Reporting Highlights
- An Ever-Present Danger: Formaldehyde is all around us and causes more cancer than any other chemical in the air. It can also trigger asthma, miscarriages and fertility problems.
- Industry Fights Back: Companies use formaldehyde for everything from making furniture to sterilizing food. Industry has repeatedly thwarted government efforts to limit its health risks.
- Closer Than Ever: Federal regulators were recently on track to make modest reforms, but those are all but guaranteed to hit a dead end when Donald Trump takes office.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
In a world flush with hazardous air pollutants, there is one that causes far more cancer than any other, one that is so widespread that nobody in the United States is safe from it.
It is a chemical so pervasive that a new analysis by ProPublica found it exposes everyone to elevated risks of developing cancer no matter where they live. And perhaps most worrisome, it often poses the greatest risk in the one place people feel safest: inside their homes.
As the backbone of American commerce, formaldehyde is a workhorse in major sectors of the economy, preserving bodies in funeral homes, binding particleboards in furniture and serving as a building block in plastic. The risk isn’t just to the workers using it; formaldehyde threatens everyone as it pollutes the air we all breathe and leaks from products long after they enter our homes. It is virtually everywhere.
Federal regulators have known for more than four decades that formaldehyde is toxic, but their attempts to limit the chemical have been repeatedly thwarted by the many companies that rely on it.
This year, the Biden administration finally appeared to make some progress. The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to take a step later this month toward creating new rules that could restrict formaldehyde.
But the agency responsible for protecting the public from the harms of chemicals has significantly underestimated the dangers posed by formaldehyde, a ProPublica investigation has found.
Formaldehyde threatens everyone as it pollutes the air we all breathe and leaks from products long after they enter our homes. It is virtually everywhere.
The EPA is moving ahead after setting aside some of its own scientists’ conclusions about how likely the chemical is to cause myeloid leukemia, a potentially fatal blood cancer that strikes an estimated 29,000 people in the U.S. each year. The result is that even the EPA’s alarming estimates of cancer risk vastly underestimate — by as much as fourfold — the chances of formaldehyde causing cancer.
The agency said it made the decision because its estimate for myeloid leukemia was “too uncertain” to include. The EPA noted that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which the agency paid to review its report, agreed with its decision not to include myeloid leukemia in its cancer risk calculation. But four former government scientists with experience doing statistical analyses of health harms told ProPublica that the myeloid leukemia risk calculation was sound. One said the risk was even greater than the agency’s estimate.
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