Greenpeace co-Founder Says Anti-Phthalates Activists Running 'Campaign of Fear'

ARLINGTON, Va., April 25, 2008 (VNS) – Dr. Patrick Moore, chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies, said April 22 in a Wall Street Journal Earth Day editorial that political agendas lacking scientific reason have led to campaigns against chlorine, PVC and phthalates. 

“The anti-phthalate activists are running a campaign of fear to implement their political agenda,” Moore said in the editorial.  Noting that activists have been successful in California in pushing through a statewide ban on the use of phthalates in infant products and are trying to do the same on the national level, he added, “This fear campaign merely distracts the public from real environmental threats.”   

Moore, a co-founder and former leader of Greenpeace, left in 1986 when his colleagues on the group’s international board, lacking the same science education he had, began “abandoning scientific objectivity in favor of political agendas.”  The breaking point, Moore said, was a Greenpeace decision to support a worldwide ban on chlorine.

“Science shows that adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health, virtually eradicating water-borne diseases such as cholera.  And the majority of our pharmaceuticals are based on chlorine chemistry,” Moore stated. “Simply put, chlorine is essential for our health.”

Moore said opposition to the use of chemicals such as chlorine is part of a broader hostility to the use of industrial chemicals.  He said Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring,” raised concerns, many of which were rooted in science, about the overuse of chemicals, but the “initial healthy skepticism hardened into a mindset that treats virtually all industrial use of chemicals with suspicion.”

Greenpeace’s anti-chlorine campaign failed, said Moore, “only to be followed by a campaign against polyvinyl chloride.”   Its new target, phthalates -- chemical compounds that make plastics flexible -- are found in hospital equipment such as IV bags and tubes, children’s toys and shower curtains, and are among the most practical chemical compounds in existence, he added.

Commonly used phthalates, such as diisononyl phthalate (DINP), have been used in everyday products for decades with no evidence of human harm, Moore said, adding that testing by government and independent evaluators has found them to be safe.

Despite this, he said, activists are pressuring companies and the public to reject the use of DINP.  Claiming that some retailers are switching to phthalate-free products to avoid public pressure, Moore warned that the cost of taking “the path of least resistance” is replacing DINP with chemicals that have not been as thoroughly tested and found as safe.

“We all have a responsibility to be environmental stewards.  But that stewardship requires that science, not political agendas, drive our public policy,” Moore concluded. 

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