Monthly Archives: April 2014

New Draft of House Chemical Safety Bill Falls Short; EDF Calls on All Sides to Redouble Effort

By Richard Denison / Published: April 29, 2014

Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Lead Senior Scientist.

Release in response to today’s House Environment and Economy Subcommittee hearing on a revised discussion draft of the Chemicals in Commerce Act (CICA)

Today’s hearing makes clear that the discussion draft has made progress but still falls far short of legislation that will fix the fundamental flaws of the current law, according to Dr. Richard Denison, Lead Senior Scientist at Environmental Defense Fund. He urged all sides to keep the bipartisan process moving forward in both houses of Congress.

“While bipartisan discussions have yielded a number of substantial improvements to address serious concerns with the original draft, the most problematic provisions remain virtually untouched,” Denison said. “The goal now should be to keep the conversations going.”

Examples of progress include giving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) authority to require testing where data are insufficient for prioritization purposes; incorporation of deadlines for agency action to assess and address risks of high-priority chemicals; and less prescriptive and onerous information quality and evaluation requirements.

Sections of the draft pose major concerns and fail to strike a fair and reasonable balance. Examples include the sweeping preemption of state authority for chemicals never subject to a thorough EPA safety review; overly broad allowances for companies to mask the identity of chemicals even long after market entry; and a failure to ensure that conditions placed on new chemicals apply to all companies making or using them.

“We’re optimistic that solutions are at hand that address the needs of all stakeholders, but it is going to take a redoubling of effort by all sides to get there,” he said.

 

Posted in Health policy, TSCA reform / Tagged , , , , | Comments are closed

The perverting of prioritization: How a good idea for TSCA reform went bad – and how to save it

By Richard Denison / Published: April 22, 2014

Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Lead Senior Scientist.

For years, the concept of prioritization as an element of TSCA reform has enjoyed support from a broad array of stakeholders.  The number of chemicals in active commerce is large, if uncertain:  surely less than the 85,000 listed on the TSCA Inventory, but still in the tens of thousands. That sheer number demands that EPA develop and apply a process to decide where to start and how to sequence the enormous task of reviewing the safety of those chemicals. 

There has also been widespread agreement that EPA should make an initial pass using available information to identify three groups of chemicals:  a) those that present significant hazard or exposure potential or both; b) those for which existing information doesn’t raise such concerns; and c) those that need more information to determine their level of concern.

As conceived, prioritization was to be a low-stakes proposition for the various stakeholders, simply the means to get the new system up and running.  Prioritization decisions would not be final actions; rather, they were expressly designed to minimize dispute, and would be barred from legal challenge.  Chemicals identified as high priority and in need of immediate scrutiny would get a more thorough assessment before any decision as to whether they posed significant risk and required a regulatory response.  Chemicals identified as low-priority would be so designated provisionally based on less than a thorough assessment, and could be revisited if and when new information arose.  And chemicals lacking sufficient information to be prioritized would be subject to further data collection and generation, and then funneled back into the prioritization process.

These concepts are well-established both in the outcomes of industry-NGO negotiations and in heavily negotiated provisions of the more recent incarnations of the Safe Chemicals Act.

But then some folks got greedy.  Read More »

Posted in Health policy, TSCA reform / Tagged , , | Comments are closed

Report: Staggering amounts of toxic chemicals produced across America

By Alissa Sasso / Published: April 15, 2014

Alissa Sasso is a Chemicals Policy Fellow.  Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Lead Senior Scientist.

[Cross-posted from EDFVoices blog]

Recent spills in West Virginia and North Carolina cast a spotlight on toxic hazards in our midst. But as bad as they are, these acute incidents pale in scope compared to the chronic flow of hazardous chemicals coursing through our lives each day with little notice and minimal regulation. A new report by EDF, Toxics Across America, tallies billions of pounds of chemicals in the American marketplace that are known or strongly suspected to cause increasingly common disorders, including certain cancers, developmental disabilities, and infertility.

While it’s no secret that modern society consumes huge amounts of chemicals, many of them dangerous, it is surprisingly difficult to get a handle on the actual numbers. And under current law it’s harder still to find out where and how these substances are used, though we know enough to establish that a sizeable share of them end up in one form or another in the places where we live and work.

Our new report looks at 120 chemicals that have been identified by multiple federal, state and international officials as known or suspected health hazards. Using the latest, albeit limited, data collected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, we identify which of these chemicals are in commerce in the U.S.; in what amounts they are being made; which companies are producing or importing them; where they are being produced or imported; and how they are being used. An interactive online map accompanying the report lets the user access the report’s data and search by chemical, by company, by state, and by site location.

Among our findings:  Read More »

Posted in Health policy, TSCA reform / Tagged , , , , | Comments are closed

Conflicted West Virginia chemical spill panel is repeating many of CDC’s mistakes

By Richard Denison / Published: April 2, 2014

Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Senior Scientist.

[Use this link to see all of our posts on Dourson.]

Yesterday, the chair of a “Health Effects Expert Panel” convened by the West Virginia Testing Assessment Project (WV TAP) held a press conference to present the panel’s preliminary findings from its review of the “safe” level set by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) for MCHM and other chemicals that spilled into the Elk River in early January and contaminated the drinking water of 300,000 West Virginia residents.

A final report from the panel apparently won’t be released until May, but a press release issued yesterday sounds far from preliminary in saying the panel supports CDC’s methods, assumptions, toxicity data and “safety factors.”  While providing no details, the release indicates the panel is using the same flawed and incomplete summary of a toxicity study used by CDC in its rush to set a safe level for MCHM.  And it parrots CDC’s erroneous use of the term “safety factors,” which is at odds with the National Academy of Sciences’ strong recommendation that such term should be avoided as it is highly misleading.

In addition to choosing to rely on the same summary CDC used of a 1990 study conducted by MCHM’s manufacturer, Eastman Chemical, the panel accepted at face value Eastman’s interpretation that the study identified a no-effect level.  That conclusion has been questioned and cannot be independently assessed because Eastman has not provided the actual quantitative data from the study.  Moreover, the study used a protocol dating from 1981 that has been extensively revised at least twice since then.  These are among the many problems identified with this study.

It appears the panel’s main departure from CDC was to assume the most highly exposed population would have been formula-fed infants instead of older children.  The panel’s “safe” level is 120 parts per billion (ppb), a value about 8-fold lower than CDC’s level of 1 part per million (ppm).  That seems an improvement over the CDC’s methodology.

The panel’s conflict of interest

However, the process by which the panel itself was formed and the clear conflict of interest (COI) involved – a conflict that only came to light in response to a reporter’s questions at yesterday’s press conference – are deeply concerning.   Read More »

Posted in Health science, Industry influence / Tagged , , , , | Comments are closed