"The EPA said that it would begin monitoring for DINP, a phthalate that causes birth defects and cancer, more than 20 years ago. It still hasn’t."
"Laurie Valeriano first heard about DINP decades ago when she was planning to start a family. An environmental activist, she was working on plastics at the time. “I started to worry about the chemicals that come out of all these plastics,” she said recently. DINP, one of a group of chemicals called phthalates that makes plastic more pliable, was one of them. It was already clear that DINP could cause cancer and interfere with hormonal functioning. But no one knew how much of the chemical was emitted into the environment — or where. So in February 2000, Valeriano and her employer, the Washington Toxics Coalition, asked the Environmental Protection Agency to add DINP to the list of chemicals it monitors through a nationwide program called the Toxics Release Inventory.
Just seven months later, Valeriano, who was by then pregnant with her first child, got what felt at the time like a significant victory: The EPA announced that it planned to grant the group’s request and issued a proposed rule that would add DINP to the toxics inventory. Once the rule was finalized, companies would have to report their DINP emissions to the public database, and communities living nearby would know how much of the chemical was being released into their surroundings. In the federal register, the agency noted the science driving its decision: “The toxicity data clearly indicates that DINP is known to cause or can reasonably be anticipated to cause cancer and other serious or irreversible chronic liver, kidney, and developmental toxicity in humans.”
Yet more than 20 years later, the EPA has yet to make good on its promise to add DINP to the list of chemicals. It never finalized the rule, and in the intervening years, companies have continued to churn out DINP and other chemicals in its class in astounding amounts without disclosing how much individual plants make and emit. Between 2012 and 2015, as much as 500 million pounds of DINP was made or imported each year, according to the most recent numbers available from the EPA. Companies add DINP to hundreds of products in place of another phthalate called DEHP that is being phased out because it causes cancer, birth defects, and reproductive difficulties. Over the last decade, blood levels of chemicals the body forms as it breaks down DINP have climbed in the U.S., while those of DEHP have gone down."
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