Monthly Archives: April 2019

Traffic pollution causes 1 in 5 new cases of kids’ asthma in major cities: How data can help

Dr. Ananya Roy is a Senior Health Scientist

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City leadership can ill afford to ignore this issue and must strive for opportunities to prevent new cases of asthma.

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landmark new study shines a light on the massive impact of vehicular air pollution on the health of our children. The study estimates that nitrogen dioxide (NO2) – a key traffic air pollutant – leads to approximately 4 million new asthma cases in children across the globe, or 1 in 10 new cases.

To address this pervasive threat, leaders need local data to create targeted approaches and policies. That’s why Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is leveraging sensor technology to develop novel methods to measure and map air pollution – including NO2 concentrations – block by block in cities across the world, from Oakland to Houston to London.

Cities bear the worst burden

The study, released this month in The Lancet Planetary Health, finds that children living in cities are most at risk of asthma due to NO2 pollution. A staggering 90% of all new cases due to traffic were in urban and adjoining suburban areas.

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D.C. Circuit Affirms Public’s Right to Know about Chemicals in Use under Reformed Law

Court strongly rebukes Trump EPA’s unlawful attempts to scale back transparency requirements

(April 26, 2019 – Washington, D.C.) Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit delivered a strong rebuke to the Trump Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) implementation of the nation’s chemical safety law, protecting key aspects of the public’s right to know about the toxic chemicals in our homes, schools, and workplaces.

The Court agreed with EDF that EPA had failed to require companies to show that the identities of their chemicals cannot be reverse-engineered in order to claim them confidential under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

The Court remanded the rule back to EPA to require that companies make this showing to claim confidentiality.  The Court also affirmed that other key TSCA requirements apply to confidentiality claims despite EPA’s failure to include them in its regulations.

“This decision is a significant win for public disclosure and a strong affirmation by the Court of the public’s right to know about the chemicals to which we all are or may be exposed. The Court ruled that EPA must require companies to provide real substantiation for their claims for confidentiality – and that EPA had failed to do so in the rule we challenged,” said Robert Stockman, Senior Attorney at Environmental Defense Fund.  “EPA will now have to require significantly more evidence from companies before they can conceal the identities of chemicals they make and sell.  As a result, fewer such claims will be allowed and workers, consumers and the public will gain access to more information about those chemicals.”

In the case, EDF v. EPA (D.C. Cir. 17-1201), EDF aimed to ensure that EPA upholds the requirements set forth in the reformed Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to maximize transparency and public knowledge about which chemicals are currently in use by narrowing the grounds for asserting confidentiality claims and requiring more scrutiny of them.  The Court affirmed that these requirements apply despite EPA’s failure to incorporate them into its regulation.

“A key goal of the reformed chemical safety law is to make more information public about the chemicals we’re exposed to at home, in our workplaces and schools, and through our environment.” said Dr. Richard Denison, Lead Senior Scientist at Environmental Defense Fund. “While the Trump EPA has taken every opportunity to skirt its responsibility and conceal information that the public has a right to know, the Court’s decision today affirms that the law trumps those efforts.”

On some issues, the Court gave deference to EPA in interpreting the law as it did:  EPA’s decision to delay assigning “unique identifiers” to certain chemicals with confidential chemical identities; and its decision to exempt chemicals made only for export from the law’s Inventory notification requirement.  Finally, the Court unfortunately ruled that EPA could in its discretion allow any manufacturer or processor to make a claim for the confidentiality of a chemical, regardless of whether that company had previously made such a claim.  While EDF does not agree with the Court’s characterization of our position, the Court cited the Chevron standard that provides agencies with considerable deference.

For more background on the decision, see the bullets below.  For more information on this and other lawsuits challenging EPA’s implementation of TSCA, see: https://www.edf.org/health/tsca-case-resources. Read More »

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EDF asks judge to rule on legality of FDA rule allowing companies to secretly decide on chemicals in our food

Tom Neltner, J.D.is Chemicals Policy Director

At the end of March, EDF, represented jointly by counsel from Earthjustice and the Center for Food Safety (CFS), asked a federal district court judge to decide as a matter of law that the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) regulation is unlawful. The GRAS Rule allows food manufacturers to make secret safety determinations for chemicals added to food without notifying FDA or the public and to use such chemicals. If the judge agrees to our request, this would vacate the rule. Two years ago, EDF and others challenged the legality of the GRAS Rule in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. Last September, the court ruled that plaintiffs EDF and the CFS have standing, setting the stage for a decision on the merits of the case.

In the Motion for Summary Judgment, we identify the following four ways in which FDA violated the law in the GRAS Rule. FDA has until May 28 to respond to our motion.

  1. FDA unlawfully delegated to food manufacturers its authority to determine the safety of chemicals added to our food.

When Congress enacted the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA) of 1938, it gave FDA the responsibility to ensure the nation’s food is safe and free from harmful substances. To implement this responsibility, it provided the agency broad authority to adopt necessary regulations.

Unfortunately, in the GRAS Rule, instead of fulfilling its responsibility to keep food safe, FDA formally and unlawfully outsourced its responsibility to the regulated entities themselves – namely, for-profit additive manufacturers – allowing them to decide for themselves, in secret, whether the chemical substances they have manufactured can be added to food. This unlawful delegation – made without express statutory authorization – makes it all but impossible for FDA to fulfill its obligations under the FFDCA.

As a result, the GRAS Rule impermissibly allows regulated, private companies with obvious conflicts of interest to self-certify the use of their chemical additives as GRAS without notifying FDA. This is not a case where FDA is seeking legitimate outside input to gather factual information or advice and make policy recommendations. Here, FDA retains no oversight over these secret GRAS determinations that directly affect the safety of our food and thus render it impossible for the agency to fulfill its statutory mandate to keep our food safe.

By delegating its authority in the GRAS Rule, the agency violated Constitutional principles, the FFDCA, and the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). The rule effectively insulates the agency from democratic accountability for food safety decisions and denies citizens their right to seek judicial review of decisions about the safety of substances that may be added to food.

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How toxic is oilfield wastewater? New paper highlights gaps in our understanding.

This post originally was published on the Energy Exchange Blog.

By Cloelle Danforth and Nichole Saunders.

Jennifer McPartland contributed to this post.

Collaborative research is a critical element for identifying unforeseen risks associated with using the oil industry’s wastewater outside the oilfield. That’s the recommendation of a new peer-reviewed paper accepted this week in the Journal of Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management (IEAM).

The paper comes at a crucial moment for the oil and gas industry, which generates some 900 billion gallons of salty, chemical-filled water (also called produced water) each year. Traditionally, companies dispose of this wastewater deep underground where it is less likely to cause contamination. But economics and water scarcity are forcing questions about other ways to treat, reuse and even repurpose this wastewater. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will release a report very soon that could make it more common for companies to discharge their wastewater into rivers and streams.

The IEAM paper outlines the conclusions of a multi-day toxicity workshop where experts from the oil and gas industry, academia, government and the environmental community collectively identified key knowledge gaps associated with this waste stream and determined tools, technologies and methods needed to help close those gaps.

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Posted in Environment, Health science, Public health / Tagged | Comments are closed

Latest available national data shows increase in blood lead levels for at least 2 million kids

Tom Neltner, J.D.Chemicals Policy Director

In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report summarizing the biomonitoring data from its National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Given EDF’s focus on protecting children from lead exposure, we went straight to the most recent blood lead monitoring results. The results are disturbing. As shown in Figure 1 below, after years of progress, in 2015-16 the blood lead levels (BLLs) of more than 2 million young children[1] increased:

  • Average child BLL: 48% BLL decrease from 2007-8 to 2013-14 but only a 3% decrease in 2015-16.
  • 75th percentile BLL (75% of children are below this level): 51% decrease from 2007-8 to 2013-14 but a 2% increase in 2015-16.
  • 90th percentile BLL: 51% decrease from 2007-8 to 2013-14 but an 18% increase in 2015-16.
  • 95th percentile BLL: 45% decrease from 2007-8 to 2013-14 but a 23% increase in 2015-16.

As with the smaller uptick in 2007-08 (which may have been related to the housing crises), it may only be short-term setback, nonetheless it bears careful examination.

Even more disturbing is the Trump Administration’s response to this information. The Administration:

  • Ignored the data in the rosy picture of progress it painted in its recent Lead Action Plan; and
  • Appears to be repeating mistakes of the past by proposing to slash CDC’s childhood lead poisoning prevention budget in half.

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Posted in Health policy, Lead / Tagged , , | Comments are closed

Wheeler piles on more deception trying to defend EPA’s corrupt actions on formaldehyde

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

In a series of recent hearings Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler has sought to justify his and his agency’s corrupt decisions to kill off a health assessment of formaldehyde done by career scientists in the agency’s science arm (IRIS) and resurrect it under the control of conflicted political appointees.[pullquote]Once again, the Trump EPA is elevating private interests over the public interest – and offering up deceptions to try to obfuscate and cover up its real intent.[/pullquote]

Recall that under Wheeler’s and his predecessor’s leadership, a draft of the IRIS assessment, ready since fall 2017 for release for public comment and peer review, has been suppressed.  Also recall that EPA leadership ran a phony priority-setting process last fall under the direction of yet another conflicted political appointee in order to claim that the IRIS formaldehyde assessment is no longer a priority for the agency.  Aspects of this scheme were highlighted in a recent report of Congress’ Government Accountability Office (GAO).  Finally, recall that a scant few weeks after that pronouncement, EPA declared last month that it intends to name formaldehyde a “high-priority substance” under TSCA.

Now to the next installment in this corrupt scheme:  Read More »

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