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Shaker native's agency takes on toxins that endanger children

It's a parent's nightmare: dangerous levels of lead lurking in Spiderman lunchboxes, Disney "Princess" jewelry, and spicy candy made by subsidiaries of Hershey and Mars.

It was all there on the shelves of Target, WalMart, and many other retailer, and would be there still if it weren't for Michael Green, executive director and founder of the Center for Environmental Health (CEH).

Green, the son of former Shaker Heights residents Shirley and Scotch Green, attended Shaker Heights High School and the University of California-Berkeley, before embarking on a truly anomalous career path. Gifted with a creative approach to obstacles, Green traveled in India, Tibet, and China. He volunteered for Mother Teresa in Calcutta and worked on the garbage problem plaguing the Tibetan refugee community in Dharamsala, India. After graduate school at the University of Michigan, Green took a promising job in the US Department of Energy (DOE) in Washington, D.C.

And found himself a cog in a very big machine.

"Have you ever been in the DOE building in Washington?" he asks during a telephone interview with the CJN from his office in Oakland. "The building is so massive - three blocks long - that it's impossible to be (anything but) a cog." He came to this realization as he was being given an award by the Secretary of the DOE in a large assembly. "The award was for organizing an all-day meeting between the secretary and the people who live around the worst nuclear waste site." Green wondered, "Is this the pinnacle of what I can achieve? I think I can do more."

Doing something more

In 1996, he returned to the Bay Area, where he founded CEH and put his creativity into developing strategic ways to stop toxic exposures and protect public health.

Green says the small structure of the CEH suits his "entrepreneurial" nature. "Now I work with a dozen really motivated people," instead of a huge bureaucracy, he explains. "There aren't any memos, there isn't a long chain of command. If someone at CEH has a really good idea, we just do it."

Because California has effective consumer-protection laws, it's a good place for CEH. The California Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986 has a citizens' suit provision under which CEH brings public interest lawsuits against corporations that expose people to toxic chemicals without their consent.

Toxic trouble

Since WWII, "we have created tens of thousands of chemicals that didn't exist before," says Green. "And very few of these chemicals have been regulated."

Nor have we taken any protective measures, says Green. "Chemicals are assumed safe until proven otherwise." The result is "an unplanned science experiment. We don't know which of these things are going to have bad consequences."

One of the CEH's most pressing concerns is children's exposure to lead and arsenic. Children's developing bodies and brains are sensitive to even small amounts of lead, which can lead to learning disabilities, brain damage, neuropsychological deficits, attention deficit disorder and hyperactive behavior. Like lead, so-called "fat-loving" dioxins like PCP also pose a particular risk for children. These dioxins attach to fat and stay in the body as long as the fat does. They're also released into breast milk - a very scary thought - which may be why women who breastfeed have lower rates of breast cancer. ("At this point, I always stop to say that even so, breastfeeding is still better for children than formula," says Green.)

Protecting the most vulnerable

With so many unregulated toxins in the environment, how does the CEH pick its causes?

"We have several criteria," explains Green. "Who is being affected? If it's a community, is it one that is disproportionately impacted (by pollution, by poverty) already? Is it a vulnerable population, like children?" They also take in account how serious the health hazard is.

Finally, Green says, "we ask ourselves ‘How much leverage do we have? Is it a company or industry where we feel we can make a difference?'" CEH's strategic impact is enhanced when it has an ally or a collaborative relationship in place within the industry. Isn't government supposed to protect us?

Although they're not always recognized outside the world of environmentalists, nonprofit, non-governmental agencies like CEH perform a very important function, spanning the breach between government regulations and industry practices.

"Government is about making and enforcing laws," Green explains. "And it is difficult to get laws passed that will cost industry money, even if in the long term it saves society money."

Sometimes laws can't be enforced "because the government agency lacks the resources or because the laws aren't comprehensive or focused enough," Green acknowledges.

Two of CEH's recent successes - banning lead in lunchboxes and children's jewelry - are a good example of this. "There is a law about how much lead a child can be exposed to, but there's no law about how much lead can be in children's jewelry," Green says. Without specific legislation, "government didn't have the ability to investigate" that situation.

A ‘captured agency'

When the CEH had gathered solid scientific evidence that there was lead in the lining of soft vinyl lunchboxes, they went to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), which is charged with protecting the public from unreasonable risks from consumer products.

But the CPSC said that they'd already tested the lunch boxes, and while they did contain lead, there was not enough lead to pose a problem. Suspicious of their scientific methods, the CEH asked for their data and was refused. Requests from reporters were also turned down by CPSC.

"When they finally released the information (their science) wasn't that good," recalls Green. Regardless, "the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), based on the CPSC data, said, ‘We don't think anyone should be selling these lunchboxes to children.'" In an unusual move, the FDA notified makers of soft vinyl lunchboxes that they should stop marketing their products because any lead on the surface of a lunchbox lining can be expected to contaminate food and would therefore be a prohibited food additive.

Green's organization once had a good relationship with the CPSC. But "since Bush was elected, they have been very loath to take action to protect consumers from health hazards," he laments. "In my profession, they're what we call ‘a captured agency', (answering to) the very parties that they are responsible for supervising."

Change from within

The CEH is best known for its public interest lawsuits (see sidebar), but Green prefers collaboration to confrontation. "Lawsuits get media attention," he confirms. "And (your opponents) have to talk to you."

But Green prefers to work collaboratively with companies in a given industry. He cites, for example, the competition among "green architects" to see "who can be the greenest and the cleanest." The CEH can serve as a resource to architects trying to "crack the market" with buildings that use "the fewest toxic materials."

"I like working with a sector to help them to change the way they do business," he concludes. The more innovative the industry, the more successful this strategy is. "The computer industry is unique in that the innovators win (as opposed to, say, the clever marketers). It's a sector that can make quick change."

That bodes well for finding a solution to disposing of "the lead, cadmium, and all sorts of toxic chemicals no one knows what to do with."

"What if the computer manufacturer and the consumer had a mutual interest in making it easy to dispose of the computers once they're outdated? That would give the computer industry incentive to design computers with recycling in mind. The successful company would have the competitive advantage of saying, "We're the ones making the greenest, cleanest computers.'"