This month marks the fifth anniversary of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA), which provided a long overdue upgrade of critical safety protections for consumer products. The CPSIA revitalized the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and created the publicly available safety incident online database, better known as www.SaferProducts.gov.

Last Friday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released final standards that manufacturers must meet before labeling their food products “gluten free.” According to the new rules, a food product must contain less than 20 parts per million (ppm) of gluten before a producer can label and advertise the product as being without gluten.

Did you know that nearly 80,000 chemicals are currently used in the United States, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has only performed a safety assessment of 200 and has only issued partial restrictions for five of these substances? This illustrates how the nation's primary environmental law on toxic substances, the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 (TSCA), has failed to protect Americans from exposure to dangerous chemicals. On July 31, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hosted a hearing to discuss the law's failures and hear from witnesses about the strengths and weaknesses of proposed legislation introduced by the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) this past May.