According to the European Union, dioxin levels in the environment have reduced over the last ten years. In the same period, PVC use has gone up by over a million tonnes.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
measured the sources of dioxins from food and the environment.
Click
for a text description of the graph.
The World health Organisation (WHO) say that it is safe for a 70kg adult to take in between 70 and 280 picogrammes of dioxins per day. A picogramme is a million, millionth of a gramme (1/1,000,000,000,000g).
Are you safe?
Use the graph and look at what you eat. Add up your total daily exposure to dioxins.
Find your weight in kilogrammes (1stone is approximately 6.5kg).
The WHO safe exposure limit is 1-4 picogrammes per kilogramme of body weight per day.
Your safe exposure in picogrammes is between 1 and 4 times your body weight in kg.
Is there any such thing as a "safe" level of exposure to dioxins? Environmental groups would argue that there is not, but it would be impossible to remove all dioxins from the environment.
