Corporate bullies and the EPA. (Letters from our readers).

Thank you for publishing the cover story on green purchasing ("Buying Green," September/October 2002). It was thrilling to read about so many efforts underway to use institutional spending to create or expand markets for safer, less-toxic products. While I agree with your contention that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could do more to promote environmentally preferable purchasing, I don't think the EPA's failure to do so lies solely within the agency.

Right now companies motivated by the same myopic, profit-driven goals that created the Enron and WorldCom scandals are successfully preventing the EPA from releasing information that would make it easier for us to buy safer products. Individual companies and the trade associations and lobbyists they support are blocking the EPA's efforts to improve product safety. These companies know that market-based strategies will succeed only if full information about the true environmental and human health costs of our purchases is available.

Industry is busy buying influence and claiming no one cares about the environmental performance of products. These efforts are succeeding because too few of us are speaking the truth. If you want less-toxic products that are not contributing to growing cancer rates or changing the planet's climate, then let EPA Administrator Christine Whitman and your Congressional representatives know. Write a letter supporting the efforts of the EPA's Environmentally Preferable Purchasing Program (www. epa.gov/oppt/epp).

It is not enough to just buy safer products when we happen upon them: We must demand them from manufacturers, and also demand that Congress require the manufacturers to give us the information we need to make intelligent purchasing decisions. At the very least, the EPA should be empowered to release the product information it has already prepared.

Betsy Taylor, President, The Center for a New American Dream, Takoma Park, MD