Monthly Archives: February 2020

EPA’s draft risk evaluation of carbon tetrachloride is riddled with unsupported exclusions and assumptions

By Richard Denison / Published: February 21, 2020

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

Next week, the Scientific Advisory Committee on Chemicals (SACC), established under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to peer-review EPA’s draft chemical risk evaluations, will meet to review the latest of those drafts, for the likely human carcinogen carbon tetrachloride.

As with other recent draft risk evaluations, EPA has been scheduling the SACC meetings in the middle of rather than following the public comment period.  This means the public has at best a few weeks to digest these huge documents and draft and submit comments in order to have them be part of the record that the SACC is allowed to take into consideration in its peer review.

However, we have learned that EPA is now further constraining the SACC’s schedule, requesting that the panel members come to the peer review meeting with their comments already drafted, and then delivering their final report within 60 days rather than the 90 days previously provided.  These developments further jam both the public and the SACC in their efforts to ensure EPAs work is subject to a robust peer review.

Whatever the reasons for EPA making these changes, EDF decided to expedite our initial comments to seek to ensure they could be considered.  We submitted comments last week, a full week before the February 19 deadline, to ensure the SACC received and had sufficient time to review them in advance of the peer review meeting.

We deemed this critical because of the glaring gaps and flaws in EPA’s draft that lead it yet again to drastically understate the risks of this chemical.  These include the same problems that have plagued the draft risk evaluations for other chemicals, as well as new ones.  Read More »

Posted in Health policy, Health science, Industry influence, Regulation, TSCA reform, Worker safety / Tagged , , , | Comments are closed

Every lead service line replaced yields an estimated $22,000 in reduced cardiovascular disease deaths

By Tom Neltner, Senior Director, Safer Chemicals Initiative / Published: February 20, 2020

Tom Neltner, J.D. is the Chemicals Policy Director.

See all blogs in our LCR series.

Using publicly available information from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), EDF estimated that fully replacing the 9.3 million lead service lines (LSL) in 11,000 community water systems (CWS)[1] across the country would yield societal benefits of more than $205 billion, or about $22,000 per LSL removed. This estimate is based solely on reducing lead exposure in adults in order to have fewer cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths over 35 years. It does not include the benefits to children’s brain development.

We submitted our analysis in comments to EPA on its proposed revisions to the Lead and Copper Rule (LCR), the federal regulation that limits lead in drinking water. Given the magnitude of the benefits, we called on the agency to incorporate CVD mortality into its economic analysis and consider strengthening its proposal by requiring full LSL replacement as an integral part of every CWS’s efforts, instead of as a last resort when lead levels get too high.

Read More »

Posted in Lead / Tagged , , , | Authors: / Comments are closed

The Trump EPA’s “Working Approach” to new chemical reviews is only working for the chemical industry

By Richard Denison / Published: February 20, 2020

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

On Tuesday EDF filed detailed comments on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) “Working Approach to Making New Chemical Determinations under TSCA.”

The document is a major disappointment, to say the least.  The Trump EPA has worked very hard to render this long-awaited update of its approach to reviewing new chemicals under TSCA an empty exercise.  Despite Administrator Wheeler’s promises in January 2019 to the contrary:

  • EPA has still failed to provide any legal or scientific justification for its Working Approach.
  • EPA provided no actual response to the many detailed comments it received on its 2017 framework, instead issuing a 1.5-page document that dismisses many of the comments merely as having “stemmed from a misunderstanding of the Agency’s intent.”
  • EPA held a public meeting – but did so without first providing the Working Approach to stakeholders; EPA then limited their comments at the meeting to 2-3 minutes each and ended the meeting well ahead of schedule.
  • EPA’s new framework ignores the earlier comments it received, retaining all of the core flaws of the 2017 Framework and in fact doubling down on several of them.

Most remarkably, EPA seems to want to make clear that the Working Approach is hardly worth the paper on which it is written.  Read More »

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

A closer look at the environmental justice implications of EPA’s proposed lead in water rule

By Tom Neltner, Senior Director, Safer Chemicals Initiative / Published: February 4, 2020

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

See all blogs in our LCR series.

[pullquote]

“Household-level changes that depend on ability-to-pay will leave low-income households with disproportionately higher health risks.”

 

– EPA Environmental Justice Analysis of the proposed rule.

[/pullquote]Reviewing a rulemaking docket can be intimidating, especially for a major rule like the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed revisions to its Lead and Copper Rule (LCR), which includes 853 supporting documents and tens of thousands of pages. Though we cannot claim to have read all of the documents, we did a targeted scan of key materials, knowing that they often yield insights and results that are lost in the summary that appears in the Federal Register. 

The effort for us paid off when we read EPA’s Environmental Justice (EJ) Analysis of the LCR proposal revisions (the Proposal), commissioned in response to Executive Order 12898. The Order directs agencies to identify and address, “as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations” in rulemaking. The agency’s contractor essentially found:

  • The current LCR disproportionately impacts low-income and minority populations as they are more likely to live in older housing that has lead service lines (LSLs), the most significant source of lead in drinking water.
  • The Proposal’s corrosion control requirements should help reduce current disparities. Because water treatment is consistent across an entire community, stronger requirements that reduce the ability of lead to leach into water from LSLs, leaded solder, and other sources should mitigate, but not eliminate, the disproportionate burden in homes with LSLs.
  • The Proposal may make disparities worse if it depends on individual household’s ability to pay for LSL replacement (LSLR). The report stated that “Household-level changes that depend on ability-to-pay will leave low-income households with disproportionately higher health risks.”[1]

In the Federal Register notice, EPA glossed over the third point and concluded that the Proposal is “not expected to have disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects on minority populations and low-income populations.”[2] The agency ignores the fact that the Proposal makes no change to the current LCR provisions that rely on a household’s ability to pay when it says water systems are “not required to bear the cost of removal of the portion of the [LSL] it does not own.”[3] We are aware of only a small – but growing – number of communities that have funding options to assist households with the cost of LSLR on private property.

Read More »

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