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This essay offers a new approach for conceptualizing the environmental impact of chemicals production, consumption, disposal, and regulation. Environmental protection regimes tend to be highly segmented according to place, media, substance, and effect. Existing scholarship often reflects this same segmentation, by focusing on a locality, specific chemical, social movement, or regulatory body. In turn, as new environmental measures are introduced to deal with pollution and toxicity, they tend to focus on controlling future effects rather than dealing with the accumulated contamination from past industrial activity and waste. In chemical substances we encounter phenomena that are at the same time voluminous and miniscule, regulated yet unruly. Inspired by recent work on materiality and infrastructures, we focus on the concept of residues as both material and political entities. Following residues, we argue, helps us see how the past has been built into our chemical environments and regulatory systems, and why contaminants seem to always evade control.

Purpose of Review Population attributable fractions (PAFs) are increasingly used for setting cancer prevention priorities. Our review aims, first, to gather published estimates of the percentage of cancer attributed to causal agents in the workplace and, second, to analyze them from the perspective of their potential effects on population health inequities. Recent Findings The estimates generally ranged from less than 2% to more than 8%, with an average of 4-5%. While most authors acknowledge that exposures concentrate in lower-socioeconomic status and more vulnerable workers, the literature has never considered the occupational group as a source of variation in the calculations. This knowledge gap is linked to the paucity of data describing the occupational patterning of exposures and cancer. More globally, the social gradient in cancer is often interpreted in the light of behavioral factors alone, a tendency linked by historians to the very foundations of modern epidemiology. Yet, there is accumulated evidence that work affects health and the risk of death through different pathways, which are also relevant to cancer. Summary While the epidemiologic literature addressed conceptual and validity issues surrounding PAFs, it seldom questioned their potential impacts. There is in particular a lack of consideration of factors beyond individual behaviors and a paucity of attention to population health inequities. We hence propose to further the discipline's reflexivity by changing the focus, scope, and metrics in order to assess the burden of work-related cancer in a way that is more meaningful to the most disadvantaged workers.

This article analyzes the consequences of the increasing reference to scientific expertise in the decision and implementation process of occupational health policy. Based on examples (exposure limits and attributable fractions) taken from an interdisciplinary seminar conducted in 2014 to 2015 in France, it shows how the measurement or regulation of a problem through biomedicine-based tools produces blind spots. It also uses a case study to show the contradictions between scientific and academic aims and public health intervention. Other indirect implications are also examined, such as the limitation of trade unions’ scope for action. Finally, the article suggests launching a broad political debate accessible to nonspecialists about collective occupational health issues—a dialogue made difficult by the rise of the afore-mentioned techno-scientific perspective.