EDF Health

ECHA gives a CoRAP: REACH substance evaluation kicks off with list of target chemicals

Allison Tracy is a Chemicals Policy Fellow.

Posts to this blog concerning REACH – the European Union’s regulation for the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals – have dealt mainly with the “R” and “A”.  A few weeks ago, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) took a first big step to capitalize on the “E” (Evaluation).

Specifically, the final 2012-2014 Community Rolling Action Plan (CoRAP) was published on February 29th (see ECHA’s press release).  After many months of consultation with the Member States, ECHA has released the list of 90 chemicals that will be the first to undergo REACH’s substance evaluation process in 2012, 2013, and 2014.

Existing data guided the prioritization process that led to the production of this list, but REACH’s authorities granted for substance evaluation will allow ECHA and the Member States to gather new information to fill data gaps.  This new information will help to improve both governmental and public knowledge about the risks these chemicals may pose to human health and the environment.  Read More »

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Exposing our ignorance: EPA study reveals barren exposure data landscape

Jennifer McPartland, Ph.D., is a Health Scientist.

This past November, EPA scientists published a sobering paper, “The exposure data landscape for manufactured chemicals,” in the journal Science of the Total Environment.  The paper reveals how little systematic information we have about human and environmental exposures to the thousands of chemicals in use today.

The aim of the study was “to define important aspects of the [chemical] exposure space and to catalog the available exposure information for chemicals being considered for analysis as part of the U.S. EPA ToxCast screening and prioritization program.”  Its conclusion:  “The results suggest that currently available exposure data are insufficient to provide the evidence base required to inform risk assessment and public health decision making.”  Not good, but not surprising.  Read on for more detail. Read More »

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Lessons for us all in the passing of a giant: Nobelist Sherwood Rowland

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

Today’s New York Times logs a passing this past weekend that should be noted by any of us who consider ourselves to be a friend of science and the environment:  Dr. Sherwood Rowland, a modest but persistent chemist who, together with his colleague, Mario Molina, discovered that a class of synthetic chemicals — chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) — widely used at the time as propellants in aerosol cans and as refrigerants were tearing a hole in the ozone layer.

That discovery, reported in a seminal paper published in Nature in 1974, ultimately earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995.  In addition to the import of the discovery itself, however, there are several other aspects of this story that for me have considerable resonance in the current debate over chemicals policy.

Rowland found that even minute releases from consumer products of chemicals widely asserted to be wholly “inert” could persist and accumulate so as to cause potentially catastrophic effects at a global scale.  It is a case study of the ability of humans, through literally millions of individual decisions and events, to transform the health of the global environment — a huge wake-up call.

Yet this science was treated as virtual heresy at the time.  Major efforts were mounted by the chemical and affected consumer products industries to discredit his work; today’s New York Times obituary reports:  “One article, in the trade publication Aerosol Age, accused him and Dr. Molina of being K.G.B. agents out to destroy capitalism.”  And he was largely shunned by other academic chemists, reportedly receiving not a single invitation to lecture in a university chemistry department for a decade after the Nature paper was published.

Dr. Rowland also believed that the implications of his scientific discovery were so profound as to warrant his advocating for changes in policy.  A 1988 article about him in the Los Angeles Times reported that:

Rowland’s wife, Joan, recalls one night in the fall of 1973 when her husband got home late from work. “How’d it go?” she had asked drowsily.  “It’s going very well,” he said. “It just means, I think, the end of the world.”

It may well have, had not Rowland and many others taken that science and pressed for national and global action, an effort that led ulitmately to global adoption in 1987 of the Montreal Protocol, which bans virtually all uses of CFCs.

A good and timely reminder that, collectively, human activity even on a small individual scale, can both create health and environmental problems at a global scale, and — with sufficient political will backed by a conviction that science will ultimately prevail —  find and implement global solutions.

 

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Smoke and Mirrors: ACC lawyers are working hard to rein in your right to know

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

I’ve blogged here frequently about EPA’s efforts over the past couple of years to make more chemical information available to the public, especially health and safety information.  A key part of this, believe it or not, is simply making sure that when EPA shares a health study with the public – as required by law – you get to know the identity of the chemical that is the subject of that study.

EPA’s initial steps (see below) were met with a little grumbling on the part of the chemical industry, but not a whole lot.  After all, the industry says it wants the public to have more information about chemicals.  At #7 on the American Chemistry Council’s (ACC) top 10 principles for TSCA reform is:  “Companies and EPA should work together to enhance public access to chemical health and safety information.”

Times, apparently, have changed.  In recent weeks, ACC has launched a broadside attack on the EPA’s efforts to compel its member companies ever to name a chemical when submitting health and safety information to EPA.  My evidence?  A 36-page White Paper delivered by ACC to the office of the regulatory czar at the Office of Management and Budget, at a meeting held there on January 20.  The ACC document is a wonder of tortured logic, obfuscation and selective renditions of the history of TSCA.

Today, a response was mounted.  EDF and Earthjustice staff, as well as representatives of health-affected individuals, environmental justice communities and workers, held their own meeting with OMB officials.  And we delivered our own letter to OMB that thoroughly rebuts ACC’s White Paper.  It also points out that, way back in 1976, the drafters of TSCA actually wanted you to have access to health and safety information on chemicals – and they darn well didn’t expect you to have to guess at the identity of those chemicalsRead More »

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More “A”-level work under REACH: ECHA adds eight chemicals to the Authorization List

Allison Tracy is a Chemicals Policy Fellow.

The European Commission has formally added eight more chemicals to the list of chemicals subject to authorization under the European Union’s Regulation on Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH).  These eight chemicals, which were proposed for addition to the Authorization List (or Annex XIV) in December 2010, join the six inaugural chemicals that were formally listed last February (see EDF’s blog post on that occasion).  The full Authorization List is available on ECHA’s website; the list also specifies the corresponding sunset date by which time uses of a chemical must cease unless specifically authorized. Read More »

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Linking everyday chemicals to disease: New science keeps on intensifying the writing on the wall

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

As a Washington policy geek, it’s sometimes hard not to let the ups and downs of political prospects for achieving real improvements in public health protections from toxic chemicals get me down.  The tenacity with which some stakeholders insist on throwing wrenches into the works to block efforts to reach middle ground is indeed depressing.

But through it all, there is one constant that continually restores my optimism that we’ll eventually get where we need to get to:  Science keeps moving forward and inexorably points toward the need for reform.  I will use this post to briefly highlight four recent studies that demonstrate the changing landscape of our knowledge of how environmental factors, including toxic chemical exposures, are affecting our health.  What’s noteworthy about these studies is that they all identified adverse health effects in human populations, and linked those effects to early-life exposures.  They all also illustrate the complex interplay between chemical exposures and social or other environmental factors that directly challenges the overly simplistic and non-scientific approach to causation that our chemicals policies have taken for decades.

Below are summaries of and links to these new studies:

  • Early-life exposure to PCE is associated with later-life risky behaviors.
  • Phthalate exposure is associated with excess weight in New York City children.
  • Exposure to perfluorinated chemicals may interfere with childhood vaccine effectiveness.
  • Epigenetic changes are associated with socio-economic status and biomarkers for cardiovascular disease.

Read More »

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