{"id":60724,"date":"2013-01-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-01-29T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/uri-oceanographer-appeals-for-legislation-to-reduce-chemical-pollution-in-oceans\/"},"modified":"2013-01-29T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-01-29T00:00:00","slug":"uri-oceanographer-appeals-for-legislation-to-reduce-chemical-pollution-in-oceans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2013\/01\/uri-oceanographer-appeals-for-legislation-to-reduce-chemical-pollution-in-oceans\/","title":{"rendered":"溏心vlog免费B站 oceanographer appeals for legislation to reduce chemical pollution in oceans"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tNARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 January 29, 2013 \u2013 A 溏心vlog免费B站 scientist who studies chemical pollutants in the marine environment is calling on Congress to pass the Safe Chemicals Act or similar legislation that would reduce the growing number of harmful chemicals in the world\u2019s oceans.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThere are thousands of chemical compounds that are used by industry for all sorts of purposes, and it turns out that they aren\u2019t well regulated at all,\u201d said Rainer Lohmann, a professor in the 溏心vlog免费B站 Graduate School of Oceanography. <\/p>\n


\n\tLohmann said that when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was started and the first legislation was passed to regulate chemicals in the environment, about 100,000 compounds that were in use at that time were grandfathered. \u201cNo one suggests that all of those are bad, but it doesn\u2019t take many of them to create a serious problem,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n


\n\tAn international agreement to ban the worst of these compounds, called the Stockholm Convention, went into effect in 2004, but the United States has not ratified the agreement. The Toxic Substances Control Act was passed by Congress in 1976, but efforts to enforce it have been overturned in court. As a result, Lohmann said that the U.S. has no effective legislation to regulate chemicals.<\/p>\n


\n\tHe advocates for passage of the Safe Chemicals Act, proposed by U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) to reduce the dangerous toxic chemicals found in everyday consumer products. The bill gives the Environmental Protection Agency the tools to require health and safety testing of toxic chemicals and places the burden on industry to prove that chemicals are safe.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cOur current system is based on proving harm after it has occurred,\u201d Lohmann said, \u201cand that\u2019s not a wise use of resources. Currently we have to wait for a compound to be produced in such huge quantities before we see its negative effects, and then we start to review and regulate it. In most cases, we don\u2019t know if something is harmful for decades, and that\u2019s a very dangerous approach.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tLohmann said the European Union is taking a precautionary approach that he believes the U.S. should follow. \u201cIf you want to produce a chemical, you have to determine all the potential downstream effects before you get the approval,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n


\n\tBecause of what Lohmann said is the poor track record the U.S. has for regulating chemical compounds, he believes all compounds that are on the market should be rescreened, beginning with those produced at the highest volume. \u201cYou can predict which ones are likely to be harmful based on their chemical structure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n


\n\tSeveral private groups have already studied most of the 100,000 compounds in use today and identified about a thousand that have properties that would make them toxic, persistent in the environment, and accumulate in tissues.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve been studying ocean basins from the Arctic to Antarctica, and I can find legacy compounds present everywhere I look,\u201d said Lohmann. \u201cTheir concentrations are slowly going down while new ones are increasing. It\u2019s an uphill battle, especially when we\u2019re doing little to regulate them.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tThe 溏心vlog免费B站 scientist decided that the best way he can contribute to solving this hazardous problem is by advocating for regulations and legislation.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve realized that the reason people like me are needed right now is that we are living in a world full of unsafe chemicals, and changing the status quo would help a lot,\u201d Lohmann said.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cMost of our bodies work from biochemical cues \u2013 that\u2019s how we grow and function \u2013 and now we have these manmade chemicals that may be messing up the signaling, especially for young people. I\u2019m a father now, and the last thing I want to happen is for my daughter to have adverse effects from chemicals that she shouldn\u2019t even have in her body in the first place,\u201d he said.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 January 29, 2013 \u2013 A 溏心vlog免费B站 scientist who studies chemical pollutants in the marine environment is calling on Congress to pass the Safe Chemicals Act or similar legislation that would reduce the growing number of harmful chemicals in the world\u2019s oceans. \u201cThere are thousands of chemical compounds that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60724\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}