What's in that lipstick you put on everyday? Your water bottle? Your pajamas? Your baby's teething ring? How about your car or your computer?

Do you know? Do you care enough to find out?

Mark Schapiro does.

When he was a young journalist serving an internship at the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, Schapiro worked with the center's founder, David Weir, on Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World. Published in 1980, the book exposed the United States' practice of shipping agricultural chemicals banned in this country to other countries — which returned the favor in the form of toxic residue on imported fruits and vegetables.

After living and working as a reporter in Eastern and Western Europe and Latin America for 25 years, Schapiro returned to CIR as its editorial director a few years ago — and once again began looking at the United States' chemical policies and practices.

A quarter of a century after the pesticide scandal, Schapiro believes the tables have turned and Americans are now on the receiving end of its own toxic double-standard. Because of its lax environmental policies, he asserts in Exposed: The Toxic chemistry of Everyday Products, published by Chelsea Green in July 2007, the United States is now the dumping ground for potentially hazardous, cheaply produced, no-name goods that cannot meet the more rigorous public health standards established by the European Union.

The primary difference between the U.S. and the E.U. approach to chemicals, Shapiro says, is in the way each defines risk.

"The Europeans assess the inherent toxicity of a substance and, based on an accumulation of evidence, determine that its potential to cause harm is enough to remove it from circulation; the Americans have a far higher standard for action, awaiting conclusive scientific evidence of toxic exposure before acting. The frequent result is that the European Union and the United States review the same scientific studies, have access to the same toxicity data, and come to entirely different conclusions."

The practical result of this difference in definition is that mercury, cadmium, lead, chromium and chemical flame retardants that leach toxins into the earth and water when discarded electronic devices reach the landfill have been banned in Europe — but not the United States. Phthalates, a class of chemicals used to produce the soft plastics found in products as diverse as lotions, toys and teething rings — long associated with cancer, infertility and reproductive system disruption — are banned in Europe but still circulating widely in the United States. (Since Schapiro's book was published, certain hard plastics have also been shown to be highly toxic, and the same chemicals circulating in our bloodstream also have been found in our pets.)

In his book, Schapiro focuses on the toxic chemicals used in the manufacture of commonly consumer goods such as cosmetics, automobiles, electronics and toys, illustrating in each case the difference in the demands made on manufacturers — and the protection offered citizens — by Brussels (the seat of the European Union) and Washington. But his purpose, he says in a telephone interview, is broader than exposing our government's reluctance to protect the health of its citizens. He also wants us to know that there is a clear convergence between these environmental health issues and our country's economic health.

"In 2005, the United States was supplanted as the world's largest market by the European Union," Schapiro writes. That means that the United States — and its multinational companies — are no longer the power brokers they once were, setting standards and demanding that rest of the world adhere to them — a significant geopolitical shift, he says.

"We aren't writing the rules any longer," Shapiro says. U.S. companies now have to adapt to the E.U.'s environmental demands if they want to sell in its market, "which represents an increasing percentage of profits for American companies."

When the European Union's requirement that the carcinogenic, mutagenic and reproductively toxic chemicals on its "Negative List" be removed from products sold to its member countries took effect in March of 2005, Schapiro says, the response of Procter & Gamble's Brussels office (which he visited) was to hire toxicologists and remove those chemicals from the cosmetics it sold in Europe.

"And then two months later I went to Sacramento and watched the debate over (California's proposed Safe Cosmetics Act) — and the American representative of the very same company went out from Cincinnati to lobby against a measure that would simply require the notification of the state health authorities (of the presence of similar chemicals)."

For two years, Shapiro says, Procter & Gamble had dual production operations, selling less hazardous cosmetics in Europe and products with higher toxic loads in the United States. In early 2007, when he called them for an update, officials told Schapiro that they had decided the company was going to adapt to the Europeans' cosmetic directives and reformulate globally.

"What's interesting about that," Schapiro says, "is that it means Americans became the accidental beneficiaries of a foreign government's policies, which is an unusual position for the United States to find itself in."

Even more important, he says, as cosmetics and electronic firms move toward global reformulation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency become increasingly irrelevant. "(These companies) will now take their signals from Brussels for what is safe and what is not," he says.

These forced changes, Schapiro writes, also are "calling the American bluff." For years, U.S. companies have been telling us that reformulating products to make them safer for people and for the environment is not feasible — that it is a Utopian ideal that will cost us money and jobs. But we now know that the opposite is true, Schapiro says.

"Why can't companies do in America what they're already doing in Europe?" he asks in Exposed. Why can't we take the toxic chemicals our of our cosmetics, our cars, our computers and our toys? The Europeans have done it and they are not only still successful as a community, they have become the dominant economic force in the world.

The American public, Schapiro says, has been largely oblivious to the changes in chemical regulations coming from Europe. The question now is how Americans choose respond to this information. Because we live in a democracy, he says, we can and should demand higher levels of transparency and accountability from our leaders.

The Toxic Substances Control Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1976, exempted every chemical already on the market before 1979 from its screening requirements — a loophole that has allowed 95 percent of the chemicals used in the United States to escape any testing for toxicity or environmental impact, Schapiro says.

"At the very minimum," Schapiro says, "we can demand that we be informed about what's in our products. The rest of the world is moving ahead and taking stuff out and we don't even know what's in there."

Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products, Who's At Risk and What's At Stake for American Power by Mark Schapiro is available in bookstores and over the Internet. For more information about Schapiro, his book and his ongoing investigation of the health and environmental effects of chemical toxins, visit the Center for Investigative Reporting Web site — www.centerforinvestigativereporting.org.