Children's book publisher goes "chlorine free" "How can you call yourself an environmentalist? You write about saving the 'Great Kapok Tree,' but your books kill all the other trees!" Three years ago children's author Lynne Cherry received this admonishment in a young reader's letter, and she began a search for an environmentally benign printing paper for children's picture books. Her pursuit fell short of saving trees, but it led her publisher, Harcourt Brace Co. of San Diego, to begin last fall to publish all its children's picture books—2 million copies a year—on totally chlorine free (TCF) paper. Cherry compared notes with other authors of children's books and found they had received similar letters. Acting through an organization she created, the Center for Children's Environmental Literature, Cherry began meeting with publishers and paper makers to work toward creation of a recycled, TCF printing stock suitable for high-quality picture books. "I told U.S. paper companies if they develop a recycled, TCF paper, I could deliver a market." That challenge remains. Harcourt Brace tried recycled stock but found its quality inconsistent; fibers broke and sheets wrinkled. Knowing Harcourt Brace's preference for environ-
Lynne Cherry's efforts led Harcourt Brace & Co. to publish all its children's picture books on totally chlorine free paper.
mentally safe stock and its problem with recycled paper, its printer, Tein Wah Press in Singapore, recommended Nymolla Silk Matte by the Swedish mill Stora, according to Michael Farmer, Harcourt Brace vice president. "The stock has excellent printability, whiteness, and brightness. It's not recycled but it is produced in a manner that certainly speaks to responsible management of resources and energy, and it reproduces artwork beautifully." For Farmer, it was better to get
the chlorine out than to use recycled stock. "We have plenty of uses for recycled paper. There's no reason to make picture books out of it." That point was echoed by Marc Cheshire, president and publisher of the American arm of North-South Books, a Swiss children's book publisher, which recently began using TCF paper, also from European mills. In the United States, there is only one TCF paper maker: Lyons Falls Pulp and Paper Co. in New York. In the last two years, Lyons Falls has increased its TCF paper market to a half dozen university presses, a few commercial book publishers, and several printers. Although unwilling to give exact numbers, George Pappas, book publication manager, said TCF paper is much more than a niche market for Lyons Falls. TCF paper pricing is "very competitive" with other stock, he added. European countries, Pappas said, are increasingly requiring manufacturers to decrease chlorine use, and he expects that European ecolabeling restrictions will eventually hurt U.S. paper makers trying to sell overseas. He noted that about one-third of the total 70-million-ton European pulp and paper market is TCF as compared to less than 1% of the 100-milhon-ton U.S. market. —JEFF JOHNSON
Dioxins' toxicity works through multiple pathways, study finds A new study suggests that dioxins render some of their toxic effects in the body not only by disrupting the normal activity of genes, but by directly affecting the activity of cellular compounds found outside the nucleus. The study, published in the October 1996 issue of Reproductive Toxicology (20(5), 401-11), also indicates that dioxins may follow this cellular pathway for toxicity more so in males than in females. The research was conducted by Essam Enan and his colleagues at the University of California-Davis. "This laboratory has done some crucial studies demonstrating that dioxin may have multiple mechanisms of toxicity," said toxicologist and dioxin expert Linda Birnbaum of EPA. "That's an important finding that is worth pur-
suing." Most studies, she pointed out, have indicated that dioxins operate solely by affecting the activity of genes in the cell nucleus. The study also suggests that researchers need to pay more attention to gender differences in how a compound renders its toxic effects in the body, according to Enan. Although it is well known that the sexes differ in the degree to which they succumb to the toxic effects of various compounds, the pathways these chemicals use to induce toxicity are generally assumed to be the same in both sexes. Enan's study suggests this assumption may not be valid, at least for dioxin-like compounds. He discovered that in the fat cells of female guinea pigs and macaque monkeys, there are gender
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differences in the mechanisms of one type of toxicity from exposure to 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD). The researchers found gender differences in the biochemical indicators of TCDD-associated "wasting syndrome," a wellaccepted nonreproductive toxic effect of TCDD whose hallmark is weight loss. In male animals TCDD stemmed the addition of phosphorus to proteins harbored in the cell nucleus while boosting the process outside the nucleus, but in female animals it rendered the opposite effects. This suggests, Enan said, that in males a substance outside the cell nucleus triggers many of TCDD's toxic effects, whereas in females the trigger includes a nuclear factor. —MARGIE PATLAK
