chemicals

What Happens to Wildlife Swimming in a Sea of Our Drug Residues?

What Happens to Wildlife Swimming in a Sea of Our Drug Residues?

By Tara Lohan Fish hooked on meth? It’s a catchy headline that made the rounds a few weeks ago, but it represents a serious and growing problem. Our rivers and streams have become a soup of hundreds of drugs — mostly pharmaceuticals — that come from the treated water released from wastewater facilities. Conventional wastewater […]

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    Biden EPA Appears to Side With Chemical Industry in Microplastics Health Conflict: Greenpeace Investigation

    Biden EPA Appears to Side With Chemical Industry in Microplastics Health Conflict: Greenpeace Investigation

    By Julia Conley A Greenpeace investigation revealed Monday that the Biden administration appears sympathetic to oil and chemical industry giants — not the public, scientists, and public health advocates — regarding a push in Europe to curb the use of microplastics in everyday products. According to a report by Unearthed, Greenpeace UK’s investigative journalism unit, […]

    Your Makeup Is Probably Toxic. The U.S. Senate Is Trying to Protect You

    Your Makeup Is Probably Toxic. The U.S. Senate Is Trying to Protect You

    High levels of a marker for toxic “forever” substances have been found in 52 percent of makeup products tested in a new study. Accordingly, the U.S. Senate has recently moved to ban them from cosmetics. According to CNN, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of man-made chemicals that are pervasive in modern life. […]

    Antidepressants in the Water Change Crayfish Behavior

    Antidepressants in the Water Change Crayfish Behavior

    Antidepressants are designed to make humans feel better, but they can have a surprising impact on non-human animals when they enter the environment. That’s the take-away of a study published in Ecosphere Tuesday, which tested the impact of antidepressants on crayfish, important players in freshwater ecosystems, and found that they altered the animals’ behavior in […]

    Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ Found in Mainstream Cosmetics

    Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ Found in Mainstream Cosmetics

    A new study found toxic PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” in hundreds of widely used cosmetic products produced by major brands throughout the U.S. and Canada. The study, published in Environmental Science and Technology, found “high levels of organic fluorine,” which is a prevalent indicator of PFAS, in over half of 231 makeup and […]

    It’s Raining ‘Forever Chemicals’ Around the Great Lakes, Scientists Find

    It’s Raining ‘Forever Chemicals’ Around the Great Lakes, Scientists Find

    In the Great Lakes region, it is quite literally raining toxic chemicals. “You can actually say it’s raining PFAS at this point,” said Marta Venier, an environmental chemist at Indiana University, according to Grist. A team of American and Canadian scientists found high levels of PFAS chemicals, also known as “forever chemicals,” after studying the […]

    Forever Chemicals Found in Home Fertilizers

    Forever Chemicals Found in Home Fertilizers

    From the looks of it, “forever chemicals” could also be called “everywhere chemicals.” Toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have shown up in everything from drinking water to mothers’ milk. And, most recently, in the fertilizers home gardeners use to grow food. A report published last week by the Ecology Center and the Sierra Club […]