Forgive me for not understanding a few of the ideas posed in this thread.
Science finds a link between a commonly used substance that ends up being distributed in the environment when a product is used in the way it is supposed to and what is supposed to be desirable living organisms and that organism prematurely dying.
Based on thoughts in this thread, the reactions are:
-Well, someone else is going to keep using it, so we should too. (Ie: India, China).
-Well, we find other things that are already banned in that organism, so what good will a ban on this do.
-Folks who do the science and find these connections are "friggin rump swabs".
-Its just going to result in a tax and nothing will change.
Just got some of cleaning testing results back with an area I work with. Copper in the runoff from the cleaning was at concentrations rivaling what comes from Acid mine drainage - which kills most everything in the water downstream of it. In this case, it ends up in a major source of drinking water. We find tons of zinc (from tire wear), Copper, Cadmium, etc... all from car and truck wear.
We can stick our heads in the sand and pretend that things that wear just "disappear" into the environment. Or we can acknowledge, particularly in very high traffic areas, the damage the wear products can inflict and do something about them.
If we can develop alternatives that work and don't send harmful products into the environment that don't need to be there, I'm failing to see the problem.
Under some of the logic here, we'd still be using leaded gas, leaded paint, asbestos in insulation, flooring material, siding, DDT everywhere, etc... and wonder why everything is dying and our life expectancy is stagnant or going in reverse.
www.epa.gov
www.heraldnet.com
