Modern houses of India are suffused with harmful chemicals. One of them is lead which is highly toxic metal, present in paints. It is banned in several countries but not in India.
The Centre for Science and Environment tested popular paints in India for lead content. It found 72 per cent of the samples had lead much higher than the voluntary limit specified by the Bureau of Indian Standards. Only the Dulux brand of ICI was lead-free; Asian Paints cleaned up later. What implications does it have for our health? Why is no one limiting harmful chemicals in household products?
George W Bush did not need to invade Iraq to find chemical weapons. He would have found them right inside his house. Not just his house but everybody else’s. They do not come inside menacing iron shells, or use rocket propellants to launch themselves for an attack. Instead they come in plastic containers, small enough to fit into one’s palm, innocuous enough for a five-year-old to play with and deadly enough to cause cancer or kidney failure. Small wonder household chemicals cause about seven million accidents every year, as Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons in the US found. Many of them fool the careful also, for they enter their bodies invisibly and poison them slowly, unlike the chemicals used in warfare.
Look around you these harmful chemicals may be lurking inside your detergent, toys, glass cleaner, room freshener and furniture, or on your shirt, walls and cars. But you may not know because labels on household products in India do not give the exact chemical composition. They are not bound to. Apart from electronic goods and food products, most everyday household products have only voluntary standards, said a senior member of the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS).
When you close the windows of your house, sip water from a bottle or clean dishes in a dishwasher, chances are you pick up a number of chemicals your body does not welcome. The coat of paint on the window could have shed molecules containing lead, a toxic heavy metal. The plastic bottle could have leached nonylphenol ethoxylate (npeo), a carcinogen, into the water. And the detergent you used in the dishwasher could have let loose chlorine in the air that can bring on an asthma attack.
In India no specific regulations limit harmful chemicals in household products, said S K Agrawal, northern region chairman of the Indian Chemical Council. A few chemicals industries under the Environment Impact Assessment Notification need environmental clearance from the Ministry of Environment and Forests to manufacture a certain group of chemicals like pesticides and bleaching agents. “But there is nothing to regulate them in the market,” he said. In India almost all regulations for chemicals are process regulations, not product regulations. The factory should comply with discharge standards, but the chemical composition of the product that leaves the factory is unregulated.
So you may not know if the skin irritation you got was because of the detergent. Or the burning sensation in the eye was caused by sodium hydroxide used as a degreaser in surface cleaners.
BIS has standardized safety evaluation of detergents but the standards are voluntary, said the bis official. Detergents contain phosphates, which soften water. Phosphates escape through the drain, reach waterbodies, promote excessive plant growth, which chokes fish.
In 1993, India introduced voluntary eco-labelling for detergents free from harmful chemicals like phosphates. It also called for proper labelling of ingredients. but all the attempts becoming in vain for the toxic metal contamination in house wall which is specially dangerous for children by the destroying child’s IQ
