Toxic Avoidance

Abstract If the words “our product is doubt” characterize the production of ignorance, in turn, the production of nonproblem could be encapsulated by “our product is silence.” This article looks behind both these words and this concept of nonproblems, drawing attention to public policy mechanisms whose effect (whether explicitly intended or not) is to reduce the attention paid to a given problem, resulting in public inaction, not taking charge of a problem. It highlights the role in those dynamics of two factors: the scientific instruments attempting to quantify environmental and occupational health issues and the regulatory instruments used in the field of the regulation of chemicals. Downstream of these regulatory processes, the use of science-based regulatory instruments implicitly steers regulatory policies in a direction that results in tolerance of certain risks (rendering them acceptable) and can lead to forms of public inaction.