"In their quest to rid cleaning products of toxic chemicals, consumer advocates have now set their sights on Tide, the best-selling laundry detergent.

"A 1974 memo from Dow Chemical describes several chemicals in a widely used farm fumigant as 'garbage.' Today, one of those useless chemicals threatens drinking water for more than 1 million people across the San Joaquin Valley. Now linked to cancer, the toxin was waste from a plastic-making process. Chemical companies often mix such leftovers to create other products to avoid the cost of disposal, says one long-time chemical engineer."

"In 2006, when beekeepers began to report that their hives were suffering from a mysterious affliction, a wide variety of theories were offered to explain what was going on. ... Over the last few weeks, several new studies have come out linking neonicotinoids to bee decline. As it happens, the studies are appearing just as 'Silent Spring,' Rachel Carson’s seminal study of the effect of pesticides on wildlife, is about to turn fifty: the work was first published as a three-part series in The New Yorker, in June, 1962. It’s hard to avoid the sense that we have all been here before, and that lessons were incompletely learned the first time around."

"Ken Shefton is furious about what the government knew eight years ago and never told him — that the neighborhood where his five sons have been playing is contaminated with lead. Their Cleveland home is a few blocks from a long-forgotten factory that spewed toxic lead dust for about 30 years."

"A coalition of more than 2,000 U.S. farmers and food companies said Wednesday it is taking legal action to force government regulators to analyze potential problems with proposed biotech crops and the weed-killing chemicals to be sprayed over them."

"In a study published last year in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers put five San Francisco families on a three-day diet of food that hadn't been in contact with plastic. When they compared urine samples before and after the diet, the scientists were stunned to see what a difference a few days could make: The participants' levels of bisphenol A (BPA), which is used to harden polycarbonate plastic, plunged — by two-thirds, on average — while those of the phthalate DEHP, which imparts flexibility to plastics, dropped by more than half."

"VIENNA, W.Va. -- A team of experts revealed Monday that it has found a "probable link" between C8 and human cancers, rebuffing DuPont Co.'s longstanding contention that exposure to the chemical is harmless."

"Residents waiting to learn whether their property was contaminated by an insecticide manufacturing plant in their Park Hill neighborhood want to know why it took officials about 25 years to begin testing the soil in and near what has become the city's newest Superfund toxic waste site."

"Wading into a decade-old controversy, former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman has urged current EPA administrator Lisa Jackson to close loopholes in a 2006 chemical security law 'before a tragedy of historic proportions occurs.'"