Let’s savor this moment: Senate passes legislation representing real chemical safety reform

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

[Links to: the Senate-passed bill and a staff-prepared summary and list of changes made since committee markup.]

A huge step was taken tonight toward bringing this country’s chemical safety law into the 21^st century:  The Senate (at last!) brought the Lautenberg Act to the floor by unanimous consent and passed it without objection by a voice vote.  While this outcome was not surprising, given that 60 Senators had already co-sponsored the legislation, it took a long time to get here and tonight’s vote is an historic moment that merits reflection.

I’ve been working for better chemical safety policies, including meaningful and comprehensive reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), for most of my career at EDF.  And for much of that time I found myself and my organization virtually always at odds with the chemical industry and often with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  When I started, I’m not sure I could ever have predicted either how long it would take – or how strongly bipartisan the support for TSCA reform would become.

The twists and turns along the way toward today’s Senate vote are too many to recount.  Suffice it to say we wouldn’t be here without the tremendous, sustained work of a group of Senators and their staff on both sides of the aisle who dedicated themselves to steadily moving this legislation forward while improving it in response to the concerns of literally hundreds of stakeholders.  The key has been the active engagement of and by an ever-enlarging circle of Senators and stakeholders, who saw the potential for a public health and environmental breakthrough and had the courage to work toward a compromise bill even in the most partisan of climates.

EDF’s benchmark for judging the strength of any legislative proposal has been the extent to which it addresses the many flaws in current law.  The Lautenberg Act, while clearly a compromise, still unequivocally meets that test – and has the level and diversity of support needed for the bill to actually become law.

Our press release, factsheets and side-by-side comparison of the Lautenberg Act to current TSCA summarize why we believe it represents the meaningful, comprehensive reform for which we’ve been working for so long and that American families deserve.

Of course, the work to get TSCA reform is not done.  The task of reconciling the comprehensive Senate bill with the more skeletal TSCA Modernization Act that breezed through the House in the summer now begins.  EDF strongly believes this should not be an exercise in merely splitting the differences.  Rather, we will be relentless in working to ensure that any bill signed into law meets key health protection objectives and delivers real reform.

Our top-ten list of objectives is as follows:

1. Primary focus on chemicals that EPA, not industry, deems to be of highest priority
2. Affirmative safety finding before a new chemical can enter the market
3. No preemption of state authority triggered by EPA actions on new chemicals
4. Dedicated user fees to defray costs of all EPA chemical reviews, not just those industry selects
5. Full exclusion of cost considerations from all EPA determinations relating to unreasonable risk
6. Elimination of TSCA’s Catch-22 requiring EPA to first show evidence of risk to require testing
7. Deadlines for compliance with, and elimination of a cost-benefit balancing requirement from, EPA chemical regulations
8. Authority for EPA to act if another agency to which a risk is referred fails to take timely action
9. EPA review of confidential business information (CBI) claims, both past and future, and mandatory access to CBI by states
10. No allowance for chemical identity in health and safety information to be claimed CBI

But it’s worth savoring the present moment, brought to all of us by a rare amalgam of political risk-taking and courage, willingness to seek common ground and compromise, dedication to one’s key principles while acknowledging the legitimacy of others’, and countless days, weeks and months of plain old hard work.