Like many new Berkeley parents, Michele Hammond and Jeremiah Holland try to live as green a life as they can, making as informed a choice on synthetic chemicals as possible.

But at a certain point, they throw up their hands

More than 80,000 chemicals are in use, yet the Environmental Protection Agency has full toxicity data on less than one-quarter. Manufacturers bringing new chemicals to market — at the rate of nearly 1,000 a year — provide little data on the health impacts of those compounds.

Almost none of that makes it to product labels.

Last month, Europe moved a step closer to enacting a far-reaching chemical reform package known as REACH. The package — officially the Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals — puts the burden of proof on manufacturers to show their chemicals are safe and bans the most harmful ones.

REACH has been strongly opposed by industry and the Bush administration, which characterize it as unwieldy, impractical, unnecessary and expensive.

"We see decades of arguments over various chemicals ... and the government basically unable to do anything about it," said Stacy Malkan of Health Care Without Harm. "In Europe, they're looking at the same science, and they're saying, 'OK, this looks bad, potentially toxic to kids,' and they've ... banned phthalates in toys and are banning them in cosmetics."

Signs of change here are emerging.

For starters, state regulators

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increasingly are looking to Brussels, Belgium, not Washington, D.C., for guidance. New York, Massachusetts and California are exploring ways to paste pieces of REACH into their local statutes. Next month, Assemblywoman Wilma Chan, D-Oakland, resumes her effort to ban certain phthalates and chemicals from children's toys.

Biomonitoring efforts by nonprofit groups, university researchers and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will shed more information about exposures. It will be scattered, less uniform and, in some cases, more prone to interpretation error and criticism than had it been done under the state's aegis, but it will be there.

And information collected in Europe by REACH will find its way here.

"The concerns of scientists, particularly European scientists, is that we'd like to not have a return of the PCBs, where they're in the sediment and they're going to be with us for the next 50 years," said Hooper, the CalEPA scientist.

"PBDE levels are not going down. There is another PCB out there," he said.

Contact Douglas Fischer at dfischer@angnewspapers.com.