Technology Helps Small Environmental Group Get Big Results

By STEPHEN G. GREENE

Last September, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention reported that an obscure chemical commonly found in some personal-care and beauty products had been detected in the bodies of each of the 289 men and women they tested. The chemical, dibutyl phthalate, causes birth defects in lab animals.

The announcement created little stir at the time. But in November, a flurry of news stories focused greater attention on the chemical, which was identified as an ingredient in nail polishes produced by nearly two dozen companies. More than 150 television stations around the country broadcast pieces about phthalates, and articles appeared in several newspapers.

During those two intervening months, a small environmental charity in Washington had become interested in the topic, had done some research, both online and in local drugstores, and then packaged the information and pitched it to news outlets. The group named common products in which the chemical was listed as an ingredient, including nail polishes made by Chanel, Cover Girl, Max Factor, and Maybelline.

The charity used the information to highlight its view that many toxic industrial chemicals are essentially unregulated in the United States. Although phthalates are recognized as toxic substances, for example, there are no restrictions on their use in cosmetics, which are used primarily by women of child-bearing age.

Activism and Analysis

People who follow the activities of the Environmental Working Group were not surprised at the size of the resulting media splash. Since the group’s founding in 1993, it has acquired a reputation for producing reports that often combine extensive research and sophisticated data analysis with a flair for finding the human-interest element that can animate their presentation of a particular environmental policy issue.

The group’s influence in and out of Washington is greatly out of proportion to its size: 17 staff members with some powerful Macintosh G4 computers and a $1.6-million budget working in a modest office where the walls are hung with spare mouse cords and bicycle helmets.

Those computers, and the Internet to which they’re connected, are key to the organization’s success. “It would literally be impossible to do the work we do were it not for the overall advance of the Web,” says Ken Cook, the group’s president.

His charity is one of several set up in the past decade that combine activism with policy analysis. Their analyses — whether of voting records, farm subsidies, or welfare payments — require the kind of number-crunching muscle and electronic data collection that has become feasible only with the growth of personal computing.

The Environmental Working Group, for example, collects sets of electronic data in massive amounts from many varied sources, particularly the various federal, state, and local agencies involved in monitoring or regulating agriculture, food and drugs, and air or water quality. It then compares and correlates data from those different sources in ways that yield interesting answers to questions the agencies themselves have seldom thought to ask.

Because its own analysts have quantitative as well as environmental expertise, the charity can generate the kind of data-dense reports that legislators and regulators find difficult to ignore.

The charity issued 15 reports over three years on pesticide residues in food that helped shape the nature of that debate, which culminated in 1996 with the passage of the Food Quality Protection Act.

“Part of the gap we’re able to fill is to take publicly available data and make it meaningful and accessible,” says Mike Casey, the charity’s vice president for public affairs. The group’s target audience is not the general public directly but the news media, who have the capacity to broadcast the charity’s message far and wide.

“More than nine million viewers nationwide saw the phthalate story,” notes Laura Chapin, the director of media relations. “You can’t buy that kind of coverage.”

The group goes to great lengths to make its research results as press-friendly as possible. Ms. Chapin often pitches ideas to reporters or news producers a week or so before the charity plans to announce its results, and allows journalists to read the reports at a password-protected Web site while the information is still embargoed. That gives reporters time to conduct whatever interviews they need to do and allows television producers to shoot the necessary footage to accompany a story.

“We spend lots of time shaping the media message, because otherwise you can generate lots of data without moving the agenda,” says Richard Wiles, the charity’s vice president for research.

Central Role for Web Site

The organization’s Web site (http://www.ewg.org) plays a central role in its activities as a repository not only for its own reports but for news clips and other information that journalists might find useful in preparing their own stories. And it has cut down on the charity’s use of press releases, faxes, and news conferences, though not eliminated them altogether.

The Environmental Working Group has also started to commission its own research in addition to collecting data from other studies. It sometimes will hire research labs to sample tap water, air quality, or pesticide residues to check the effectiveness of much larger testing programs conducted by government agencies.

During debate over pesticides in baby foods, for example, the charity compared results of its own testing with those done by the Environmental Protection Agency, and went on the Today show to explain its results. “That was a big-time kaboom,” Mr. Wiles recalls, which caused some major baby-food companies to tighten their standards on acceptable levels of pesticide residues.

“The ability to create your own data is an essential component” in being able to give substance and immediacy to an otherwise abstract debate on environmental policy, says Mr. Wiles. “So you’ve got to keep evolving.”

White House Policy

Mr. Cook worries that the government data on which his group depends may be more difficult to pry loose in the future. For years his group has routinely downloaded data on pesticides, farm subsidy payments, air and water quality, and state and local monitoring of environmental regulations, which eventually are used in its various reports. The Clinton administration’s position was that that was public information and should be freely available.

“It’s not a foregone conclusion that that policy will continue” in the new Bush administration, Mr. Cook says. “All that’s needed is a slight pendulum swing and we’d be treading water, or even losing some ground.”

He adds: “We’ve got great computers on our desks and it’s easier to do online searches than ever before, but a policy decision might put us almost back into the era of the telephone and hand tabulation.”