This is the simple yet highly charged message behind the Toxic Industry Bus Tour, a protest on wheels that highlighted the toxins and carcinogens associated with our consumer lifestyle. Last Friday the 13th, three buses carrying 100 people, including 20 7th and 8th graders from the Southside Family School, rolled into the Hennepin Energy Incinerator, 505 6th Ave. N., downtown Minneapolis, where the dangers of dioxin were explained. From there the tour went to TruGreen ChemLawn, 14360 Ewing Ave. S., Burnsville, where pesticide use and its relationship with cancer were shown. And last, it went to The Koch Refinery, Highways 55 and 52, Rosemount, where benzene, a gasoline additive, was the culprit. The sharp increase in childhood cancers was brought up again and again over the course of the afternoon — a 39 percent increase in brain cancer, for instance, over the last three decades as well as increases in leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “And it’s not as if you can explain the increase in childhood cancer by saying they are smoking more or drinking more,” one speaker said. The increase in breast cancer was also brought up, an increased rate even for women with no known risk factors. Men face an increased chance of developing prostate cancer and testicular cancer. Half of all Americans will get cancer at some point in their lives.
The tour was sponsored by a number of organizations with obvious interests in toxic pollution: the Women’s Cancer Resource Center, the Sierra Club North Star Chapter, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and Clean Water Action. Their goal ultimately is to change the focus of October from Breast Cancer Awareness Month to Cancer Prevention Month.
Mary Swenson, chair person of the tour and one of its organizers, is herself a breast cancer survivor, one of a number of women on the tour wearing a pink banner that read “Cancer Survivor.”
“Breast cancer has increased one percent a year since 1940,” she said. “The increase is growing too fast to be accounted for by genetics. Something like only 25 percent of women who get breast cancer have family histories of it. The other 75 percent don’t. . . . We know there are plenty of studies out there that link chemicals in the environment to cancer. That’s why we decided to focus on some of the worst polluters.”
Ceci Shapland is the executive director of the Women’s Cancer Resource Center and has also had breast cancer. “As a person with cancer who did everything they said you were supposed to do, I was kind of wondering why I had breast cancer. I had none of the risk factors, nothing in my family. But I certainly have had my share of exposure. [The environmental links] make so much sense, especially when you are faced with it in your life. There has to be more to it than how many vegetable servings you have a day. There has to be more to it than just saying cancer is a fact of life, that you are going to get cancer.”
The idea for the toxic tour came from a group called Breast Cancer Action in San Francisco, which has organized a similar tour for five years. The idea was discussed at a conference the WCRC sponsored last October called Turning the Tide: Creating a Cancer Free Environment Now, at which one of the organizers of that tour spoke. Some people who attended decided to do it here.
What they want is for the public to understand that Breast Cancer Awareness Month—October — should be Cancer Prevention Month. The power, they say, is within us to prevent much cancer and to lower the increasing rates of cancer. “The major focus and message [for Breast Cancer Awareness Month] is about screening and getting mammograms,” Shapland said. “The whole idea about Breast Cancer Awareness Month is promoted by a company named AstraZenaca and they make tamoxifen, which is a major drug used fighting in breast cancer. They also have cancer centers and they also own a company that manufactures a carcinogen.”
In a sense, cancer is rooted in our economy, in our behavior, and to dig it out would be painful. It’s not only that companies like AstraZeneca make profits from the treatment of cancer or for producing goods and services that are carcinogenic. But consumers want these goods and services: chlorine bleach, plastics, pesticides, gasoline. These days the efficiency of automobiles is dropping overall as more and more consumers choose to buy heavier SUVs that use more gasoline, which means more benzene, which is a known carcinogen, is released into the environment. We also tend to drive our cars for short errands rather than walk or ride a bike. We dump chemicals onto our lawns. We use more and more plastic products and throw more and more of them away. Then when they are incinerated, dioxin is released into the environment. This tour emphasizes the responsibility everyone shares in this.
The bus’s first stop is the Hennepin County Incinerator, which emits dioxin, the most toxic substance known. It has no use and is only an industrial byproduct, yet it is so pervasive that it has been tracked to the Arctic. One way it is created is in incinerators like the Hennepin County Incinerator when polyvinyl chloride plastics and bleached papers are burned. People are exposed to it when they eat animals that graze on pastures contaminated with dioxin. Dioxin falls to earth on grazing land, for instance, where cows eat it. Then people eat beef and cheese or drink milk and dioxin enters their bodies. It remains in fatty tissue for about seven years.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reviewed the dangers of dioxin and said this summer that dioxin poses 10 times the cancer risk it previously believed for people who consume large amounts of dairy and meat products. Dioxin is also considered by the EPA to be one million times more toxic than arsenic. The lifetime “safe” dosage of dioxin, again according to the EPA, would be a piece of dioxin no larger in size than one-ten thousandth of a grain of table salt.
From the incinerator, the tour went to the TruGreen Chemlawn office in Burnsville. There are many companies that apply pesticides to lawns and certainly many individual homeowners do it as well, but TruGreen may be as recognizable a symbol of the green, weed-free lawn there is. Pesticides — this term is used broadly to include chemicals that kill insects, plants, rodents, anything that is considered a pest — are widely used in American homes. They are found in ant killers, flea collars, in garden products. One of the most deadly was only taken off the market earlier this summer — or maybe it wasn’t, because the EPA restrictions are vague. Dursban, used in nearly 1,000 products including flea collars and bug sprays, is similar to nerve gas and attacks the brain and nervous system, especially in children. The EPA “ban” allows the chemical to continue to be manufactured and sold and even used on public areas like golf courses. In fact, according to Mother Jones, homeowners in New Jersey stocked up on this product when news of its “ban” was reported.
Other chemicals commonly applied to lawns, like 2,4-D in Weed-B-Gone, are known carcinogens. Farmers who use pesticides have higher rates of prostate and testicular cancers as well as Hodgkin’s disease and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Children in homes that use pesticides are three to nine times more likely to get cancer than children in homes where they aren’t used. The rate of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma has almost tripled in the last 30 years in 15-19 year olds. Golf course superintendents were found in one study to have abnormally high rates of cancers of the brain, intestine and prostate.
No one knows for certain why children develop cancers as quickly as they do. Cancers in adults can take decades to develop, but there has been a 39 percent increase in brain cancer in children. Some studies suggest it is because of exposure to chemicals by the mother when carrying the child. Some say that breast milk can give a person half of their lifetime exposure to chemicals. Some say it is simply that a child is developing and changing and their behavior brings them into closer contact with chemicals. They are playing on the floor, for instance, or in the dirt. They eat anything that interests them and they don’t stay clean. They are breathing air that is closer to the ground, where chemicals tend to settle. In addition, standards for the safe exposure to chemicals are based on a 155-pound adult’s exposure to them.
Koch Refinery in Rosemount has the distinction of receiving the largest environmental penalty in the state: in 1998 it had to pay a $6.9 million fine for spills and cleanups. The week before the tour, it contacted the organizers and asked to meet with them. At the meeting, organizers were shown how Koch has improved and cleaned up its plant in Rosemount.
Benzene is a gasoline additive that is a known carcinogen and Koch emits over five tons of benzene a year. Studies show that half the population has been exposed to benzene from industrial sources like Koch Refinery. But nearly the total population has been exposed to benzene from traffic and automobile exhaust. Benzene is also found in cigarette smoke. A state department of health study this year reported that benzene levels exceeded safe levels at every monitoring site in Minnesota this year. The same finding was reported last year.
The Federal Toxic Release Inventory in 1999 cited Koch Industries as the largest benzene polluter. The company has promised to reduce its emissions by 50 percent over the next five years — 10 percent each year.
“It is not just that we are pointing fingers at the incinerator or TruGreen or Koch,” Swenson said. “Part of the tour will be pointing fingers back at ourselves to see what we can do to stop this stream of waste that is getting into the environment. The point sources are responsible for about a third of the pollution — the rest of us are responsible for the big gas guzzlers. Or we choose to drive a lot. We need to point our fingers at ourselves.”
She said these studies showing links between cancer and pollution have been around for a long time, but now they are being talked about. To her that is radical.
“It’s not shocking and new to me or to most people I know who read about this,” she said. “I guess what is shocking and new is that we are hoping to get media coverage of it. We are saying we have to find the causes. We have to let people know the causes.”

Prevent breast cancer

Breast Cancer Awareness Month is under attack from an unlikely source: breast cancer survivors.
“What we are trying to do is turn the month into cancer prevention month and look at what our bodies are being accosted with in the air and water and other chemicals we are exposed to,” said Mary Swenson, chair person of the Toxic Industry Bus Tour and a cancer survivor. “There is a whole slew of carcinogens out there, at least 40 known carcinogens that are being allowed into the atmosphere. They are chemicals that are known to produce cancer in human beings, and they are still around being used.”
One in 20 women would get breast cancer in 1940, one in 14 in 1972 and one in eight today. Since 1960, breast cancer has risen 122 percent, testicular cancer 300 percent and prostate cancer 200 percent. Brain cancer in children has risen 39 percent in 30 years.
Many are now looking at environmental links for these increases, because they seem to be the most obvious. Since World War II, over 70,000 new chemicals have been introduced into the environment and only three percent of them have undergone any kind of carcinogenic testing. Of the 34 most popular lawn pesticides, 33 have not been fully tested for human safety, and if tests are done, they are usually done by the chemical manufacturers. In 1996, Congress ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to review all pesticides by 1999. It has only done three so far, but all three have been found unsafe enough to be restricted.
Breast Cancer Awareness Month was started by chemical companies, a British chemical conglomerate called Imperial Chemical Industries (now called AstraZeneca) in 1985. The slogan for the month has always been “Early detection is your best prevention,” but the organizers of the Toxic Industry Bus Tour scoff at that. “We are saying it is time to look at how we can prevent it,” Swenson said. “Early detection doesn’t stop anything.”
But it will be difficult for small organizations to change the focus of a month that is heavily promoted by a multinational pharmaceutical/chemical company. The company has insisted on the right to approve or veto all messages associated with Breast Cancer Awareness Month — posters, pamphlets, ads. Large media outlets also tend to follow that corporate line, because the message of working to prevent cancer through education and detection is warm and fuzzy and easy to pass along to their readers and viewers. The thought that we might be killing ourselves and our children in order to have a weed-free lawn or a popular, gas guzzling car, on the other hand, is harsh and uncomfortable.
But it seems that more people are becoming skeptical about AstraZeneca’s motives in promoting Breast Cancer Awareness Month because of the cancer treatments it offers. It manufactures tamoxifen, a powerful cancer drug, and owns a chain of cancer treatment centers, so its profits are directly tied to cancer, not to preventing it. It also bought a company that manufactures acetochlor, a pesticide that is a proven carcinogen. In addition, according to Rachel’s Environment and Health Weekly, one of the company’s Canadian subsidiaries was held responsible for a third of the toxic chemicals dumped into the St. Lawrence River separating the U.S. and Canada.

What can you do?

The Toxic Industry Bus Tour points the finger at consumers, who ultimately make the choice about buying and using these chemicals and services.
But there are a number of things that each consumer can easily do to reduce carcinogens in the environment, according to the tour organizers.
To create less dioxin, consumers should avoid using PVC plastics. Incinerating less garbage is another way. The Hennepin Incinerator in the past legislative session received approval to increase the amount of garbage burned by 20 percent, from 1,000 tons a day to 1,200 tons a day. Other speakers said that we should also buy more durable products, sell our used goods when we are done with them, and buy used products ourselves.
A handout suggests that the incinerator should stop burning PVCs and bleached paper. The public should stop buying PVC products and demand paper be unbleached, which means it would not be as white as paper often is. Avoid cleaning products with chlorine bleach and reduce the amount of garbage generated. The MPCA says the amount of garbage each Minnesota generates has increased 21 percent between 1992 and 1998.
For lawns and gardens, we should change our standards for healthy lawns and create a demand for toxic-free lawns. Plant clover. Use organic methods to shape a lawn. Insist that the parents be notified when schools or daycares use pesticides and require homeonwers to tell neighbors when they are going to apply pesticides.
To decrease the amount of benzene in the environment, organizers suggest that Koch increase its emission controls and that the EPA and MPCA monitor the company better. But the public also needs to change its habits. It needs to demand higher fuel effeciency in cars, cleaner fuels, better mass transit and less urban sprawl. People also need to rely on walking and bikes for shorter errands.