ContamiNation

An investigation into the dangers of the chemicals present in our daily lives, along with practical advice for reducing these toxins in our bodies and homes, from acclaimed journalist McKay Jenkins.
 
A few years ago, journalism professor McKay Jenkins went in for a routine medical exam. What doctors found was not routine at all: a tumor, the size of a navel orange, was lurking in his abdomen. When Jenkins returned to the hospital to have the tumor removed, he was visited by a couple of researchers with clipboards. They had some questions for him. Odd questions. How much exposure had he had to toxic chemicals and other contaminants? Asbestos dust? Vinyl chlorine? Pesticides? A million questions, all about seemingly obscure chemicals. Jenkins, an exercise nut and an enviro-conscious, organic-garden kind of guy, suddenly realized he’d spent his life marinating in toxic stuff, from his wall-to-wall carpeting, to his dryer sheets, to his drinking water. And from the moment he left the hospital, he resolved to discover the truth about chemicals and the “healthy” levels of exposure we encounter each day as Americans.
 
Jenkins spent the next two years digging, exploring five frontiers of toxic exposure—the body, the home, the drinking water, the lawn, and the local box store—and asking how we allowed ourselves to get to this point. He soon learned that the giants of the chemical industry operate virtually unchecked, and a parent has almost no way of finding out what the toy her child is putting in his or her mouth is made of. Most important, though, Jenkins wanted to know what we can do to turn things around. Though toxins may be present in products we all use every day—from ant spray, perfume, and grass seed to shower curtains and, yes, baby shampoo—there are ways to lessen our exposure. ContamiNation is an eye-opening report from the front lines of consumer advocacy.McKay Jenkins holds degrees from Amherst College, Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and Princeton, where he received a Ph.D. in English. He is the author of The Last Ridge, The White Death, and Bloody Falls of the Coppermine. A professor of English, journalism, and environmental humanities at the University of Delaware, Jenkins lives with his wife and two children in Baltimore.

PRAISE FOR
ContamiNation

“A Silent Spring for the human body.”

—Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone

“Jam-packed with information and not only an invaluable resource for those interested in protecting their loved ones, but a sound investment and a book that will pay health dividends for a lifetime.”

—Robyn O’Brien, author of The Unhealthy Truth and founder of AllergyKids Foundation

“In this wonderfully readable journey of a book, McKay Jenkins illuminates not only the science of everyday toxic compounds but the best ways to manage them in everyday life. Read it and keep it. You’ll be glad you did.”

—Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Poisoner’s Handbook

“McKay Jenkins allows the discovery of a tumor in his left hip to lead him—and us—into the world of failed chemical regulations in a story of unflinching courage combined with hardheaded research. It’s chock-full of suspense . . . and footnotes, too.”

—Sandra Steingraber, author of Living Downstream

“In this serious exposé that is surprisingly entertaining and positive, Jenkins uncovers the ubiquity and danger of [everyday] chemicals and offers some solutions, both personal and political.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

ALSO BY McKAY JENKINS

Bloody Falls of the Coppermine

The Last Ridge

The White Death

The Peter Matthiessen Reader (editor)

The South in Black and White

Prologue

On a crisp fall afternoon a couple of years ago, I went in for a routine two-year checkup with my internist. Everything seemed to be fine: My home life was happy and nurturing. I had never smoked. I ate right, got plenty of rest, and had been a dedicated runner and cyclist my entire adult life. Save for the usual aches and pains, nothing had ever been wrong with my body, and as long as I was smart about it, I figured, I’d still be riding my Fausto Coppi racing bike well into my eighties.

My only complaint, I told my doctor, was a faint tightness in my hip that I had felt off and on for two years—and odd, sharp twinges between my left thigh, knee, and shin that occasionally accompanied it. Sometimes the skin on my leg itched. Sometimes it burned. Sometimes the ligaments in my knee hurt. I’d consulted with a dermatologist months before, but had gotten no answers. Were these symptoms related? My internist was perplexed. Perhaps it was an “overuse injury,” he said, something I’d developed from too much running in the woods or riding the rural roads near my home. Like anyone who has tried to stay in shape through their postcollege years, I was familiar with such aches and pains. As the years went by, fewer and fewer were the days when I didn’t feel some minor muscle or joint ache after even a light workout. I was getting older, and so was the machinery.

My internist looked me over and agreed that my pains were probably related to exercise, and he suggested I see an orthopedist at a nearby sports medicine clinic. I called and got an appointment that very morning. I walked into the orthopod’s office ready for a quick diagnosis and a pat on the head. “Someone as fit as you can expect to have occasional ligament stress,” I expected him to say. “Here’s the name of a physical therapist. Go get a massage, and check in with me on your seventy-fifth birthday.”

This is not what he said.

After hearing my description of the pain, the orthopedist rotated my hip and knee a couple of times. He seemed puzzled. This didn’t seem like a joint problem, and in any case the pain in my knee was probably “referred” pain radiating from my hip. He suggested I get an MRI to help him see a bit more clearly what was going on with my soft tissue.

Okay, I thought: people get MRIs all the time. Especially athletes. They’d probably just find a slight tear in some connective tissue, I’d buy a new pair of running shoes, and away I’d go. Worst case? A little minor surgery to fix an abraided tendon. I got an appointment that afternoon, spent forty-five unpleasant minutes inside a clanging metal tube, and went home to wait for the results—which, given the routine nature of the exam, I figured would take a few days, or even weeks.

I was standing in my living room when the phone rang just a few hours later. This was an awfully quick turnaround, I thought, looking at the caller ID. These lab techs must be having a pretty light day at the office. But when I picked up the phone and heard the orthopedist’s voice, I knew even before he spoke that something was amiss.

Hello, Mr. Jenkins, he said, then paused. You have a suspicious mass in your abdomen, he said. It’s growing inside your left hip. Here is the number for an oncologist. You need to call him right away.

—

What can you say about such moments? I remember hanging up the phone. I remember looking at my wife, Katherine, and looking at my children putting together a puzzle on the floor in the next room. My son was four, my daughter not yet eighteen months. I fell apart.

Far worse than my fears for myself were my worries about my kids. How would they get by without a father? Trying to protect them from the initial shock of the news, Katherine and I took turns taking our cell phones outside to talk to doctors and loved ones. Standing in the yard, trying to set up a date for a CT scan, I would look through the living room window to see my kids playing together. I imagined the same scene, with me gone. I felt like a ghost.

Katherine and I passed the next three weeks in a kind of silent panic. We spent anxious hours on the Internet, blindly researching what this thing was that was growing between my hip and my belly. This was a very bad idea. We called every doctor we knew.

I held it together enough to keep teaching my classes at the University of Delaware, which is about an hour north of our home in Baltimore. One day, when I returned to my office after a morning class, there was a message on my phone. It was from Katherine. I found an oncologist, she said, but you need to get here fast; he’s really busy and has only one opening this week. I ran into my classroom, scrawled “Class canceled” on the blackboard, and dashed off to my car.

When I got to the hospital, Katherine was already there, waiting in the parking lot. We hugged, and went inside. I was short of breath. A nurse escorted us into an examination room, and a few minutes later, the oncologist strode in with my MRI images under his arm. He slapped them up on a backlit screen. You see this? he asked. That’s your hip. Now, see that round thing next to it? That’s not supposed to be there.

He reached over to the examination table and began scribbling diagrams on a sheet of sanitary paper. He sketched out what he thought was going on. Although he couldn’t be certain without further tests, the tumor was likely a soft-tissue sarcoma, an ugly cancer of the fibers connecting my hip to the muscles and nerve tissues of my left leg. The prognosis depended on how big the tumor was, where precisely it was growing, exactly how aggressive it was. I could get a biopsy of the tumor, which would provide a look at its cellular profile, but there was always the risk of a biopsy needle inadvertently spreading malignant cells outside the tumor itself. What to do?

At worst, this was, well, very bad. At best, a surgeon could cut out the tumor, but might be compelled to sever my femoral nerve, the trunk line that connects the nerves in the leg to the spine. Which meant I would probably never run or ride my bike again. And then I’d have to remain vigilant to see if the cancer returned. The doctor ripped off the sheet of sanitary paper, now four feet long, and handed it to me.

As he continued to speak, I felt myself leaving my body. My mouth continued to move, but the rest of me was floating, looking in from the outside. I saw myself shake hands with the doctor. I saw Katherine take my hand and lead me outside. It wasn’t until we made it back to the parking lot and I dialed my brother on my cell phone that I returned to my body. “Brian, it’s McKay,” I said. “I just came from a doctor’s office. I have cancer.” The floodgates opened.

To this day, the ride home has remained indelible. Once-generic landmarks still vibrate with the terror I felt that day: the gas station where I stopped to call my friend Wes. The curb by our home where I called my friend Tom. Rather than relieving my anxiety, each telling made the story more concrete. This was really happening. But how? This was not a grinding descent into illness; it was a bolt from the blue. I did not feel sick, and never had. My mind raced. How could I possibly have cancer?

Beyond the panic, of course, was a question. Where had this thing, this “suspicious mass,” come from? No one seemed to know. Not my primary care doctor, not my orthopedist, not even my oncologist. In medicine, cause and effect are not always clear.

After weeks of scrambling and using every connection I could muster, I found a slot on the schedule of a renowned surgeon at a New York medical center. Katherine and I drove north, dropped our kids off at their aunt and uncle’s apartment, and went to the hospital.

In the morning hours before my operation, I sat on a couch in a waiting room in a light-blue surgical gown. I wore headphones, listening to the Dalai Lama offering counsel about facing one’s own death. Life is a series of transitions, he said. Dying is one of them. It’s vitally important to remain clear-eyed during these times, to see things Just As They Are.

Okay, I thought. I will do my best. But seeing things clearly is not always so easy. Especially when it comes to understanding illness and its root causes.

—

At some point, I looked up to see the outstretched right palms of a pair of researchers, a man and a woman in their twenties, clipboards at their sides and kind, self-conscious expressions on their faces. I took off my headphones and we shook hands. We’d like to ask you a few questions before you go into surgery, they said. Sure, I said. I was feeling strangely serene and, I confess, a bit melodramatic: If I’m going to die, I thought, the least I can do is be a model for others. Go out gracefully. Make the Dalai Lama proud.

The researchers sat down on a couch across from Katherine and me, placed their clipboards on their laps, and began probing. The first questions were pretty standard: What ethnic group best describes you? Um, white. How far did you make it in school? I have a PhD, I said. How many packs of cigarettes have you smoked per day, on average? None, I said. Ever. The researchers nodded, and scribbled. How much alcohol? A couple of beers a week, I said. I managed a wan smile. Please don’t tell me I have a tumor because I drink beer.

Then the questions changed, from ones I had been asked by doctors dozens of times before to ones I had never been asked in my life.

How much exposure had I had to toxic chemicals and other contaminants? In my life? I asked. This seemed like an odd question. What kind of chemicals do you mean? The researcher began reading from a list, which turned out to be long. Some things I had heard of, many others I had not. Metal filings? Asbestos dust? Cutting oils? I didn’t think so. What’s a cutting oil? How about gasoline exhaust? Asphalt? Foam insulation? Natural gas fumes?

Where was this going?

I was not a machinist, or a car mechanic, or a building contractor. The words kept coming. Vinyl chloride? I wasn’t sure. What was that? How about plastics? Are you kidding? Everything is made of plastic. Dry-cleaning agents? I shot a glance at Katherine and managed a smile; I was not exactly known for my natty attire, and I hadn’t darkened a dry cleaner’s door in years. On and on it went. Detergents or fumes from plastic meat wrap? Benzene or other solvents? Formaldehyde? Varnishes? Adhesives? Lacquers? Glues? Acrylic or oil paints? Inks or dyes? Tanning solutions? Cotton textiles? Fiberglass? Bug killers or pesticides? Weed killers or herbicides? Heat-transfer fluids? Hydraulic lubricants? Electric fluids? Flame retardants?

By now I had begun to feel distinctly uncomfortable. Not about my history of “industrial” exposures, which were nonexistent, but about the myriad, and mostly invisible, chemicals the researchers seemed to be curious about. What was a flame retardant, exactly, and how in the world would I know if I had been exposed to one? I had never used pesticides, but Lord knows there were plenty in my neighborhood.

The questions shifted again.

We’d like to ask you about your job history, they said. What had I done before I became a professor? Well, I thought, I hadn’t exactly been working in a chlorine plant. Before teaching English, I spent a decade writing for newspapers. I’d spent a lot of college summers waiting tables in restaurants and, before that, washing dishes. Oh, wait—there was that one summer after college when I worked in a garage, pumping gas and changing people’s oil. Could that have been it? And was that the point of all these questions? To find a single cause of this tumor? If so, why would they be so interested in what I had done for work thirty years before?

Again, the researchers changed their tack. Now we’d like to ask you about the places you’ve lived, they said. If my employment history seemed fairly benign, I had spent a lot of time living in big, industrial cities. Again, going backward in time: Baltimore, Philadelphia, central New Jersey, Atlanta, Seattle, Annapolis, Manhattan, western Massachusetts, suburban New York.

Any cancer in my family history? My paternal grandfather had died of prostate cancer at an advanced age, I said. My mother had had malignant melanomas removed from her skin. I had, thus far, showed signs of neither.

Had I ever lived within a mile of any kind of waste incinerator, either at a city dump or a hospital? Not that I knew of. I had never worked in an industrial plant; wasn’t that where all these chemicals were concentrated? A decade earlier, I had built a couple of canoes, but I had done all my fiberglassing outdoors. I had painted a bedroom or two. Who hadn’t? Yet the longer the questioning went on, the more I began to realize that I didn’t have the faintest idea about how many of these chemicals I had come into contact with over the years. After all, just because I had never worked in a factory did not mean that I hadn’t been exposed to the products these factories made. But once chemicals were turned into products, they stayed put. Didn’t they?

The researchers, to be fair, were not there to talk about these larger questions. They were there to ask their questions, and when they were finished, they stood up to leave. The young guy gave me a parting look that seemed slightly melancholy, and they said good-bye.

—

A couple of hours later, a doctor led me into the operating room, and I lay down on the table. How in God’s name did I end up here, I wondered. The room was remarkably cold. Around me, a dozen faces in blue hats and masks scurried around, tending to monitors and swinging trays of instruments at my bedside. How you doin’? asked a man who introduced himself as my anesthesiologist. Fine, I said, but I could use a beer right about now.

I’ll give you something better than that, he said, hooking me up to an IV. Do me a favor and count backward from twenty, would you?

I made it to nineteen.

A moment later, it seemed, I awoke. My eyes felt fuzzy, and blurred by bright overhead lights. Where was I? I blinked. There, at the foot of my bed, stood Katherine and my surgeon. Both were beaming. Something must have gone well, I thought. You’re a lucky man, the doctor said. The tumor was as big as an orange, but it turned out to be growing out of a nerve cell rather than a muscle cell. We sent a slice of it down to the lab; it turned out to be benign. Of a hundred cases like this, about four turn out this way. Not only that, we managed to peel the tumor off your femoral nerve. Once you recover, you can get back to running and riding your bike. You’re a very lucky man.

And so I was.

—

As joyful as my outcome had been, I was left feeling somehow bereft. Had this whole thing been bad luck? Where had this tumor, this navel orange, come from? It wasn’t until I’d answered the hospital questionnaire that I had ever even considered the vast arrays of chemicals I had been exposed to over the years. Was it possible that the questions constituted a trail of bread crumbs that could lead me to some answers? Suddenly, these questions began to take on a whole new sense of urgency.

From the moment I thought I had cancer to the moment I learned I didn’t—an extremely long month, as it turned out—I felt like I had been initiated into a vast secret society, one whose members had been stamped with a disease whose origins were utterly and maddeningly opaque—to themselves, and frequently even to their doctors. Colleagues, friends, students, family members I hadn’t heard from in years—everyone, it seemed, had had a brush with cancer or was intimately connected to someone who had. In the four years that have passed since my surgery, cancer has burned its way through a swath of my family and friends. My beloved aunt Julie recently passed from a combination of breast cancer, bone marrow cancer, and Parkinson’s disease. My friend Scott, still in his forties, just learned that he has pancreatic cancer. Like me, he has small children. So do Leah and Suzie and Susan, young women who have both recently suffered terrible bouts with breast cancer. My cousin’s husband, Phil, died of a brain tumor before his fortieth birthday. He left a wife and a young daughter. And on and on and on.

What is going on here?

I used to think that serious illness was something rare, something that touched only the unlucky, those who drew the short stick. No longer. Now it had begun to seem like the world was filled with two kinds of people: those who had received their diagnosis and those who had yet to receive it. My brother Denny, a surgeon, has a dry expression for this: We’re all pre-op. Every one of us.

No one goes through a cancer scare without experiencing a kind of awakening. Here’s what mine looked like: I went from being a passive observer of other people’s suffering to feeling an intimate desire to prevent that suffering. I wanted to know if there were root causes. I wanted to try to see things just as they are, how they came to be that way, and what I could do to protect myself and my children. This book is the result.

—

To begin with, it’s worth thinking about what a relatively short time we’ve been swimming in synthetic chemicals. In 1992, seven years after the Titanic was discovered by a French-American team off the coast of Newfoundland, the French government sought out the few survivors and their heirs to try to return some of the bounty—pince-nez spectacles, hairpins, ivory combs—that divers had discovered on the sunken ship. But what caught my eye about this story was a comment made by Charles Josselin, secretary of the French merchant marine.

“What most struck me,” Mr. Josselin said, “is that in such a long list of day-to-day objects, there was nothing made of plastic.”

Not a single piece of plastic on the grandest luxury liner of the day. And this was less than ninety years ago.

The Synthetic Century, let us say, has been full of grand achievements and equally grand consequences, many of them unintended. In 1918, a scientist named Fritz Haber won the Nobel Prize for figuring out how to make synthetic nitrogen, a key component of soil, and thus “improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind.” But during World War I, his technology also helped Germany make bombs from synthetic nitrate and, later, poison chlorine and phosgene gas. In World War II, Hitler used another one of Haber’s compounds, Zyklon B, in Nazi concentration camps. After the wars, synthetic fertilizers paved the way for the explosion of industrial-scale agribusiness, which has, in turn, created great wealth but also unprecedented levels of pollution, monoculture, and processed foods.

In his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan outlines the way our industrial food chain floats on an ocean of cheap oil. This is also true of our vast array of consumer products. Although coal companies in the mid-1800s were processing coal gas for lighting and synthesizing other products like dyes, this was but a baby step compared to what happened a hundred years later. Since World War II, Big Oil and, more recently, Big Coal and Big Natural Gas, have supplied our economy not just with energy for our homes and cars but with the very building blocks of our domestic lives: not only our plastics but our fertilizers and pesticides, our furniture, our personal care products, even our clothing. Consider this: in the last twenty-five years, the country’s consumption of synthetic chemicals has increased 8,200 percent.

By the end of the Second World War, everything, it seemed, was being made from petrochemicals: fertilizers and pesticides for the farm and garden; plastics for everything from shrink wrap to baby teethers to car dashboards; treatments for fabrics. “The synthetics are changing life imperceptibly—changing it, in fact, as profoundly as it was ever changed by the machine,” The New York Times reported in the spring of 1940. “The gaudy fountain pens and cigarette holders, the lacquers, the well-designed and attractive costume jewelry in the five-and-ten stores, the curtains at the living room’s windows, the steering wheels that we clutch in our cars, the drugs that cure us from some of the more deadly diseases, the dyes that outdo the rainbow, the camphor that once came from the trees, the musk that once cost $700 a pound, the ‘glass’ in the bathroom—all are synthetics. To the man in the street, ‘synthetic’ still means a tricky substitute for something authentic—an unfortunate relic of prohibition when raw and fiery alcohol was inexpertly flavored to produce a potent but unconvincing gin. It is time that we gave synthesis its true meaning—a putting together, a control over matter so perfect that men are no longer utterly dependent on animals, plants and the crust of the earth for food, raiment and structural material.”

The trouble with such rapid proliferation of products made from petrochemicals, of course, has been that the production and use of synthetic chemicals has vastly outpaced our ability to monitor their effects on our health and the environment. We learned to love what chemicals could make; we just never bothered to wonder if there could be a downside. By the mid-1970s, there were some 62,000 chemicals in use; today the number is thought to be closer to 80,000. The EPA has a full set of toxicity information for just 7 percent of these chemicals, and the U.S. chemical industry, a $637-billion-a-year business, is so woefully underregulated that 99 percent of chemicals in use today have never been tested for their effects on human health. Fewer than 3 percent of these chemicals have ever been tested for carcinogenicity. Far fewer (or none) have been assessed for their effect on things like the human endocrine system or reproductive health. In recent years, as we shall see, the news from these fronts has not been promising.

And since these chemicals—and the products they are turned into—are designed not to break down, they have a way of showing up in some strange places. In 1997, Charles Moore, an oceanographer with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, found himself navigating a patch of the Pacific Ocean so full of garbage that pieces of plastic—bottle caps, bits of shredded bottles—outnumbered plankton by six to one. Much of this garbage is in the form of “nurdles”—little plastic pellets used as the building material in all kinds of consumer goods. Some 5.5 quadrillion—I’ve never written a number that large before—of these nurdles are manufactured every year, and lots of them end up in the ocean. Moore has since estimated the amount of debris that has washed off the coasts of Asia and the western United States to be something on the order of 100 million tons. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, he says, is now the size of Africa, and has become “a toilet bowl that never flushes.”

—

I was born in 1963, the year after Rachel Carson published her landmark book Silent Spring, first alerting the world to its saturation in industrial chemicals. A biologist and essayist, Carson set out in Silent Spring to chronicle just how widespread, and how dangerous, synthetic chemicals had become. Man had learned enough about chemicals to create enormously potent products, she warned, but had failed to imagine the consequences of their widespread use. “Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for life?” she asked.

Carson’s stories, gleaned from newspaper accounts and scientific journals, were ominous, and told with unblinking directness: In Florida, two children find an empty bag of the insecticide parathion and use it to repair a swing. Both die soon afterward. A chemist checking the toxicity of parathion tests it on himself by swallowing less than a hundredth of an ounce. Paralysis sets in so quickly he doesn’t have time to reach for an antidote, and he dies. At the time Carson wrote, 7 million pounds of parathion were being applied every year in the United States; the amount used in California alone, one scientist said, was enough to provide a lethal dose for ten times the world’s population.

Carson’s book was savaged by the chemical industry, which reached for rhetoric as dramatic as Carson’s own. Silent Spring’s claims about the dangers of pesticides missed the greater threat, the industry claimed, of “hordes of insects that can denude our forests, sweep over our crop lands, ravage our food supply and leave in their wake a train of destitution and hunger, conveying to an undernourished population the major disease scourges of mankind.”

In addition to pesticides, the decade before I was born had ushered in the widespread use of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, the oily fluids used in everything from electrical transformers to window caulk. At that time, researchers tested PCBs for toxicity by dumping them into a bucket of fish. If, after five days, more than half the fish were still alive, the chemicals were considered safe.

In short, the middle decades of the twentieth century were a kind of golden age of synthetic chemicals, a time when DuPont’s “better living through chemistry” was considered the coin of the realm. I grew up in Yonkers, New York, where a Sherwin-Williams paint store had a neon sign of a giant can pouring red paint over a blue globe. The sign read: “Cover the Earth.” And so we have. By 1940, American companies were already making 300 million pounds of plastic. We wrapped our food in cellophane. We wrapped our legs in nylon. We gave ourselves over to vinyl. Styrofoam. Plexiglas. Polyethylene. Polypropylene. Polyurethane. By 1960, plastic production was up to 6 billion pounds. In 1928, a man named Waldo Semon invented polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. When he died, at the age of one hundred, in 1999, worldwide production of PVC, which is used to make everything from clothing to car interiors to children’s toys, had reached 44 billion tons a year.

By 2004, the U.S. chemical industry was producing more than 138 billion pounds of seven petrochemicals—ethylene, propylene, butylenes, benzene, toluene, xylenes, and methane—that form the building blocks for tens of thousands of consumer products, from gasoline to rubber to lipstick. Today, industries worldwide generate 300 billion pounds of plastics a year. You’ve probably come across numbers like these: Americans throw away 100 billion plastic bags a year—the equivalent of dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil. We throw away 50 billion plastic water bottles a year.

In 1990, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that in the United States alone, toxic flame retardants were added to 600 million square yards of upholstery fabrics each year—enough to cover Washington, D.C., three layers deep. And that’s just for sofas and car seats. Every year, some 40 million pounds of the herbicide 2,4-D—a primary constituent of the infamous Agent Orange once used to defoliate forests in Vietnam—are used on lawns and other green spaces in the United States; the product can be purchased without a license in any hardware store.

Every day, the United States produces or imports 42 billion pounds of synthetic chemicals, 90 percent of which are created using oil. Converted to gallons, this volume is the equivalent of 623,000 gasoline tanker trucks,