An article in today's New York Times about workers sickened by n-hexane -- a potent neurotoxin used in Chinese manufacturing plants that produce iPhone components for Apple -- underscores the questions raised in my piece called "A Great Leap Backward" posted yesterday on The Pump Handle....

In an email received yesterday, January 12 about 4:30 p.m. Pacific Time, Dr. Jeong-ok Kong, an occupational health physician in Korea who works on behalf of Korean semiconductor and other high-tech manufacturing industry workers through an organization called SHARPS (Supporters of Health and Rights of People in Semiconductor...

Labor Day, its picnics, parades, and speeches have now come and gone. But as I wrote on The Pump Handle, despite the vast improvements in workplace safety that have taken place in recent decades, every day, fourteen U.S. workers die on the job - doing routine construction, electrical,...

As we've watched the Deepwater Horizon disaster unfold, Advancing Green Chemistry executive director Karen Peabody O'Brien and I have been thinking about how green chemistry can help change how we go about preventing the kind of toxic pollution now taking its toll on the Gulf Coast...

Pictures of oiled pelicans are in the news. Less photogenic and less obvious are potential adverse health impacts to responders or to Gulf Coast communities. But the recovery effort is putting tens of thousands of people in the path of toxic substances they would not otherwise encounter and there's concern...

This is what we know happened. On March 31, 2010, Park Ji-Yeon, who worked at Samsung's On-Yang semiconductor plant in South Korea, died of leukemia at age 23. According to Korean news accounts, Park began working at the Samsung plant in 2004 and was diagnosed with acute...

For the past ten days my inbox has been filled with FDA bulletins announcing recalls of food products ranging from soup to nuts, chips to dips, packaged burritos and pasta entrees, salami, cheese, and ground red pepper. On March 4th, the FDA announced an overarching recall that links...

Sunday of the "Week of Eating In." I am squeaking in under the wire with this entry. All week I have been thinking about what I, a penny-pinching freelancer who likes to cook and for whom eating in (and no take-out) is the default setting, would write about. On a...

We've sequenced the human genome, landed on the moon, invented smart phones and wireless Internet access, but from what the chemical and packaging industries have been saying in response to questions about the safety of certain products, American innovation may be in trouble.

This dilemma presented itself during testimony from...

On Sunday January 24, Carl "Danny" Fish, who worked at the DuPont plant in Belle, West Virginia died after being exposed to phosgene - a chemical so acutely poisonous it was used as a weapon during World War I but is now used to make pesticides, plastics, and other chemical...

On Thursday December 17, while the world was waiting to learn if talks in Copenhagen would produce a plan to keep the planet from heating up any further, the EPA made a flame retardant announcement of its own: Within three years - by the end of 2013 - the two...

While Afghanistan, the economy, Copenhagen and health care grabbed headlines this week, on December 2nd, Senators Frank Lautenberg and Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate Environment & Public Works committee, held a hearing on an issue that could significantly influence three out of four of those big ticket items....

On Friday November 6, despite opposition from the chemical industry, the house passed a bill that would strengthen chemical plant security and require dangerous chemicals that could be used in terrorist attacks to be replaced by safer alternatives. The measure, said chemical industry lobbyists, explaining their objection to extending...