The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 was signed last Thursday morning by President Bush. It marks America's most important regulatory advance against toxic chemicals in many years.

By freeing children's items from lead and phthalates and strengthening the Consumer Products Safety Commission, the act brings hope that Congress is getting serious about undertaking a vital journey to achieve safe chemicals.

If we reach the journey's end, parents will no longer need to anguish over chemical hazards when they buy the very products we associate with secure, healthy families -- everyday goods found in toy, furniture and bedding stores and throughout supermarkets. American homes will be safer places for children to grow up undiminished by developmentally impairing chemicals.

However, this will be no easy ride. We have been part of the way before, but we have ceded much of the landscape to industry "highwaymen" who would prefer to keep the status quo with toxic chemicals to protect their bottom line.

Now that Congress has taken a big step in retaking this ground by fortifying the CPSC, let's do the same for other agencies charged with protecting the American people from toxic chemicals, especially the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.

Restoration of our consumer protection landscape will happen when Congress establishes the supremacy of science over vested interests in product safety decision-making. Allow demoralized agency scientists to do their jobs again and a new idealistic generation will join their ranks. Let's insist that we have legally binding tests for and effective means of regulating developmentally impairing chemicals.

Congress should go further and do more to help parents in their search for safe products. They have a right to know what is in the merchandise they buy. Why should "fragrance" on a shampoo bottle be able to provide cover for a phthalate or any other questionable additive? Let's expand the laws requiring disclosure of chemical ingredients across the board.

The highwaymen must be disarmed. Let's do that by finding more effective ways to reward companies that are shifting to safer chemicals so that the industrial lobbyists can no longer assert a need for harmful ingredients in the products that surround us.

We can also make the roads safer by passing the Green Chemistry Research and Development Act, which has languished for years in the Senate. As surprising as it may seem, professional chemists generally have little or no training in the toxic and environmental impacts of chemicals. We are pretty much driving blind as we design new products and processes to expand the economy. This bill will be the catalyst for a whole new approach for chemists -- one in which they learn to think properly about how to develop nonhazardous products and processes.

And last, we need to choose the authentic green chemistry leaders to head up the new federal centers, leaders who have created the field without federal support and who have had no choice other than to make themselves unpopular by coaxing the chemical enterprises to acknowledge toxic chemicals as a necessary step toward developing safe alternatives. Otherwise, "green chemistry" will become just another catchphrase.