Investor and Market Strategies Advisor:

mike-schade update
Tracy Gregoire
Learning Disabilities Association of America
Send Tracy an email

_______________________

Safe Markets and Safe Substitutes

grocery-cart Tracy Gregoire is the mother of a child with autism. She also works to prevent learning, attention, and developmental disabilities and other health impacts linked to toxic chemicals found in consumer products and building materials. As you might imagine, Tracy’s insight and personal experiences have made her very passionate about protecting children, and this passion has led her to organize parents to visit retail stores and even company headquarters to urge them to remove harmful chemicals from their products.

Tracy is right. People should not be exposed to hazardous chemicals linked to asthma, infertility, autism, and cancer in products like toys, furniture, and cosmetics. At Coming Clean, we agree, and we’re working to bring communities and organizations together to win government and corporate policies that take toxic chemicals out of products and materials. We want to help companies avoid chemical substitutes that might be as bad or even worse than what they are replacing, and ensure that product manufacturers and retailers tell us what chemical ingredients are in the products they sell.

“As a proud mom of a child with autism, I know firsthand that the last thing a parent with a special needs child wants is something else that will impact their neurological or general health. It is not enough for companies to say they meet state and federal laws. Parents and children deserve more. There is no need to use many of these toxic chemicals because there are safe, affordable alternatives.”

— Tracy Gregoire, Topsham, Maine

National chemical safety laws are failing to protect us from toxic chemicals in everyday products, building materials, and the environment. In addition to working for reform of federal and state laws and regulations, Coming Clean supports market-based strategies that use consumer and investor pressure to convince manufacturers and retailers to remove harmful chemicals from the products they make and sell. Our collaborative research and organizing have drawn attention to toxic chemicals in products, won phase outs of some chemicals, and pressured manufacturing and retail companies to go beyond simple compliance with weak laws to truly protect their customers. We developed the Five Essential Practices to guide retailers, brands, and suppliers toward safer chemicals and avoid regrettable toxic chemical substitutions. The Campaign for Healthier Solutions (founded by Coming Clean and the Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform) is leading the charge toward ensuring dollar stores remove toxic chemicals from their products—an important effort to protect communities of color and the poor, which disproportionately rely on dollar stores for food and products.

Safe Markets Campaign Resources:

Nanomaterials Hazard Assessment Resources

As part of our research on chemical substitutes, Coming Clean conducted collaborative research on the potential hazards of nanomaterials, which are increasingly used as substitutes for other toxic chemicals in products. This is the first time an off-the-shelf chemical hazard assessment tool—the GreenScreen for Safer Chemicals—was applied to a nanomaterial. Here are resources on our nanosilver hazard assessments using the GreenScreen method:

Lifting the Nano Veil: A Peek at Nanosilver with GreenScreen. This fact sheet explains what nanomaterials are, why we should be concerned about the impacts of nanosilver on our health, and how the new nanosilver hazard assessment can be used by government agencies, companies and consumers to avoid these hazards.
Nanosilver and conventional silver GreenScreen manuscript in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health, published on November 8, 2016.
The online version of the Environmental Health manuscript, titled, "Use of a modified GreenScreen tool to conduct a screening-level comparative hazard assessment of conventional silver and two forms of nanosilver."