Wilson understood that regulating individual chemicals—getting hexane banned, for example—was a trap. Instead, his green chemistry idea took a “life cycle” approach. Products should be less toxic by design. Their component chemicals should not bioaccumulate in the body, and they should break down readily in the environment. Manufacturing processes should use safer chemicals, consume less energy, and produce less hazardous waste.

Large chemical corporations are understandably resistant—even hostile—to fundamentally changing the policy frameworks that have guided chemical use in the U.S. since World War II. But the European Union, America’s largest trading partner, has already adopted a green chemistry policy. And since 2003, Wilson and his Berkeley colleagues, with surprisingly strong support from the legislature and the governor, have been in the forefront of an effort to bring green chemistry to California. Their studies conclude it will not only save lives, but will also create new clean-tech jobs and strengthen the state’s ability to compete in the global marketplace.

Wilson credits Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and the growing awareness that actions today will affect many generations to come, with helping his green chemistry proposal to gain footing. Conversations with delegates from the European Union’s green chemistry group, who attended a conference Wilson hosted in 2003, confirmed he was on the right track. Some important Californians agreed. “Members of staff from the California state legislature also came to this conference and had an epiphany,” Wilson says. A short while later, the chairmen of the state Senate Environmental Quality Committee and the Assembly Committee on Environmental Safety and Toxic Metals officially asked him to flesh out the concept. His report, completed in 2006, began by identifying three dangerous and fundamental “gaps” born of TSCA and other federal statutes.

First, the nearly total lack of information about the effects of most industrial chemicals—a “data gap”—makes it difficult for firms to identify hazards in their supply chain, and for workers and consumers to choose less-toxic products. Without that information, government agencies cannot meaningfully identify or prioritize chemical hazards, and so cannot use their legal tools to regulate toxic compounds. Wilson called this the “safety gap.” Third, there are no market and regulatory incentives to drive green innovation, creating a “technology gap.”

In his report, Wilson drew a portrait of a world awash in untested and largely unregulated chemicals. He reported, for example, that the only way a mother can shed persistent industrial pollutants commonly found in breast milk—such as methylene chloride, toluene, trichloroethylene, and xylene—is to deliver them directly to her developing fetus through the umbilical cord or to her infant through the breast milk.

Legislators including Joe Simitian and Mike Feuer were quick to respond, introducing three green chemistry bills within months of the report’s release. Another, AB 1879, introduced in 2008, would regulate consumer products containing lead, mercury, phthalates, and four other known neurotoxins while giving the Department of Toxic Substances Control more autonomy to adopt safeguards based on scientific findings. Environmental groups rallied behind the proposed legislation. Bill Magavern, the Sierra Club’s California director, believes the bills “have a decent shot at enactment, though all face serious opposition.”

According to one legislative insider, the strategy in Sacramento has been to fashion bills that go beyond a chemical-by-chemical approach but aren’t so comprehensive that “they unify every monied interest group in opposition.” It’s unclear whether the bills will pass this year. But there are hopeful signs. “It’s not just the environmentalists against industry anymore,” the legislative insider says. “The private sector is manufacturing green products and wants market advantage, so industry’s voice isn’t as unified. Also, the media and public are more focused on the health effects of chemicals. Citizens are coming to Sacramento to voice their concerns.”

The road had been paved for both Wilson and the legislature by the European Union. In 2007, the European Commission had instituted REACH (the regulation on Research, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemical Substances), with provisions that flip important aspects of U.S. law. For example, REACH requires industrial producers to supply basic health and environmental information, and to prove their chemicals are safe. (Here in the United States, the government must judge chemicals unsafe before they are removed.) EU authorities also retain the right to bar chemicals of “very high concern” unless and until producers can demonstrate that risks can be adequately controlled, or if there are no suitable alternatives.

U.S. agencies and chemicals-industry lobbyists did everything short of provoking an international incident to derail REACH, which affects most American-manufactured chemical exports to Europe. Even now, the Office of the United States Trade Representative website complains that the directive “adopts a particularly complex and burdensome approach that appears to be neither workable nor cost-effective in its implementation and that could adversely impact innovation and disrupt global trade.”

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