A clearer way to warn people about chemicals that cause chronic damage across generations

Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that can interfere with endocrine (or hormonal) systems. These disruptions can cause cancerous tumors, birth defects, and other developmental disorders.[4] Found in many household and industrial products, endocrine disruptors "interfere with the synthesis, secretion, transport, binding, action, or elimination of natural hormones in the body that are responsible for development, behavior, fertility, and maintenance of homeostasis (normal cell metabolism)."

Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs) may be natural or unnatural in origin, but many are found within a suite of chemicals called Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). These synthetic chemicals are often described as 'forever chemicals', as they don't break down over time, and they are very challenging to remove from the environment, food chains, and living beings.

This is a massive problem for humanity's long term health and wellbeing, and it's getting rapidly worse. The quantity and variety of this class of chemicals is growing all the time.

EDCs produce insidious effects that can appear as idiopathic hormone imbalances rather than poisonings. This is especially the case where it occurs chronically and cumulatively and over a long time span.

These symptoms can look like ordinary degenerative diseases, or things that people don't even really consider diseases such as alterations to gender identity, parental instincts, irritability and mood, mental fog, obesity coldness and sluggishness, impaired sexual desire, etc.

Even worse, such effects can persist through the generations, affecting the children and even grandchildren of those exposed to the original chemical insult. We are leaving a devastating legacy for our descendants.

The insidious and clandestine nature of EDCs, their chronic and long term damage across lifespans, and indeed across multiple generations, as well as their typical resistance to breaking down, warrants a unique hazard warning and standard description. There is a separate need for an EDC symbol which is separate from other symbols, such as the generic serious health hazard symbol.

If we could standardize the use of a symbol to denote the presence of EDCs/POPs in products and processes, then we can take account of EDCs for the first time, to facilitate consumer awareness, industrial safety, world trade, and ethical production and consumption.

We would like to increase awareness of the dangers of these chemicals by creating a new symbol for products and zones contaminated by EDCs/POPs, inspired by the trefoil hazard symbols for radiological and biological hazards, developed by UC Berkeley and Dow Chemical respectively.

EDCs/POPs attributes as ‘forever chemicals’ oblige us to consider future civilizations as well as our own. This is why a symbol needs to be instinctively unnerving at a universal level – danger, stay away!

Below is our second draft submission, with example implementations. The central symbol is a stylized dioxin molecule, flanked by three radiative blades symbolizing congenital defects, infertility, and chronic disease. These elements together convey an instinctive sensation of danger, irrespective of familiarity with the symbol’s meaning.

We now seek to advance the design further if necessary, and to specify it formally within an official standard.

In-situ mockups (not to be used in such configuration without clearance from the relevant standards bodies):

Watson, Arabadzhi, Kosturanov, and the IEEE 3173 Working Group, 2021-23, Public Domain.