The Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal, India is an oasis of healing. Combining Western and traditional healing philosophies, the clinic empowers people to take responsibility for their own health. Clinic staff and patients maintain a healing garden where patients learn about the medicinal qualities of plants and then take home a plant to remedy some of their health problems. Satinath Sarangi, the clinic's director, says that "people take care of the plants and the plants take care of them."

All this, while sitting a quarter mile from the site of one of history's worst industrial disasters.

Just a short distance away is the rotting hulk of the Union Carbide pesticide factory. Thirty years ago the factory exploded, sending a poisonous cloud across a city of one million people as they slept in their beds. In one night of terror, thousands died and half a million people were injured.

Rightly called the "Hiroshima of the Chemical Industry", the abandoned factory still leaks poisons into the surrounding neighborhoods and children continue to be born with high levels of birth defects. Dow Chemical, the company that bought Union Carbide in 2001, claims it did not inherit Union Carbide's liability for Bhopal and refuses to clean up the Bhopal site or pay for any ongoing medical care for survivors.

Also see press release on the study from Silent Spring Institute, "Study measures carcinogenic flame retardants in people".    

TURI's Note: From December 5th to December 7th, the documentary film "Toxic Hot Seat" is freely available to watch online.  Click here for details. 

Plastic waste is one of today's major environmental concerns. Most types of plastic do not biodegrade but break up into ever smaller pieces while remaining a polymer. Also, most types are made from oil, a rapidly dwindling resource. But there are promising alternatives, and one of them is polylactic acid (PLA): it is biodegradable and made from renewable resources. Manufacturers use PLA for disposable cups, bags and other sorts of packaging. The demand for PLA is constantly rising and has been estimated to reach about one megaton per year by 2020.

The research groups of ETH professors Konrad Hungerbühler and Javier Pérez-Ramírez at the Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering are now introducing a new method to produce lactic acid. The process is more productive, cost-effective and climate-friendly than sugar fermentation, which is the technology currently used to produce lactic acid. The new method's greatest advantage is that it makes use of a waste feedstock: glycerol.

See original article in Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, "Endocrine Disruption in Human Placenta: Expression of the Dioxin-Inducible Enzyme, Cyp1a1, Is Correlated With That of Thyroid Hormone-Regulated Genes". 

Also see blurb from NIEHS, "Endocrine-disrupting chemicals interfere with placental thyroid hormone activity".

This fall, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) convened 21 experts from ten countries to assess the carcinogenicity of carbon nanotubes (CNTs), a class of nanomaterials.  What did they find?  As published in the October 31, 2014 issue of The Lancet Oncology Online, their conclusion was this: there is sufficient evidence from existing toxicological studies to warrant a classification of "possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B)" for one type of CNTs - multi-walled carbon nanotube-7 (MWCNT-7). These IARC findings reveal complexities facing our growing understanding of the hazards posed by CNTs, and the need to act on early predictions of harm. 

Current and anticipated uses of engineered carbon nanotubes are numerous and diverse: sporting equipment, anti-static paints, solar cells, wind turbines, disk drives, batteries, biosensors and water filters, among others.  CNTs are also being marketed as replacements for known chemicals of high concern, such as halogenated flame retardants in textiles and polymers and tributyltin in anti-fouling paints.

See article on this study in Phys.Org, "Green meets nano: Scientists create multifunctional nanotubes using nontoxic materials".  

The European Parliament (EP) Committee on Environment, Public Health, and Food Safety (ENVI) has published a study which analyzes the main differences between European Union (EU) and US legislation. This covers eight main subject areas including, amongst others, nanomaterials.

The study highlights that currently in both the EU and the US there is no specific legislation on nanomaterials. Rules for the use of nanomaterials or products containing nanomaterials are implicitly included in general regulations on chemicals. These regulations are Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006 on Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) in the EU, and the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) in the US. The TSCA is more flexible regarding the submission of safety data and the use restrictions than REACH. Furthermore, where the US does not include requirements for nanomaterials in other regulations, the EU expressly includes such requirements in product-specific legislation, notably notification and labelling rules for nanomaterials contained in cosmetics, food additives and biocides.