is possible, and we know our progress depends on your actions and engagement.  When you […]