Old rules but new pollutants: Scientists want Canada’s law on pollution updated
Pollution has a new face, nothing like the traditional image of a giant smokestack or a factory pouring smelly goop into a river.
Modern pollution — at least the toxic chemical kind — is smaller, more personal, from 35 million Canadians who are all individual sources of toxic bits that add up in the environment.
These come from personal products that we all use in our cellphones, furniture, televisions or bathrooms, chemicals that travel down the drain and into lakes and rivers when we wash our hands or do laundry. Their combined effects are unknown.
This is what worries Miriam Diamond, a University of Toronto pollution scientist. She and others believe our federal law, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA), was progressive when enacted in the 1990s but needs an update.
“We have trace levels of pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical metabolites in our drinking water — that would not be covered under CEPA,” she said in an interview.
“I’m finding in surface waters chemicals that are in my TV. We have such a huge waste stream of electronic products that require handling because of their hazardous substances.”
From motherboards come small amounts of toxic silver, tantalum, cobalt, rare earth elements and other metals “for which toxicity is just becoming understood.”
There’s also a variety of flame retardants that have known toxicity.
“The casing of your TV has flame retardants that migrate from your TV. You find it as house dust, you find it in air and surface waters. … You’re typing at your computer, (and) your hands are going to pick up a whole lot of flame retardants and plasticizers. Our clothes pick up chemicals. We wash them, and down the drain” it goes.
The same goes for the cellphones. “It emits a very small quantity. The problem is there are so many cellphones, so many electronics, so many floor polishes, so many cosmetics. Individually, tiny. Aggregate in a home, actually not so tiny. Put it together in a city, a whole lot more.”
Cities on smaller rivers such as Edmonton or Regina can focus a heavy chemical load in a limited body of water, she said.
Diamond was speaking on behalf of a group of 540 scientists and doctors from across the country who want the federal government to update CEPA.
The letter is in response to a recent review of the act conducted by the House of Commons standing committee on environment and sustainable development that made 87 recommendations to strengthen CEPA.
In the Great Lakes, the “up and coming contaminants arise from products and materials that we use as opposed to direct effluent discharges” from factories, she said.
“We have long shifted from the belching smokestack or the pipe spewing effluent ... but a lot of the provisions (of the law) are better suited to dealing with manufacturing and also with resource extraction,” such as mining.
“For example we have so many car tires. The most abundant microplastics in the environment are very small fragments from tires. And as well we see antioxidants from tire debris in surface waters and the Great Lakes.
“I think those are incredibly difficult to regulate,” she said.
“One way is just to talk about the sheer amount of resources that we are using and that this has unsustainable implications. But it just doesn’t receive any traction.”
Environmental law and research money are often based on known human health dangers, she said, moving “away from true environmental protection and toward ‘It’s all about me’ and human health.”
She wants more research on “the public good of clean air, clean water and clean soil.”