Arlene Blum

Arlene Blum

Founder and Executive Director of Green Science Policy Institute

Arlene Blum : AB
Sooyeol (Suzy) Kim: SK
Robin Yoon: RY

 

SK: Hi, Ms. Blum!

RY: Hello.

AB: Hi.

SK: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. By way of introduction, I’m Suzy Kim. I’m a junior chemistry major at Harvey Mudd College.

RY: And I’m Robin Yoon, a junior computer science major at Harvey Mudd College.

AB: Delighted to meet both of you.

SK: Nice to meet you, too. To remind you briefly, we’re interested in gathering stories and insights from local leaders who have experience working to bring about change in our communities, and with your permission, we’ll record the conversation on our phones, type it up, and then run the transcript by you for your approval before posting it on the password-protected site.

AB: Okay.

SK: We’ve prepared a couple of questions for you to get us started. Our first question is, in the 70s your research contributed to the regulation of some cancer-causing chemicals used as flame retardants on children’s sleepwear. Were you involved in any of the policy part of the process?

AB: Yes, I was. I remember speaking to the children’s sleepwear manufacturers, talking about changing the protocols, and speaking to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. I think what we did is, we put our science together from a number of disciplines and wrote a lead article in Science, but we also, through the media, through government, tried to encourage the Consumer Product Safety Commission to change their standards so flame retardants were not needed in kids’ pajamas anymore.

SK: As a science-y person, I would think that scientists would stop at publishing results–this is at least my preconception–and leave the rest up to other people…

AB: Those other people are there. That’s what our institute does, so in this current field of flame retardants, there were literally thousands of papers on the harm of the flame retardants, and you would go to a legislator hearing and there would be lobbyists employed by the chemical industry, saying it’s not sound science to say there was any harm, and none of the scientists would be there. So there’s this huge gap between the mass of science and the need for policy, and who’s to fill it? We think scientists do have some responsibility to translate their science and make it available to decision makers.

SK: Earlier this year, from your webpage it says that the same flame retardants that have been used in furniture foams for years just got banned, so was this policy change process any different from when you worked on the policy change for the children’s sleepwear in the 70s?

AB: I’m not sure what you’re talking about. What got banned?

SK: Your website said that there is a policy…

AB: I don’t think anything got banned. I think the flammability standards changed so the flame retardants weren’t needed.

SK: Oh! Okay.

AB: When you ban a chemical, the replacement is usually the chemical’s cousin, so banning chemicals actually often isn’t that helpful, unless what you’re replacing it with is something safer. So what happened was, we had a furniture flammability standard in California that was met by the use of a lot of flame retardants, so now we have a different standard that provides greater fire safety for our furniture with no flame retardants. So nothing stands if you don’t need flame retardants and you don’t have to use them.

SK: Was this policy process change any different than when you went through the process in the 70s?

AB: In the 70s, it took three months. This time, it took eight years.

SK: So that’s a relatively short time for a policy change.

AB: Eight years?

SK: Oh, eight years! I thought you said “a year” and I was like, “Oh, it only took a year!”

AB: Yeah, eight years. Along the way, the chemical industries spent $23.5 million working to prevent the policy change. In the 70s, they didn’t do that, but now they did.

SK: So would you say that the biggest struggles involved in making change are these chemical companies that don’t want this kind of thing to happen?

AB: Yeah, because the industry has really figured out how they can control the process for their own profit, which makes it virtually impossible to change things. It’s possible, but it’s much harder. We think things can be changed much more rapidly, working with manufacturers, retailers. Well, of course, if flame retardants were required to meet the law, they have to meet it, but other kinds of harmful chemicals, once they’ve learned they’re harmful, they can just decide not to use them, take them out tomorrow, but chemical industries are very energetic in defending their market.

SK: From your experiences on bringing about these changes, what would you identify as the most important weapon?

AB: Science. Science really is very powerful. So, I’ve been doing this for eight years, and we’ve prevented about 12 new flammability standards that would put billions of pounds of flame retardants in pillows, mattress pads, electronics. They wouldn’t have provided any health benefits; it would’ve made a lot of profit for the flame retardant producers, and they’ve spent millions, hundreds of millions, and we’ve always been successful because we have science on our side. So science, when translated thoughtfully to decision makers and government, I think, is incredibly powerful.

RY: So, have you heard of how, last month, there was a bill passed in the House that–it’s called HR 1422. Some things that particularly worried me were that it would prohibit scientific experts from advisory activities that either directly or indirectly involve their own work, which sounds like they wouldn’t be allowed to share their expertise in their own field of research.

AB: Yeah, I’ve heard about this. It didn’t pass the Senate, but next Senate, it might, so Obama will have to veto it, probably.

SK: As a scientist who works with policy, we wanted to know your opinion about this bill.

AB: Well, I’m not familiar with it, but I am familiar with the fact that Republicans would like to shut down the EPA, though I’m sure it’s not helpful. It’s unfortunate it has so little authority already.

SK: In your opinion, what would bring about enough change so that EPA does have actual authority?

AB: Have you heard about ?

SK and RY: No.

AB: Well, there’s one law called TOSCA, the Toxic Substances Control Act, that regulates chemicals before they go out into the world, and it was passed in the 70s, and it does not give the EPA the authority it needs, so all the chemicals that were in commerce then, were called “grandfathered”, and they’re allowed and they really can’t be regulated. Asbestos kills 10,000 people a year, and the EPA is not successful in regulating asbestos, but you can say, “Well, asbestos is regulated, there are asbestos lawsuits.” There are, but everybody who files an asbestos lawsuit has mesothelioma, which is a fatal form of cancer, so everyone who goes into lawsuits dies. That’s how asbestos is regulated, so that’s not the best way to regulate chemicals.

SK: I watched one of your TED talks, and you start the talk off by mentioning that there are chemicals in our everyday lives known to be harmful to us, yet no one has the authority to do anything about it, like you just mentioned with the EPA. If we know something is harmful, what is blocking us from just banning that chemical?

AB: Who has the authority to do that? You know, the EPA doesn’t. If asbestos can’t be banned, which kills thousands of people a year, the EPA can’t, they’ve tried for years, because the standard of proof is so high to be able to ban a chemical, even asbestos. So that’s the problem: EPA does not have the authority to ban them. No one knows how. They have some regulatory authority but not on the thousands of chemicals that have been grandfathered in the Toxic Substances Act.

SK: Are there things that we, as students and individuals, can do in order to help with changing policies or maybe helping EPA gain the authority it needs to change some policies?

AB: Well, those are really hard things. You said you were a chemistry major?

SK: Yes.

AB: I think chemistry majors are very good at policy, and I’m not sure what kind of chemistry you’ll go into, but think about the chemicals you’re working on and their health effects. And if you can, when you’re a chemist, get a little involved in policy. Learn about the chemicals you’re working with and make that information available to decision makers. That’s what we do in Green Science Policy; our goal is to educate decision makers about chemicals, and our chemists are good at that. Right now, it’s quite complicated about which furniture might have flame retardants, so there’s going to be labels on furniture, so people can choose not to buy furniture with toxic flame retardants, so it’s helpful to tell people about that, warn them that they want to buy furniture without flame retardants because flame retardants are harmful to health.

SK: Would you say that, for science majors too, it’s important for us to be able to communicate ideas to the non-science majors?

AB: Absolutely, yes. You want to be able to understand the science well enough that you can still make sense of it. You ever heard of Richard Feynman? He’s not alive anymore, but he’d give these lectures that were so brilliant, so simple. He made science so understandable.

RY: Earlier, you mentioned that science is the most important tool in bringing about change.

AB: In my opinion, that’s just in my opinion.

RY: Okay. My perception is that, in the US government, there’s a lot of anti-environmentalism despite a lot of science on, you know, there’s pretty good consensus on the existence of climate change but a lot of politicians deny that it exists. Why do you think something like this is going on right now?

AB: Well, because people make a lot of oil and money on fossil fuels. Unfortunately, money is the big rival for all of this. And the people who want to make more money, they’ll spend a lot of money lobbying politicians, but I think science can bear against that. If it’s true and it’s not good and you’re a scientist, I think an impartial scientist could really stop it, but you have to start. It’s kind of the David and Goliath story, you know, with goliath corporations running their fabrications, and you have science which has truth, and it can do very well against the Goliaths.

SK: So I want to kind of go back to when you first started your policy work. Did you have any background in any kind of policy work?

AB: No. I just wanted to make the world a better place and solve problems.

SK: Then how did you get started? I feel like it would be hard for anyone to just say “I want to make a change so I’m going to do it.”

AB: Well I was working with Professor Bruce Ames, who founded the Ames test, and he did have a habit of calling the media when things happened. So we wrote a number of papers in Science. When we wrote a paper that had policy implications, Science would send it out to the press and they would talk to us. Then we would talk to people in government. So it was just really about sharing information with the decision makers.

SK: So do you find that people in government generally listen to science?

AB: Yes, I think they do. When I first went to talk to people in congress, which was when President Bush was still in office in 2007, people said that they never had a scientist come talk to them who was impartial, who didn’t work for a company. I think that they respected that I was there in the public interest, and not because I was trying to make profit. Are you interested in policy? Is that why you’re taking the course?

SK: Yes. At Harvey Mudd we have to do a humanities concentration and I’m a politics concentration just because I ended up taking so many interesting politics classes.

AB: Are both of you interested in politics?

RY: Um… (Laughs) Not at the moment. Maybe in the future, I’ll also want to use policy to make the world a better place as well, but at the moment not really.

SK: So if someone wants to make a change, like you did, how would we go about starting to make this change?

AB: Well an interesting example is a flame-retardant called brominated vegetable oil and it’s used in carbonated drinks. It makes the drink cloudy like Mountain Dew, Orange Fanta, and Gatorade.

SK: It’s a flame-retardant that’s used in soft drinks?

AB: Yes, the orange and lemony ones. If you look on the label, it’ll say brominated vegetable oil, which is also used as a flame-retardant. So a fifteen-year-old girl noticed that her Gatorade had brominated vegetable oil and it sounded weird so she looked it up. You can look this up online – there will be a lot of articles about it. And she was upset so she started an online petition where she got a few hundred thousand signatures. She also got a story in New York Times and the makers of Gatorade took the chemical out. It’s funny because I’ve known about it and knew it was a bad idea. I’ve written papers and had press release, but it didn’t work. But her petition worked. It’s banned in Europe and Japan but we use it here because, again, we have such a bad lack of regulations with chemicals that go in our products.

SK: When you were talking to politicians, were there any particular politicians that were hard to convince just with science?

AB: I usually just educate the politicians, usually the politicians themselves or their staff members. So for example, if you wanted to do policy and become perhaps Triple AS fellow – Triple AS is American Academy of Arts and Sciences – you would work in Washington D.C. in the office of a senator and then in the House. So I would go talk to people and it would often be young staff members or Triple AS fellows. I would explain the science to them and they would explain it to their boss, a senator or a congressman.

SK: So you said that it took 8 years to change this recent policy. Was the chemical companies trying to lobby against you the only problem that you ran into?

AB: Pretty much. For 6 years we had legislation but the chemical companies spent 23 million dollars against us. Then we changed governors; California elected new a new governor who understood the problems involved. So it’s really how the legislation went because the flame-retardant companies have so much money.

SK: Now that this new legislation passed, what are you working on currently?

AB: Well there’s no legislation; it was a regulatory change. We’re working on a lot of things and again on our website you can find out more about them. One thing is in the 70s, laws passed that led flame-retardants in furniture and building insulations, and it turns out that flame-retardants in those places don’t provide any protection and they are very harmful. Now the regulations have changed so that flame-retardants are not needed in furniture and they have increased fire safety. We’re similarly working on building insulations. We’re also working on what you do with all those toxic couches. People can now buy safe furniture without flame-retardants but all the old furniture go into landfills and can make its way back to the community. So the people are still being exposed to harmful chemicals.

We’re also working on something called six classes; these are six harmful chemicals in everyday products – you can go to sixclasses.org to learn more about them. But now we’re working on a new class… which is a carbon … bond; it’s one of the strongest bond in the periodic table. Because these molecules are incredibly stable they can last thousand of years and are toxic. They are in water, every day products like cosmetics and contact through clothing. People need to understand that they’re harmful even though they are in our every day products. Those are few of our projects.

SK: So you mentioned that there are these harmful chemicals in our landfills. Can’t those chemicals that are already in the landfills also affect us now?

AB: Depends on what happens to something called landfill foodchain. Sometimes landfills eats up this air, water, and soil and sometimes it ends up in sewage floods, So the harmful chemicals can end up in our food supply.

RY: Back to the change in regulations that went through recently after pushing for it for eight years. You mentioned that the chemical companies spent billions of dollars going against it. I was wondering if you could expand on how you managed to overcome that obstacle because that just seems like a lot of effort that they put in.

AB: When the new governor came into office, we explained the science to his advisors and they explained it to the governor. There’s a lot of pushback. One of the chemical companies called Chemtura was suing the state of California saying that they don’t have the right to do that, but Chemtura lost and California won. But they’re trying hard through publicity campaigns; they’re trying their best to put the flame-retardants back in. But they probably won’t.

SK: That’s all the questions that we had for you. Do you have any closing remarks about change in general or on the work that you do?

AB: Well I thought the way I wrote it in my memoir, which is called Breaking Trail, was good: that this is like mountain climbing in some sense. You see the sumit that you want to reach, you get a good team of people and we work with people all over the world: people in government, people in business. We make a plan and then it’s just hard work, taking a step at a time. There are storms, avalanches, set backs and often times there are catastrophes. But trotting along important; you just have to get past it.

RY: Thank you so much for letting us interview you. We will shortly send you the transcript so that you can review it for our website.

AB: It’s good that you’re interested. Did you sign up for our mailing list?
(Green Science Policy Institute offers monthly newsletter to anyone who wishes to receive updates on chemicals of concern, science, policy and protecting health)

SK: Not yet but I should do that.

AB: Yeah, you can just go to our website to do that. Well it was nice talking with you. It’s good that you’re taking this class. Bye.

SK, RY: Thank you.