How The Toxics Reduction Strategy Could Label Your Drugstore A Dangerous Place

—The following is an article from the Ontario Mining Association.

The Ministry of Environment’s Toxics Reduction Strategy may be labelling your local drugstore a hazardous location. The strategy, which is based on the Toxics Reduction Act, has created a proposed list of toxic substances. However, seven of the minerals on that hit list are among the 18-plus minerals that are essential for human life. Can it be that the Environment Ministry has declared war on minerals essential to human mental and physical wellbeing?

Zinc, copper, nickel, chromium, manganese, vanadium and selenium are included on the proposed list of toxic substances. People on average ingest about 1.5 grams of minerals per day, which represents about 0.3% of consumed nutrients. However, the human body would not be able to use the other 99.7% of consumed foodstuffs if these minerals were not consumed as well. Minerals in the body form parts of cell structures, have functions with enzymes, play roles with hormone interactions and form part of blood, muscles and bones.

Take a stroll through your neighbourhood drugstore. No prescription is needed to examine products in the health supplement and vitamin aisle. There, you will find for sale bottles of zinc, selenium, magnesium, potassium and calcium tablets. Then pick up a few boxes of multivitamins and examine the contents — chromium, nickel, copper, manganese and vanadium join other items such as iron and iodine on this list. Take a look at other over-the-counter medications and you will be able to add aluminum, bismuth, titanium and others to the list of minerals you can buy at the drugstore for consumption. Is there something the medical and health care communities aren’t sharing with the Ministry of Environment?

More than one quarter of the elements known in the periodic table are essential for human life. How can the Environment Ministry be interested in declaring elements found in our bodies and in the earth “toxic?” While the Ontario Mining Association (OMA) does not question the ministry’s good intentions in reducing toxics, it would like to use the tongue-in-cheek and perhaps oversimplified example above to point out some flaws in the strategy.

The fact is that depending on dosage and exposure, any substance can be toxic. With the Toxics Reduction Strategy, the OMA envisions problems related to the lack of definition of “toxic substance” and how “toxic” will be characterized in regulation. Determining toxicity is an issue of science. Toxicity will vary according to the nature of exposures (inhalation, skin contact or ingestion), the form of the substance to which exposure occurs and duration of exposure. Without a disciplined consideration of exposure, how can there be a full risk evaluation and management of various substances?

Other jurisdictions, in their efforts to reduce toxic substances, have excluded metals and alloys from legislation. Massachusetts determined that designating key metals and alloys as “toxic” could stigmatize appropriate uses such as in stainless steel sinks, cutlery, water supply and rust-proofing. The Ontario Ministry of Environment, which is trying to change public behaviour in this area, is continuing its consultations on “toxics” and the development of related regulations is ongoing.

Let’s take a step back before putting a pernicious label on minerals that are elements in the human body essential to our existence and in the Earth’s crust. In the meantime, be careful walking down drugstore aisles and read content labels carefully. You never know when a toxic substance may leap out at you from a vitamin bottle.