Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy

Rating:
Summary: Thornton's Poison
Review: "God created 91 chemical elements, man more than a thousand and the devil created one: chlorine." said Greenpeace in its Belgian August magazine in 1992. That is the credo of Greenpeace for its anti-chlorine campaign and is the fundament of the book of Thornton, who still works (occasionally?) for Greenpeace.
There is no difference in methods used by Thornton as author of his MIT-based book and Thornton as (co)author of several brochures about chlorine/PVC as Greenpeace worker. There is only a difference in style, which makes it even more difficult for the average reader to know where the author is a little economical with the truth. Or to say it with the words of the Hamburg (Germany) court in the case of Greenpeace e.V. vs. Engelbeen: "The reader understands from the actual context of the text that Greenpeace presents facts that are overstated or, even though they give true information about a fact, they do not give all the details, so that at the very least a false impression can be created in the mind of the person receiving the message.". That is what Thornton does again and again in his work.

The basic assumption that the introduction of chlorine in an organic molecule in general makes that molecule more toxic is true. But that this is also true for the introduction of oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen(oxides), phosphor(oxides), etc. is omitted. Every organochlorine that can be inhaled, ingested or can pass the skin is toxic, carcinogenic, mutagenic, hormone-disrupting, etc. at some dose. But that is also the case for all organics, whether these contain only carbon and hydrogen (as is especially the case for aromatics) or other elements like oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen,... Again that is omitted from the book.

The introduction of chlorine makes a molecule more fat soluble, but that is similar to the addition of a CH3 group (an extra carbon with three hydrogen atoms) to such a molecule. Indeed some organochlorines are POPs (persistent organic pollutants), that means persistent *and* bio-accumulating *and* toxic. A few hundred of the more than 10,000 industrial and over 2,000 natural organochlorines can be found in human blood. With the today's analytical techniques, we can assume that most of the others are either not persistent enough, or don't bio-accumulate at all, or are released in such minute quantities that they can't be detected, even not after bio-accumulation, which makes their environmental relevance rather questionable. But that also can be said of a few hundred of non-chlorinated materials like PAHs and nitro-PAHs. While their bio-accumulation is mainly at the lower end of the food chain, their impact is far higher than for organochlorines like dioxins, as they are released in quantities which are orders of magnitude higher. Further, (nitro)PAHs are cancer inducers, while dioxins are cancer promoters at high levels, but cancer inhibitors at low levels...

One can write a similar book about the dangers of oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen, phosphor,... for all life on earth. That will be more difficult than for chlorine, for the simple reason that much less is known of the results of the introduction of these elements into organics. But what is known don't make them less suspect than organochlorines. And nature is not less toxic, carcinogenic, mutagenic,... than industry, to the contrary...

A few examples of (deliberate?) omissions by Thornton: Half lives of organochlorines are given in *pure* water (page 33). E.g. for 1,2 dichloroethane (EDC, an intermediate for making PVC) that is 72 *years*. That has nothing to do with real life, where bacteria break down EDC within three *days* (figure from the biological waste water treatment where I work)!
Thornton only gives carcinogenity figures for organochlorines and omits these for the "safe" alternatives (page 60). According to the German Occupational Health Authority, 50% of the workplace carcinogens are nitrogen compounds, 30% others (metals, hydrocarbons) and 20% contain chlorine, while chlorine is involved in 60% of all chemical processes...
Thornton gives the graph of dioxin deposition to the Great Lakes sediment (page 228), but stops in 1980, so that there is a good correlation with chlorine production. But he omits the 1980-2000 data which show that with steady chlorine production (and a tripled PVC production), dioxin deposition has fallen dramatically back to the pre-1945 levels.
Thornton even promotes alternatives for PVC (page 366), where the process (iron ore sintering, all from uncontaminated raw materials!) emits orders of magnitude more dioxins than PVC in its whole life cycle. The steel sector is good for 118 g TEQ dioxins in Belgium, the PVC industry emits only 0.025 g... Rather strange for a promotor af the "precautionary principle"...

There are such incredible (deliberate?) errors in what he says about the emissions of the EDC/VCM factory where I work, which are published every year since 1989 (and occasionally by the Dutch government and the UNEP), which are known by Greenpeace, that this alone completely discredits his work.

But if you believe that chlorine is invented by the devil, this is the book for you. If you are more critical, look at the detailed critique on the Chlorophiles web pages...

Sincerely,

Ferdinand Engelbeen
Worker in a chlorine/EDC/VCM/herbicides production site in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Rating:
Summary: Double Value: on Environmental *and* Information Strategy
Review:

This is the best of the several environmentally-oriented books I have reviewed recently, and it offers a double value: not only does it lay out a persuasive social, economic, and political case for abandoning the Risk Paradigm of permissive pollution in favor of an Environmental Paradigm of zero pollution; but it also provides a very fine--really excellent--case for why the current government and industry approaches to information about the environment and threats to the environment are severely flawed. In a nutshell, the current approach divorces "good science" (code for permitting what you can't prove will kill the planet today) from social consciousness and good policy; and the current approach insists on studying risk one contaminant at a time, rather than as a whole.

This book is persuasive; I believe author has the right stuff and should be consulted on major policy issues. I believe the underlying moral values and intellectual arguments that this book makes, about both science and social policy, should be adopted by the Cultural Creatives and the independent voters of America, and that the recommendations of this book are so serious as to warrant country by country translations and promulgation.

This book is exceptional in that is combines a readable policy essay for the non-technical citizen, with deeply documented technical appendices and notes that support a middle ground series of chapters relating scientific findings to long-term policy issues.

From many small actions come revolutionary change--this book is a necessary brick in the road to environmental reform. The bottom line is clear: every year more and more toxins are building up in our blood streams, and this is going to have an overwhelmingly negative impact on the humanity, capability, and survivability of our great grandchildren three generations down--we have not have grandchildren seven generations down if the insights from this book fail to reach the people, and through the people, the policy makers and legislators.

Rating:
Summary: A Clear Eyed View of The Problem...And A Solution
Review: Mr. Thornton has an eagle-eye view of the problem and presents it in layman's terms. This is a book that is well-written, factual, and presents actual solutions instead of just ringing the alarm bell.

The current industry-driven approach which assumes chemicals "innocent until proven guilty" has clearly failed us. It is based on a microscopic and simple linear chemical-by-chemical rating system. This approach does not take into account accumulation of pollutants nor does it address the myriad and exponential effects of the chemicals in all the complex systems in the biosphere whose dynamics are still only dimly understood. This approach is heavily tilted towards the polluters as Mr. Thornton so skillfully shows.

Mr. Thornton presents a solution that includes a much more prudent "guilty until proven innocent" approach that puts the rights of human beings and the planet first. He proposes viable alternatives for chlorine-based products and proposes a new paradigm for rating chemicals and classes of chemicals that takes into account all the "unknowns" and accumulation problems that the pro-industry (and one currently used by our own EPA)...does not.

Mr. Thornton advocates true science be applied to the problem instead of the "good science" that industry always touts. Unfortunately the term [servant]whore to corporate interests.

A call to arms has been rasied and champion has arisen. Mr. Thornton, on behalf of all humans, plants, and animals....thank you. An excellent job and stunningly good book.

Rating:
Summary: A well crafted deception
Review: Reading Pandora's Poison, I couldn't help thinking of Dante's Inferno. Thornton takes the reader on a tour of the modern-day inferno of chemicals we've created since the rise of chlorine chemistry in the early 20th century. Of course, we've known all along that these poisons were out there (and in here, and everywhere) and we knew they were troublesome, even deadly. But reading this book was the first time I took the full tour. Thornton hands the reader big pieces of technical information, but he walks you through them thoroughly, in language the literate adult can understand. I found myself reading passages over and over again, not because their meaning was unclear, but because, for the first time, the meaning of corporate chemistry and its effects was all too clear. It's obvious that while we have long known how to manipulate industrial chemicals to make our gewgaws, it is only recently researchers and writers, like Thornton have taken the time to assemble evidence of what we have done by releasing these compounds into the environment.

If that isn't enough to convince you of human crassness and myopia, Thornton then takes us on a tour of the convoluted regulatory system that allows these pollutants into our air water and food, and shows us how our civil servants, who are supposed to protect us, instead give protective cover to the miserable merchants of industrial poison.

Finally, he provides a solution, which isn't perfect, but would be a significant step in a positive direction and leaves me thinking the needed answers can be found if we devote half as much cleverness to fixing this problem as we did to causing it.

Rating:
Summary: A great environmental book
Review: This extremely well-written book makes a powerful argument for a fundamental but practical change in the way government and the chemical industry do business. It is amazingly well referenced and makes a powerful case that synthetic chemicals based on chlorine are harming everyone's health -- not just people who live in polluted areas but the general public, because hundreds of these chemicals can now be found all across the planet. And the book shows in a very fresh and convincing way that this problem has occurred not because we have no regulations but because we have the wrong kind. The new strategy the author discusses is a big change from the current system of bureaucratized pollution, but its strength is that it is based on principles that, after reading the book, seem like just common sense. A secondary theme is a very interesting discussion of how corporate power shapes environmental science in both subtle and obvious ways, and the implications of this for our assumptions about science and democracy. Well worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: It's What He Leaves Out That Hurts
Review: This is an ambitious book that has a lot to teach us, but it is flawed by what the author chose to hide from his audience. For example, he fails to report the dramatic decline in human exposure to toxins during the past 20 years; the major methodological flaws in research he cites as "proof" of a negative effect on human health from exposure to background levels; the very tenuous and often false assumptions that lie behind his proposed "new paradigm" (and the fact that this paradigm isn't new at all, but standard fare for many years from Greenpeace and other anti-technology voices); and more. I give Thornton credit for admitting his anti-corporation and pro-government biases at the outset and, at the end, calling for a socialist reorganization of the U.S. economy and higher education. Discerning readers will recognize just how far from the intellectual mainstream Thornton and this book are. I do not recommend it.