Sometimes it feels like there's a Target or Walmart around every corner -- and rightly so in many areas, because at last count nearly 6,000 of them were sprinkled across the U.S.

While that may seem like a sizable amount, consider this: There are roughly 24,000 dollar stores, and that's just counting the Big 3: Dollar Tree, Dollar General and Family Dollar.

With such a pervasive presence, it should come as no surprise that in many neighborhoods and communities, dollar stores are often literally the only store selling household goods, including food.

The next time you buy a stick of deodorant or a bottle of dish soap, consider this: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has tested and published data on only approximately 200 of the roughly 83,000 chemicals legally used to make products in the U.S., according to a California Senate review from 2010.

A top federal health official and hundreds of environmental scientists on Friday voiced new health concerns about a common class of chemicals used in products as varied as pizza boxes and carpet treatments.

The concerted public campaign renews a years-old debate about a class of chemicals known as poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs. After studies showed that some PFASs lingered in people's bodies for years, and appeared to increase the risks of cancer and other health problems, the chemical manufacturer DuPont banned the use of one type of PFAS in its popular Teflon products, and other companies followed suit.

At issue now are replacement chemicals developed by those manufacturers and used in thousands of products, including electronics, footwear, sleeping bags, tents, protective gear for firefighters and even the foams used to extinguish fires.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has something to say about what you wear.

While not a fashion arbiter and unable to advise on attire for family gatherings, the FTC oversees what appears on the labels inside your clothes. As the federal agency responsible for enforcing the Textile Products Identification Act and related laws, it makes sure clothing is accurately labeled with its fabric content. But it turns out, apart from these laws (and a few -- including some state laws -- that restrict certain hazardous substances from being used in children's clothing), there is no overarching U.S. law that regulates or requires listing of materials outside of fabrics that go into producing our clothing.

When we buy food, we're often buying packaging, too. From cherries to Cheez-It® crackers, modern foods are processed, transported, stored, and sold in specialized materials that account, on average, for half the cost of the item, according to Joseph Hotchkiss, a professor in Michigan State University's School of Packaging. Consumer-level food packaging serves a wide range of functions, such as providing product information, preventing spoilage, and protecting food during the journey from production to retail to pantry, fridge, or freezer. That's why food producers lavish so much time and money on it.

But what happens when these valuable and painstakingly engineered containers leach chemicals and other compounds into the food and drink they're designed to protect? Such contamination is nearly ubiquitous; it happens every day, everywhere packaged food is found, with all common types of packaging, including glass, metal, paper, and plastic.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the World Health Organization's specialized cancer agency, strongly disagrees with the conclusion of a scientific report on the causes of human cancer published in the journal Science on 2 January 2015 by Dr Cristian Tomasetti and Dr Bert Vogelstein.

This is an edited excerpt from the book Chemicals without Harm: Policies for a Sustainable World.

Every day thousands of people make decisions that affect the chemical market. Most decisions are about the costs, availability, and performance of products; few involve consideration of human health or the environment. If the consumer market offers an important opportunity for promoting safer chemical production and consumption systems, the amount of chemical information in the market must expand, and the number of products that take health and environment into account must increase. A chemical conversion strategy needs to address the chemical market.

The Great Lakes are being threatened by an invasion of tiny plastic orbs called microbeads, but lawmakers for one state that depends on this huge freshwater ecosystem have failed to do anything about it. That state is, of course, New York, where lawmakers this year sat on a good bill to ban these unnecessary bits of plastic.

That left local governments to try to do the state's job by banning these plastic irritants, county by county.

The culprits are often found in toothpaste, acne scrubs and other drugstore items. After use, these colorful little balls roll down the drain and slip through the country's sewer systems by the millions. Then they land in the nation's waterways where they can pick up toxic pollutants like PCBs. Fish mistake them for food, and then we humans eat those fish, microbeads and all.

In 1996, Guatemalan immigrant Myra Vargas and her Venezuelan husband Ernesto bought J&P Cleaners, a neighborhood dry cleaner in Boston. But something always smelled funny.

"The chemicals we used -- we knew they were not healthy," Myra said. She stayed away from the shop when she was pregnant with her second child.

Like most conventional dry cleaners in the U.S., J&P used a chemical called perchloroethylene, known in the industry as "PERC." The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has classified PERC as a "likely human carcinogen." Because it can be absorbed through the lungs and skin, it is primarily a threat to employees of dry cleaning businesses, who are subjected to it throughout the workday. But customers are also exposed when the chemicals seep out of clothing into the air in their homes.