Health & Environment

Seventy four billion pounds of chemical substances are produced in, or imported into, the United States every day, and global chemical production is projected to double in 24 years, rapidly outpacing population growth. While these chemicals provide important products and services, some are harmful to humans and ecosystems, and there are significant knowledge gaps about the human health and environmental impacts of the vast majority of these substances.

Our goal is to inform the design of safer substances by identifying the highest-priority chemicals and toxicity pathways that demand the new solutions offered by green chemistry. Faculty and researchers working in the Center's Health and Environment sphere apply the environmental health sciences and public health principles to improve the assessment of chemical risks and advance the design of safer chemistries.

Creating safe jobs and healthy communities demands a better understanding of the relationship between exposure and disease, as well as new prevention and remediation strategies to protect public health, ecosystems and the environment. "Clean technologies" only fulfill their promise if they are safer for workers and reduce environmental contamination.

Through advances in toxicology, we can more efficiently identify the risks posed by the hundreds of synthetic chemicals and pollutants detected in human populations and in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems worldwide. Innovative testing methods are needed to assess the human and ecological impacts of chronic exposure to chemical mixtures and emerging chemical hazards such as endocrine disruptors. Current chemical testing methods primarily detect only advanced toxicity and are unable to anticipate hazards or detect alterations that, while subtle, can nevertheless significantly affect human and ecosystem health.