Monthly Archives: September 2019

Where are Illinois’ lead pipes? Chicago Water has nearly 60%, and small systems don’t know.

Tom Neltner, J.D., Chemicals Policy Director and Lindsay McCormick, Program Manager.

Chicago is the epicenter for lead service lines (LSLs) in the United States. In a report submitted to Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) in April, Chicago Water reported having 392,614 LSLs – 75% of the total service lines in its water system that serves 2.7 million people living in the city and the city’s 125 suburbs. The number of LSLs is over three times higher than any other city. For additional context, this number represents 58% of the known LSLs in Illinois and 6% of the estimated 6.1 million LSLs in the country.

Chicago Water also reported an additional 120,760 service lines as unknown material that may be lead. Only 7,299 (2%) of its total service lines are made of something other than lead.

These numbers are based on the second year of mandatory reporting that IEPA makes publicly available. Earlier this year, we summarized the first year of reporting. In the second year of reporting, IEPA improved the program by allowing CWSs to separately report lines of unknown material where the utility was confident they were not LSLs – most likely because the lines were installed after the date the CWS stopped allowing use of lead. So the remaining lines of “unknown material” were more likely to be lead. In addition, all community water systems (CWSs) in the state reported in the second year.[1] Given these improvements, we looked more closely at the data.

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Peer reviewers confirm EPA has failed to show Pigment Violet 29 doesn’t present unreasonable risk

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

Late on Friday, EPA quietly posted the final peer review report of the Scientific Advisory Committee on Chemicals (SACC) for pigment violet 29, the first chemical for which EPA issued a draft risk evaluation under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) as amended in 2016.

No wonder EPA posted it late Friday with no announcement.  The peer reviewers’ report confirms what EDF and others have been saying since release of the draft:  EPA has fallen far short of supporting its sweeping conclusion that the chemical does not present unreasonable risk, including to vulnerable subpopulations.  The report also faults EPA’s use of systematic review, and reiterates that EPA needs to submit its method to the National Academy of Sciences for review.  Read More »

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No, Bergeson & Campbell, the public’s right to know about new chemicals is not a distraction or waste of resources

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

Earlier this month, EDF and other NGOs filed a notice of intent (NOI) to sue the Environmental Protection Agency for violations of the Toxic Substances Control Act and its own regulations that deny the public timely access to information on chemicals companies seek to bring onto the market.

Members of the public have a right to know about chemicals entering the market because they may well be exposed to them.  And they have a right to know about and meaningfully participate in EPA’s review of the safety of those chemicals because such transparency, accountability, and public participation are fundamental to good government, as well as being required by the law.

This week the industry law firm Bergeson & Campbell (B&C) offered a commentary on the NOI, lamenting it as “hugely distracting and draw[ing] resources and [EPA] management’s attention away from other priorities.”  Note that B&C represents many companies that submit new chemicals to EPA for review under TSCA and has been a central actor in the chemical industry’s efforts to weaken those reviews.

In its commentary, B&C acknowledges that the NOI has identified real legal violations committed by EPA, and that these violations result in the public having less information about the agency’s new chemicals program.  But B&C asserts that the violations don’t really matter because they have been going on for a long time, not just under this administration.  While that is true in some cases, the argument ignores the two elephants in the room.  Read More »

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EPA’s latest move to deflect criticism of its TSCA risk evaluations: Muzzle its science advisors

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

Readers of this blog know that Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has voiced strong opposition to a number of decisions made by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that aim to limit the risks it finds when evaluating the safety of chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

These decisions include:

  • excluding from its analysis known human and environmental exposures to a chemical, based on unwarranted assumptions that those exposures are adequately managed by other statutes;
  • claiming without support that workers are protected by assuming universal and universally effective use of personal protective equipment throughout chemical supply chains and the adequacy of OSHA regulations that either don’t apply or are decades out of date;
  • arbitrarily loosening EPA’s longstanding risk standards governing when cancer incidences are deemed unacceptably high; and
  • choosing not to exercise its enhanced authorities under TSCA to require submission of robust information on chemicals’ hazard and exposures, resorting instead to questionable assumptions and relying on voluntarily submitted industry data that are unrepresentative or of poor or indeterminate quality.

Through these decisions, EPA increases the likelihood that it will either not find unreasonable risk and thereby avoid regulating the chemical, or if that can’t be accomplished, find risks that are low enough that it can impose few restrictions, thereby burdening industry as little as possible.

In response to each of these decisions, EPA has received dozens of highly critical comments on its draft risk evaluations from state and local governments, labor and health groups, environmental NGOs and members of the scientific community.  And in the first several peer reviews conducted by its Scientific Advisory Committee on Chemicals (SACC), many of the scientists voiced quite similar concerns during the committee’s public meetings (as of yet, final peer review reports have not been issued).

Rather than address the problems, EPA has adopted a new tactic to stifle the criticism, one that is quite chilling (literally and figuratively):  It is telling the SACC that these issues are off-limits to the peer reviewers because they represent policy decisions that are beyond the charge given to the SACC.  This is beyond the pale, for several reasons.  Read More »

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EDF comments flag serious flaws in EPA’s draft risk evaluation for 1-Bromopropane

This week, EPA held its Science Advisory Committee on Chemicals (SACC) meeting to peer review its draft risk assessment on 1-bromopropaneone of the first 10 chemicals being evaluated under the reformed Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

EDF provided both oral comments and written comments to the SACC, raising the following issues:

  1. EPA inappropriately and illegally excludes all exposures to the general population from releases to air, water and land based on the unsupported assumption that other statutes adequately address the exposures;
  2. EPA has failed to evaluate the risk to consumers of developing cancer from acute 1-BP exposure;
  3. EPA errs in deeming a 1 in 10,000 cancer risk level reasonable for workers;
  4. EPA lacks access to full studies and relies only on summaries, prepared by industry, of limited aquatic toxicity testing to conclude 1-BP presents no unreasonable risks to the entire environment; and
  5. EPA overstates OSHA requirements and erroneously assumes that workers always use appropriate personal protective equipment. Yet in 2018 alone, OSHA cited 2,892 violations of the respiratory protection standard identified in 1,281 separate inspections, and such violations were the fourth most common type of violation.

Recently EPA has publicly stated that a number of the topics above are policy decisions outside the SACC’s charge (particularly, 1, 3 and 5). In our comments, EDF strongly disagreed, noting that all three decisions have major direct scientific consequences, and clearly lead EPA to underestimate the chemical’s risk – to the environment, the general population, workers, and vulnerable subpopulations.

For our full set of oral and written comments, see here.

 

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EPA needs to stop misleading the public and its peer reviewers about the data it has obtained from the European Chemicals Agency

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

In numerous assessment documents issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) developed in its implementation of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), EPA cites as a source the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA).  ECHA is the agency that administers the European Union’s (EU) REACH Regulation, which (unlike TSCA) requires the registration of chemicals in commerce by companies that wish to continue to produce and use the chemicals in the EU.

When companies register chemicals under REACH, they are required to develop and submit a “dossier” of certain information on production and use as well as on physical-chemical properties, fate, hazard, exposures and risks.  ECHA then makes information available on its website.

In its draft risk evaluations for the first 10 chemicals undergoing evaluations under TSCA, as well as in some of its support documents for high-priority substance designations under TSCA, EPA has heavily relied on these dossiers.  But in doing so, EPA has grossly mischaracterized the source and nature of the data it references as coming from ECHA.

EDF has been raising concerns about EPA’s mischaracterizations for some time now (see section 1.E of our comments on EPA’s draft risk evaluation for 1,4-dioxane), but they persist.  And as recently as yesterday, members of the peer review panel reviewing EPA’s draft documents have been led by EPA statements and citations to assume a degree of completeness and government review of these data that is simply false.

EPA needs to immediately cease and desist in its mischaracterizations.  Read More »

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