Issues > April 18, 1996 (#23) > Our Barbies, Ourselves: The End of Innocence in the Age of Dioxin

Our Barbies, Ourselves: The End of Innocence in the Age of Dioxin

For decades, many parents have doubted whether the Barbie doll, with her sex-object proportions, is an appropriate role model for our daughters. We don't want our daughters to stop eating in an attempt to mold themselves into Barbie's shape. But there's another compelling reason to think twice about Barbie: she contains polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a plastic whose manufacture and disposal creates dioxins--the most toxic man-made substances known. "Barbie is toxic if you consider the entire lifecycle of the toy, from its manufacture to disposal," says Charlie Cray, toxics campaigner with Greenpeace. "Incineration of PVC products is a major source of dioxins release."

According to the EPA's most recent assessment (1994), there is no threshold dose at which dioxins begin to do damage to people and animals--any amount of dioxins causes some degree of harm. An industrial by-product, dioxin causes cancer at levels far below any other carcinogen, as documented, using EPA figures, in Dying From Dioxin by Lois Gibbs and the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (CCHW). For purposes of this article, "dioxins" includes the furans and polychlorinated biphenols--PCBs--that have dioxin-like properties.

The non-cancerous effects of dioxins, however, may ultimately prove more grave. As endocrine disruptors, dioxins appear to suppress and damage our hormonal and immune systems, as reported in Our Stolen Future by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers. The book describes how dioxins, PCBs and DDE--the substance into which DDT breaks down in our bodies--mimic estrogens. In one case, nonylphenols--substances in PVC--leached from test tubes into lab cultures and caused proliferation of breast cancer cells.

Last year, when Lois Gibbs attended a community meeting in Chehalis, Washington, downstream from a dioxin-contaminated former wood treatment plant, young local men reported that they don't grow facial or chest hair; women told of abnormal vaginal bleeding and a high incidence of hysterectomies. Endocrine disruptors have been linked to endometriosis, breast cancer, low sperm counts and other reproductive problems. (Now the Ken doll's lack of anatomical correctness seems prophetic.)

Dioxin is in all of our bodies. According to the EPA, 90 percent of our exposure comes through food. Dioxins accumulate in fatty tissue, moving up the food chain from fish and cows to humans. Human infants are at the top of the food chain; they take concentrated doses of dioxin in their mother's milk.

The greatest source of dioxins is incineration of chlorine-containing medical and municipal waste--including PVC bottles and medical syringes. The second-highest release of dioxins occurs during the chlorine bleaching of paper. Third, dioxins are produced during the manufacture of PVC, herbicides (such as Agent Orange, which was made by Diamond Shamrock) and some household cleaners. Dioxins enter the food chain through the air, water and soil.

How do we remedy the situation? We need to stop dioxin production at the source. Industrial use of organic chlorine must be phased out. We can also refuse to buy products packaged in or made with PVC. "Read labels," says Charlie Cray. "Anything that says 'vinyl' is likely to contain PVC. In disposable packaging you'll find the recycling number on the bottom--for PVC it's '#3.' But it's a virtually unrecyclable material." We can demand that Mattel, which has phased out PVC packaging, do the same for PVC in its toys.

The EPA has known since at least 1988 that dioxin is produced during the manufacture of PVC. But in 1990, after pressure from the Vinyl Institute, Dow Chemical and others, the EPA deleted dioxin from a list of contaminants to be monitored and controlled in PVC manufacturing waste.

It's in Our Air, Water and Food

Once in the air, dioxin washes out or settles onto soil, plants, water and the beds of rivers, lakes and the sea. Deep-ocean fish have lower levels of dioxin, but coastal fish and shellfish have higher levels due to pollution of coastal sediments.

We can drastically cut our dioxin exposure by reducing our consumption of fish, poultry, meat and dairy products. But, dioxins have been accumulating in our fatty tissues all our lifetimes. The half-life of dioxins in our bodies (the time it takes for half of a given amount of dioxins to break down) ranges from seven to eleven years. Studies show that, while human breast milk contains high concentrations of dioxins, it is prenatal exposure to dioxins from the mother's body that does the most harm (see sidebar on breastfeeding).

The elimination of animal fats from our diets will not stop the continued production of dioxins, nor will it protect those who live near industrial sites and dumps contaminated by dioxins that they absorb directly through their water and air, as did the citizens of Love Canal. And because dioxin is such a pervasive global problem, you don't have to live near a Superfund site to get sick from dioxin exposure.

Dioxins are everywhere. New York Harbor is filling up with sludge that needs to be dredged to keep the port in operation. Not surprisingly, contaminants in the mud, such as dioxins that flowed from an Agent Orange factory on the Passaic River, prevent the Port Authority from dumping the sludge at sea. What has caused surprise, however, is the recent discovery of high levels of DDE, PCBs and other dioxin-like compounds in the eggs and bodies of black-footed albatrosses at Midway Atoll in the remote North Pacific. Effects include deformed embryos and the thinning of egg shells.

As Lois Gibbs writes in Dying From Dioxin, "When we won evacuation from Love Canal, we thought we were saving our children from further damage from dioxin. I didn't realize that the dioxin from a hazardous-waste-burning cement kiln in Florida could end up in the milk of a cow grazing in Virginia and then end up inside my kids." In 1978, Lois and her neighbors at Love Canal, near Niagara Falls, New York, discovered that their homes were built next to a toxic waste landfill created by Hooker Chemical Company (owned by Occidental Petroleum). The elementary school stood on the banks of the canal and the playground sat directly above the dump. As evidence of leukemia, birth defects, miscarriages, asthma, central nervous system disorders and urinary tract disorders mounted, elected representatives, Hooker Chemical's executives, scientists, and public health officials were all unwilling to take action to protect Love Canal residents from further harm. Only after the Love Canal Homeowners Association initiated a strategic direct action campaign, making their demands in persistent, highly visible ways, did they win evacuation and relocation. Lois moved to Virginia, where, in 1981, she founded the CCHW (now named the Center for Health, Environment and Justice), which provides organizing assistance and technical support to communities faced with an immediate environmental threat.

It's In All of Our Bodies

Dioxin exposures are measured in picograms (one-trillionth of a gram) and nanograms (one-billionth of a gram). According to the 1994 EPA assessment, most people are exposed to 3-6 picograms (pg) of dioxins per kilogram of body weight each day. This intake results in 30-60 parts per trillion (ppt) of dioxin, on average, in our body fat.

It's Making Us Sick and Causing Infertility

How dangerous are these levels? The answer from EPA is not comforting. The agency reports that people at the high end of the range may be experiencing reduced reproductive capacity in men (based on decreased sperm counts), higher probability of developing endometriosis in women, reduced ability to withstand an immunological challenge--in brief, damaged immune and reproductive systems. For cancer, current exposure levels per day, for human beings, are 300 to 600 times what the EPA calculates is "acceptable" risk.

While dioxin is an extremely potent carcinogen, the EPA concluded that its non-cancer effects on our immune and hormonal systems are actually more significant and may harm a much larger group of people.

Citizens' Response: Uniting in Action

Diverse coalitions of dairy farmers, meat producers, fishermen, workers and concerned citizens are already making a difference. Their goal is to halt all incineration; phase out industrial use of chlorine, including its use in pulp and paper manufacturing and in PVC plastics; include provisions for affected workers and promote safe alternative jobs, products and technologies.

Low-income people and people of color suffer disproportionately. "Vinyl production facilities are predominantly sited in African-American and low-income white communities," says Charlie Cray. These included Reveilletown and Morrisonville, Louisiana, which were bought out and relocated in 1988-89 by Georgia Gulf and Dow Chemical, respectively, following vinyl chloride contamination.

Love Canal was a blue-collar community. East Liverpool, Ohio, is a community of blue-collar people, poor people and people of color that has for fourteen years been fighting against the operation of the world's largest toxic waste incinerator. The EPA-promoted facility was built, over their objections, on a bluff above the elementary school. It might still go into operation, despite the ruling of a federal court, using the EPA's own criteria, that the incinerator would pose an unacceptable risk.

In New York City's South Bronx, often referred to as the poorest Congressional district in the U.S., a medical waste incinerator was built without the community's knowledge. Since 1991 the Bronx Clean Air Coalition, uniting individual parents and youth with local environmental, civil rights and community groups, has been working to close down the incinerator.

Dying From Dioxin includes a guide to organizing. Since it was published last year, CCHW has assisted in the formation of many new stop-dioxin-exposure coalitions. In February 1996, at the invitation of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, lobster fishermen, Trout Unlimited, the Council of Churches, the Paperworkers Union, the American Association of Retired People and a broad array of environmental and social change activists met with CCHW to discuss how to eliminate dioxin pollution by the pulp and paper industry. Two hundred and fifty miles of Maine rivers below chlorine-based pulp and paper mills have warnings posted, advising women of childbearing age not to eat the fish.

As Lois Gibbs says, "We have lost the balance between a corporation's right to do business and the people's right to safe food and clean air and water." It is time to restore that balance by building a diverse, inclusive environmental movement that values our children's health more than it values corporate profits--a movement that brings to life the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter: "In a democracy, the highest office is the office of citizen..."