Many of us know formaldehyde as that clear chemical with the powerful smell that permeates high school bio labs.

It's found just about everywhere, including in a lot of things that are probably in your homes and offices right now.

Composite lumber, plastics, paints, and glues.

And this past week, an Environmental Protection Agency evaluation said it poses an unreasonable risk to human health.

Last month, a ProPublica investigation concluded that it causes far more cancer than any other airborne pollutant,

and critics say not enough is being done to address the risk.

Sharon Lerner, who covers health in the environment for ProPublica,

was the lead reporter on their investigation.

Sharon, we mentioned some of the places where it's found.

How pervasive is formaldehyde in everyone's everyday life?

It's incredibly pervasive.

Vermaldehyde is essentially ubiquitous.

So indoors, the concentration is particularly high because

lots of products admit it like furniture, flooring, sometimes even clothing, but it's also outdoors

and pretty much everywhere outdoors. And how much more dangerous is formaldehyde than other airborne pollutants?

Yeah, so the EPA analyzes toxic air pollutants and estimate the cancer risk for each one of them.

Ideally, they're supposed to limit the exposure to these chemicals so that they cause no more than one case of cancer in every

million people exposed over lifetime.

And for most of the dozens of toxic air pollutants they look at, that is the case.

formaldehyde causes more cancer than any of them by far.

So according to the EPA's numbers, it's more than 20 cancers per million people. But what we found in our investigation and what the EPA acknowledged to us is that that number is an underestimate and it's a vast one because the actual number using their best estimate

is closer to 77 cases of cancer in every million people. You say the EPA acknowledges they

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