Endocrine Disruptor Symbol

Forewarned is forearmed

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are among the most challenging and dangerous chemical insults that human beings experience.

EDCs are enormously damaging to human health: they disrupt hormones, cause congenital damage in foetuses, and devastate male and female fertility.

EDC production has almost tripled in the last 20 years, and the effects persist through generations, affecting the children and even grandchildren of those originally exposed.

Line chart, 1940 to 2010: global chemical production and diabetes prevalence rising in step

Worse, some of them, such as the PFAS family known as ‘forever chemicals’, barely break down at all. We have no good way to destroy or purify them.

This is a massive problem for humanity’s long-term health, and it is getting rapidly worse.

Editorial note (2026): partial answers have since appeared. In 2022 chemists reported in Science a low-temperature method that breaks down one major class of PFAS, the perfluorocarboxylic acids; making such methods work beyond the laboratory is still in progress.

Diagram: endocrine-disrupting chemicals act at each stage of life, from mother and foetus through infancy and childhood to adolescence, with effects including restricted foetal growth, obesity, changes in metabolism, thyroid dysfunction, neurobehavioural disorders, effects on fertility and cancer, with epigenetic alterations at the centre

I want to increase awareness of these dangers by creating a new symbol for products and zones contaminated by EDCs, inspired by the trefoil hazard symbols for radiological and biological hazards, developed by UC Berkeley and Dow Chemical respectively.

Existing hazard symbols are recognised by billions of people, including chemical warnings for flammability and the like. But there is no comparable signal for which products contain EDCs, or how much, a gap that affects both industry and, especially, consumers.

A standardised symbol denoting EDCs in products and processes would let us account for these chemicals for the first time, facilitating consumer awareness, industrial safety, world trade, and ethical production and consumption.

Below is our second draft submission, with example implementations. The central symbol is a stylised molecule of bisphenol A (BPA) with a dioxin molecule below it, flanked by three radiative blades symbolising birth defects, infertility, and chronic disease. These elements together form the grotesque Endohazard Wraith, intended to convey an arresting, instinctive sensation of danger and revulsion across all cultures, irrespective of familiarity with the symbol’s meaning.

The next step is to refine the design if necessary and specify it formally within an official standard.

Editorial note (2026): in April 2023 the European Union added endocrine disruption, for human health and for the environment, to the hazard classes of its CLP regulation (Delegated Regulation (EU) 2023/707). Labels for classified chemicals carry a signal word and an EU hazard statement; no pictogram was assigned to the new classes.

I’ve put up a landing page at www.endohazard.org

The proposed endocrine disruptor hazard symbol: three barbed fronds swirling around a disrupted molecular motif

Watson & Arabadzhi, 2021. Public Domain.

(Design updated in 2021.)

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