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Cockroaches, not pollution, are to blame for the rise in asthma among inner-city children. And dioxin -- often described as the most toxic substance known to man -- poses no health hazard.
Industry officials say that these are perfectly valid rebuttals to environmentalists' shrill warnings about chemicals.
Others, however, see a darker objective.
"It's all very purposeful disinformation, very carefully crafted," said David Fenton, president of a Washington public relations firm that regularly works for environmental groups. "Mostly what they do is sow doubt."
The chemical industry has been on the defensive since the 1962 publication of biologist Rachel Carson's Silent Spring -- an expose on the ecological dangers of pesticides.
It began tracking its lowly public image even before that, searching, usually in vain, for signs of improvement. It monitored the budding environmental movement of the 1960s and '70s, started a high-profile safety initiative known as Responsible Care in the '80s and spent $50 million to promote the program in the '90s.
It is a $400 billion industry routinely in crisis and routinely in need, therefore, of damage control. Economic peril comes in many forms: a chemical accident in India that kills thousands, an Environmental Protection Agency study that may lead to further regulation of dioxin, a scary book that posits a link between synthetic compounds and fetal abnormalities.
Such threats draw an array of well-choreographed and well-financed responses, from folksy meetings in factory towns like Lake Charles, La., to sophisticated lobbying in Washington.
Op-ed pieces and letters appear in newspapers. Materials extolling the wonders of chemistry are sent to public schools. Intelligence is gathered on adversaries large and small.
"Rachel Carson's book launched the environmental movement and also launched the anti-environmental movement," said John Stauber, co-publisher of an online newsletter called PR Watch, and co-author of Toxic Sludge is Good for You, a book on corporate public-relations tactics. "The chemical companies are waging a holy war against environmental and public-health activists. PR firms are using deceptive techniques and smear campaigns to help the chemical industry marginalize and defeat environmental health activities."
Much of the environmentalists' rancor has been directed at the Chemical Manufacturers Association, a trade group founded 126 years ago to represent producers of sulfuric acid.
With 190 members, accounting for 90 percent of the nation's production of basic industrial chemicals, the CMA is a formidable opponent. Its president, Fred Webber, bristles at the suggestion that the chemical industry, as one critic put it, uses "smokescreens" to divert public attention from emerging health concerns.
"We may be the most regulated industry in America," Webber said at the group's Arlington, Va., headquarters. "We are determined to continuously improve our health, safety and environmental performance. We don't want bad stuff to happen out there."
The council's director, C.T. "Kip" Howlett Jr., offered as evidence the cholera epidemic that struck Peru in the early 1990s.
Peruvian officials had stopped disinfecting drinking water, in what the Pan American Health Organization described as an overreaction to U.S. EPA findings that excessive chlorination could create carcinogenic byproducts. As a result, the water became infested with disease-bearing microbes and thousands died.
Greenpeace leaders and others clamoring for the elimination of chlorine chemistry should keep this episode in mind, Howlett said. "It was a politically correct policy directive that got out of hand," he said. According to Greenpeace, there's one problem with this cautionary tale: The group isn't calling for an immediate ban on beneficial uses of chlorine -- in drinking water and pharmaceuticals, for example. Rather, it's pushing for a measured phaseout of industrial uses of chlorine -- as in the making of polyvinyl chloride plastic or the bleaching of paper -- and the pursuit of safe chlorine substitutes in other settings.
"It's a desperate act. It's a scare tactic," Rick Hind, legislative director of Greenpeace's Toxics Campaign in Washington, said of Howlett's cholera anecdote.
Indianapolis lawyer Gordon Durnil can hardly be portrayed as a Greenpeace lackey. Indeed, he's a prominent Republican, author of The Making of a Conservative Environmentalist and a former co-chairman of the International Joint Commission, an environmental advisory panel with representatives from the United States and Canada.
For some time, the commission has agonized over persistent toxic pollutants -- most of them chlorinated -- in the Great Lakes. In its Sixth Biennial Report in 1992, it recommended that the two nations, "in consultation with industry and other affected interests, develop timetables to sunset the use of chlorine and chlorine-containing compounds as industrial feedstocks and that the means of reducing or eliminating other uses be examined."
The chemical industry, in Durnil's words, "went nuts. They said we were all a bunch of Greenpeace liberals and goofballs. They worked all the small businesspeople in Indiana to try to get me to shut up."
Minimizing chlorine risk Privately, the commission and industry agreed that a phaseout of chlorinated feedstocks could be accomplished, without disastrous consequences, in 20 years, Durnil said. Publicly, groups like the Chlorine Chemistry Council minimized the risks of chlorine and warned that its elimination would lead to global upheaval.
"That's the only way they can defend themselves," Durnil said. "It's the same model the tobacco industry used. They just kept it going until they came to this cliff and fell off."
The chemical industry has been preoccupied with its image for decades. Internal documents obtained by the Chronicle show that the Manufacturing Chemists' Association (the CMA's predecessor) was probing public attitudes as early as the 1950s.
On May 28, 1958, for example, members of the MCA's Air Pollution Abatement Committee pondered a survey that had just been taken in 48 U.S. towns and cities.
According to minutes of the meeting, 59 percent of the respondents felt that the chemical industry was "most to blame for air and water pollution." By comparison, 31 percent blamed the oil industry, 8 percent the steel industry and 2 percent the electronics industry.
Things got worse after Silent Spring came out in 1962.
On Dec. 7 of that year, the MCA's Medical Advisory Committee mulled an appropriate response to the groundbreaking book, which examined the long-term impacts of DDT and other pesticides on wildlife and humans.
"During discussion of the effect of this book on public opinion and on the chemical industry, opinions were expressed that it should not be MCA policy to attempt (in print) to counter the various allegations made, since the effect of such action is to draw even more attention to Miss Carson's conclusions," minutes of the meeting reflect. "It was, however, considered that the situation should be given careful, `full-time' Association attention."
By the early '70s, America had experienced a successful, inaugural Earth Day, and environmental and consumer advocates were becoming impossible to ignore. The MCA's Government Relations Committee devoted much of its meeting on June 9, 1971, to this phenomenon.
"Business needs to think in broader terms in order to meet the challenge of new coalition lobbying (consumers, women, negroes, labor unions, environmentalists)," the minutes state. "Must redirect PR at leader targets."
Fears of a similar accident in the United States gave rise to federal right-to-know legislation in 1986 and Responsible Care -- a plant self-policing program the CMA borrowed from its Canadian counterpart -- in 1988.
The CMA also began to make extensive use of the broadcast media, producing the occasional videotaped news release and a semimonthly radio program -- "The Report" -- sent to 1,500 stations around the country.
"A new study says that more than 10,000 Americans may be dying prematurely each year because of government regulations," reads an excerpt from a typical radio script.Last year, the CMA contracted with a New York firm to distribute a video titled, Asthma and Cockroaches. According to a draft script, "Scientists have come up with an interesting answer to the growing number of asthma cases in inner-city children. A new study suggests that cockroaches are to blame."
The eight-city study, conducted by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, established a connection between roach droppings and the breathing disorder. The CMA promptly used it to question the need for costly new air-pollution rules.
"Now, with this new study, the focus for public health officials may shift from air control to bug control," the video script says.Sometimes the CMA even interviews its own people, generating useful sound bites. A few years ago, Brad Lienhart, then head of the Chlorine Chemistry Council, told a questioner, "The fact of the matter is, dioxin is not bad, as it relates to human health. There's no evidence of dioxin having caused human health problems."
(Now president of a North Carolina synthetic-fibers company, Lienhart believes that the argument against chlorine has been deflated because the chemical industry has done such a good job of reducing waste and reformulating products to become more environment-friendly. Asked why Greenpeace persists, Lienhart said, "It's partly about doing good for society and partly about keeping their organization alive.")
"What irks me deeply is when somebody suggests that this is a PR program," CMA president Webber said. "This is one hell of a tough ethic. It's a deep and continuing commitment. It demands more than the toughest government program you can find. Earning the public trust -- that's what Responsible Care is all about."
Mike Wright, director of safety and environment for the United Steelworkers of America in Pittsburgh, is convinced that the CMA and a number of its members are serious about the program.
"I think they've gone a long way to actually improve safety," said Wright, whose union represents about 35,000 chemical workers in North America. "I think they realized that they had a problem that went way beyond public relations."
Still, a survey of 29 unions in 21 countries last year by the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions indicated that "workers and their trade union representatives are neither widely involved in nor well-informed" about Responsible Care.
Thirty-five percent of the respondents weren't even aware of it. (The CMA's Responsible Care manager, Dick Doyle, says the survey results are misleading because some companies' health and safety programs are known by other names.)
A five-year, $50 million CMA advertising campaign touting Responsible Care went forward in 1991 over the objections of some company executives, who felt a cynical public wouldn't buy it.
The campaign worked, Webber said, reversing an image-erosion that had seemed unstoppable after Bhopal. But Bhopal-type accidents aren't the industry's only worry these days.
There is fresh scientific interest in the more subtle health effects of chemicals -- especially dioxin and other chlorinated compounds, which some studies have tied to cancer and endocrine-system disorders.
The Chlorine Chemistry Council was spun out of the CMA in 1993 to fend off attacks from Greenpeace and other anti-chlorine organizations. The council, in turn, hired Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin, a Washington firm that collects information on public-interest groups and sells it to corporations.
"We call it research and analysis," said MBD's founder and president, Jack Mongoven. "You could call it intelligence. Everything we do is from open sources; we don't sneak around in people's wastebaskets or tap phones or any of that stuff."An example of MBD's work can be found in a September 1994 memorandum to the council, whose annual budget has grown to $15 million. "It is obvious that the battleground for chlorine will be women's issues -- reproductive health and children -- and organizations with important constituencies of women opinion leaders should have priority,"
Mongoven wrote.
He urged industry officials to "mobilize science against the precautionary principle" (under which chemicals are regulated before they do obvious harm) and "stay ahead of the activists" by meeting with the media and opinion leaders.
Chlorine council director Howlett pointed out that environmental groups also use PR firms, like Fenton Communications, to promote their agendas and, at times, cry wolf.
Although the EPA later banned it, alar remains a popular example of needless hysteria over a substance that, its defenders say, would have to be consumed in prodigious quantities to be dangerous.
In truth, David Fenton said, the danger was real, the ban sensible.
"The standard way of trying to defuse public concern about chemicals like alar is to say that a child would have to eat 10,000 apples to get a dose that would cause cancer," he said. "They know that's a totally bogus analogy. They know that high-dose animal testing is the way to go, that low-dose testing would cost tens of millions of dollars. They know that the vast majority of chemicals do not cause cancer in animals in any dose."
Although the CMA may be the most visible industry exponent, it doesn't act alone. The Vinyl Institute, a trade association based in Morristown, N.J., has turned out a series of memos to makers of vinyl chloride and polyvinyl chloride, suggesting ways to deal with protestors. Here's one rejoinder recommended to plant managers:
"The people leading this demonstration are outsiders (assuming this is true). They are paid, professional agitators. They are extremists and obstructionists who prefer confrontation to meaningful dialogue. They give serious environmentalists a bad name. We want them to go away."The "agitators" to whom these memos refer presumably include Beth Zilbert, who arrived in Lake Charles as a Greenpeace campaigner two years ago.
Although she had encountered hostility in other places, Zilbert was unprepared for what she characterized as highly personal attacks by spokespeople for local chemical plants, several of which belong to the Vinyl Institute.
"Instead of talking about the issues, instead of talking about dioxin, they talked about me as an outsider, an extremist," said Zilbert, who has left Greenpeace and now chairs an organization called Dioxin-Free Lake Charles. "They tried to turn me into a villain."Apart from the trade-association rhetoric, most chemical companies execute their own PR strategies, ranging from the amateurish to the refined.
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