Center for Environmental Health

We were heartbroken to learn that our longtime partner and attorney, Eric Somers, passed away this past Spring.

CEH has held a nearly 30-year partnership with Eric’s firm, the Lexington Law Group (LLG) that continues to this day. Under Eric’s steadfast representation, CEH’s litigation efforts led to the elimination of lead in children’s products such as toys, lunchboxes, baby bibs, diaper rash cream, and countless other common sources of lead exposure for kids. Eric also helped CEH to reach agreements that required companies to remove lead from jewelry, hexavalent chromium from footwear, and arsenic from wood playground equipment.

Eric was instrumental in helping us change the world. We send our deepest condolences to Eric’s family, friends, and our colleagues at the Lexington Law Group.

A number of former CEH team members who worked closely with Eric shared their thoughts, which can be read here:

In Memory of Eric Somers, Longtime Attorney and Counsel for CEH - Center for Environmental Health % Eric Somers represented CEH for 27 years, securing transformational legal victories to protect people’s health and the environment.

We notified the EPA of our intent to sue the agency over the atrazine issue. We're proud to take this joint action alongside our colleagues at Center for Biological Diversity and Pesticide Action Network North America.

“While more than 60 countries have banned the herbicide outright as too dangerous, over 70 million pounds of atrazine are used annually in America, contaminating thousands of watersheds nationwide and inflicting widespread harm to aquatic life and human health."

Story by The New Lede:

Federal review on weedkiller sparks backlash from environment and health groups Advocates for environmental and human health protections are seeking to challenge a decision by US regulators that they say will allow the continued use of atrazine, a commonly used herbicide linked to cancer and other health problems.

🌊 Today is ! What better way to celebrate than to use our collective power to get an endocrine-disrupting chemical that's also bad for our oceans out of receipt paper?

The toxic chemical BPS is commonly found in the thermal paper used in the hard copies of receipts. The receipts we throw in the trash often wind up in landfills where contaminated liquid runoff can seep into local waterways. Receipts that have been littered wash into storm drains which discharge directly into marine ecosystems. Even receipts that we mistakenly put into paper recycling end up contaminating those recycling streams causing paper mills to discharge bisphenol-laden water into our oceans.

It’s clear that the only way to protect our oceans from the BPS in receipts is to head it off at the source and get BPS out of receipt paper in the first place. That’s why we’ve filed legal actions against nearly 200 companies with BPS in their receipts in hopes of using safer products for human health and aquatic life.

But nearly every industry uses paper receipts, so we’ve got a lot of ground to cover to change the industry. Will you help us make receipts safe for human health and our oceans? https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/its-world-ocean-day-protect-aquatic-life-from-the-bps-in-receipts-2/