Put a sock in it

You may find perfumed socks an indispensable luxury, but Steen Gade, head of
the Danish Environmental Protection Agency, thinks they are a pain in the neck.
“They undoubtedly add colour to life for some people,” he says, but his agency
faces the dilemma of how to regulate thousands of untested chemicals in products
that might harm human health or the environment. He believes regulators should
apply an “unnecessariness principle”, to dispense with chemicals that “make no
difference to how the products work”. You can let him know what you think at
www.mst.dk/debat/emner.asp?g=10.