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Abstract
If the words "our product is doubt" characterize the production of ignorance, in turn, the production of nonproblem could be encapsulated by "our product is silence." This article looks behind both these words and this concept of nonproblems, drawing attention to public policy mechanisms whose effect (whether explicitly intended or not) is to reduce the attention paid to a given problem, resulting in public inaction, not taking charge of a problem. It highlights the role in those dynamics of two factors: the scientific instruments attempting to quantify environmental and occupational health issues and the scientific expertise in the field of the regulation of chemicals. Downstream of these regulatory processes, the use of science-based regulatory instruments implicitly steers regulatory policies in a direction that results in tolerance of certain risks (rendering them acceptable) and can lead to public inaction.

Strongly grounded in scientific knowledge, the instrument known as occupational exposure limits or threshold limit values has changed government modalities of exposure to hazardous chemicals in workplaces, transforming both the substance of the problem at hand and the power dynamics between the actors involved. Some of the characteristics of this instrument favor the interests of industries at the expense of employees, their representatives, and the authorities in charge of regulating these risks. First, this instrument can be analyzed as a boundary object that has very different uses in space and time. In particular, it is increasingly masking its industrial origins to appear as an instrument that is almost exclusively based on scientific rationale. In the case of asbestos and its substitutes, the use of an instrument relying on scientific expertise generates a specific temporality of implementation that allows manufacturers to take advantage of periods during which regulations are either nonexistent or very loose. Finally, the choice of a technoscientific definition of the issues contributes to shifting the negotiations to a field where companies are in a position of strength and their opponents are weakened.

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.

Résumé Cet article analyse les transformations contemporaines de la production de connaissances et d'expertise en santé au travail en replaçant ces évolutions avec les spécificités et les évolutions récentes de ce secteur d'intervention publique. Après avoir montré comment les changements des politiques de santé publique contraignent à un certain nombre de transformations dans le domaine de la santé au travail, notamment en obligeant à créer de nouvelles instances d'expertises, cet article analyse comment l'expertise des risques professionnels s'institutionnalise et les effets induits sur les modalités de la prise de décision dans ce domaine. Il montre qu'au-delà de bouleversements importants, les rapports de pouvoir qui caractérisent ce domaine d'intervention restent relativement stables. Au delà du cas de la santé au travail, cet article invite à reposer les questions de la production de connaissances et de l'expertise en les mettant en perspective avec les rapports de force qui structurent un secteur d'intervention publique.