EDF Health

Promising proposal for addressing lead in schools and licensed child care – but gaps remain

By Lindsay McCormick / Published: January 23, 2020

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

See all blogs in our LCR series.

Update: On February 5, 2020, we submitted comments to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on its proposal. 

Through its proposed revisions to the Lead and Copper Rule (LCR) under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), EPA made the unprecedented move of proposing to require community water systems (CWSs) to test for lead in water at all schools and licensed child care facilities constructed prior to 2014. The current rule only requires testing if the facility is itself a regulated water system (e.g., uses own private well). While EDF fully supports testing in these facilities, we are concerned that EPA has overlooked several major issues, especially in the child care context.

Based on our experience – including a pilot project to test and remediate lead in 11 child care facilities, a training program for child care providers in Illinois, and monitoring of state child care testing requirements across the country – we believe that addressing lead in child care facilities is an important opportunity to improve public health. Though schools are also critical, we’ve focused on child care facilities as they present a major gap due to a number of reasons. First, children under the age of six are more susceptible to the harmful effects of lead – and those at the highest risk are infants who are fed formula reconstituted with tap water. Second, child care, especially home-based facilities, are often smaller operations than schools, and therefore more likely to have a lead service line. Finally, child care facilities often lack robust facility support and public accountability that schools may have.

From our background on this issue, we have identified three key flaws with EPA’s proposal. Specifically, it:

  1. Ignores lead service lines,
  2. Relies on inadequate sampling, and
  3. Does not provide sufficient support for remediation.

We also are concerned that the result of this proposed rule may sound like “one hand clapping.” If state licensing agencies and local health departments are not requiring or promoting testing, child care facilities are unlikely to cooperate, making it more difficult for CWSs to comply with the requirement. For this requirement to have greatest effect, CWSs need the support and participation of all parties involved.

This blog will provide an overview of EPA’s proposed requirement and an analysis of each of the key issues. Read More »

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

When it comes to testing heavy metals in food, the result is only as good as the lab.

By Tom Neltner, Senior Director, Safer Chemicals Initiative / Published: January 23, 2020

Tom Neltner, J.D., Chemicals Policy Director and Boma Brown-West, Senior Manager.

[pullquote]

“Even though the levels of a metal in any particular food is low, our overall
exposure adds up because many of the foods we eat contain them in small amounts.”

 

Dr. Conrad Choiniere, leader of FDA’s Toxic Elements Workgroup on April 20, 2018

[/pullquote]

Heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, and lead are present in most foods, whether conventional or organic, usually as the result of environmental contamination. Because heavy metals pose significant threats even at low levels, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has made reducing cumulative exposure a priority. The Baby Food Council – consisting of Beech-Nut Nutrition Company, Happy Family Organics, Earth’s Best, and Gerber Products Company and supported by Healthy Babies Bright Futures (HBBF), Cornell University and EDF – shares this goal and seeks to reduce heavy metals in the companies’ products to as low as reasonably achievable using best-in-class management practices.

Through the Council, EDF is coordinating a proficiency testing program to enable retailers, food manufacturers, ingredient suppliers, and others to identify laboratories that are capable of measuring arsenic, cadmium, and lead at levels in the low parts per billion (ppb). The Council has arranged for FAPAS, a leading proficiency testing provider for the food and water testing industries, to manage the testing program.

Read More »

Posted in FDA, Food, Health science, Lead / Tagged , , , , , | Comments are closed

How new data is helping West Oakland clear the air

By / Published: January 21, 2020

Fern Uennatornwaranggoon is EDF’s Air Quality Policy Manager.

Community groups are using California’s first-of-its-kind Community Air Protection Plan to reduce pollution in the city’s most impacted areas.

The fight for healthier air in West Oakland spans generations. Just Ask Ms. Margaret Gordon, who has been at it since 1992. “I’ve had 16 grandchildren and one great-grandchild since then,” says the co-director of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP). Two years ago her community’s efforts got a much-needed boost: California passed AB 617, establishing a program requiring the state to reduce air pollution in those areas most impacted. Under the Community Air Protection Plan, community groups, environmental organizations, industry and local air districts work with the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to develop improvement plans.

Ms. Margaret, who has been an integral part of West Oakland’s efforts, tells EDF’s Fern Uennatornwaranggoon how the plan unfolded and how data gathered from Google Street View cars fed into its development.

Fern: Why did CARB turn to WOEIP to facilitate the community air plan?

Ms. Margaret: We were asked, because of the work we have done over the last 25 years on air quality. We had demonstrated our capacity to participate technically with the air district staff. In 2015 and 2016, we started doing the air monitoring with EDF, Google, the University of Texas and Aclima, and we also deployed 100 sensors with UC Berkeley throughout West Oakland for the 100×100 project.

Read More »

Posted in Air pollution, Hyperlocal mapping / Tagged , , | Comments are closed

Finally something we can (mostly) commend EPA for doing under TSCA

By / Published: January 14, 2020

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

Readers of this blog will know how concerned EDF is with ensuring the public’s right to know about chemicals to which they may be exposed.  We have repeatedly sounded the alarm when EPA has taken steps to deny public access to chemical information, whether for chemicals entering the market or those already in commerce.  Even in recent months, EPA has sided with chemical companies in denying access to health and safety information on chemicals EPA is assessing under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

So we were pleasantly surprised by a letter to an industry group that EPA posted on Friday.  Read More »

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

Top takeaways from The Intercept’s investigation into Trump’s toxic rollbacks

By EDF Blogs / Published: January 13, 2020

Regulatory decisions by federal agencies in Washington often feel distant – bureaucrats moving paper in ways that don’t matter to regular people. But a devastating new story by reporter Sharon Lerner of The Intercept makes clear just how awful the Trump administration’s actions on chemical safety have been for average Americans.

Lerner shows that the Trump EPA has repeatedly bowed to industry lobbyists to allow dangerous chemicals to stay on or enter the market with little or no restrictions.

EPA’s actions are not abstract bureaucratic events to Angela Ramirez, who was diagnosed with breast cancer after years of living and working “near two facilities that were emitting a cancer-causing chemical called ethylene oxide.” EPA scientists knew “that exposure to ethylene oxide caused elevated rates of tumors in the brain, lungs, uterus, and lymph systems” – but under the Trump administration, following pressure from an industry trade group, EPA decided not to follow its own science deciding whether to limit the chemical.

Lerner reports that the Trump administration, stacked with political appointees who have worked, lobbied or advocated for the chemical, tobacco, and coal industries, has been systematically undermining EPA’s ability to use the best science and get the best expert advice to protect families. They’ve been attacking programs like the Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, which provides evidenced-based analysis to the government to make public health decisions.

From Texas to Delaware and across the country, Lerner shows the impact of an administration that seems entirely focused on doing the bidding of industry, rather than pursing its legal mission to protect public health. They are doing so both broadly – weakening a new chemical safety law –and in a series of individual chemical assessment decisions. “Each time we see one of these assessments, there are ways in which the science has been played with,” EDF’s Lead Senior Scientist Richard Denison told Lerner.

To read more about what Lerner calls “Trump’s cancer gang” and their attacks on science and public health, check out her full article.

Posted in Health policy, Industry influence, Public health, Regulation / Tagged , , , | Comments are closed

The Trump EPA says “precede” means “follow”

By / Published: January 10, 2020

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

[Corrections added below in bracketed italics on 1-17-20]

Last month EPA finally released its long-awaited update to its controversial 2017 New Chemicals Decision-Making Framework, which describes how EPA is conducting risk reviews of new chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).  While we are still reviewing it and will be filing comments, it is clear the new document suffers from many of the same problems as the prior version, as well as raising additional concerns.

A core problem of both documents is EPA’s illegal bifurcation of its treatment of a new chemical’s “intended” conditions of use – those proposed by the company submitting a premanufacture notification (PMN) to EPA – from the chemical’s “reasonably foreseen” conditions of use.  EPA does so despite TSCA’s clear instruction that EPA address potential risks from both categories in an integrated manner and at the same time.  EPA’s frameworks instead relegate any consideration of “reasonably foreseen” conditions of use to a separate, later process undertaken upon receipt of a separate notification submitted to EPA in response to a Significant New Use Rule (SNUR) – assuming EPA has actually promulgated a final SNUR for the chemical in question.

EPA has now used this bifurcated approach to greenlight hundreds of new chemicals for market entry – finding that they are “not likely to present an unreasonable risk” based on a review only of the chemicals’ intended conditions of use.  EDF has blogged in detail about the inadequacies of EPA’s “SNUR-only approach” and the disturbing extent of its application.

EPA has yet to provide any legal justification for its approach – how it believes the approach comports with TSCA – let alone demonstrate how it provides for protection of health and the environment despite deviating from what Congress intended EPA do under the law.

[pullquote]How on earth can EPA assert with a straight face that it is promulgating SNURs that precede its “not likely” determinations?[/pullquote]While we will have much more to say on the new framework, in the remainder of this post I want to focus on EPA’s characterization of its reliance on the SNUR-only approach.  EPA now says it has expanded that approach to two different scenarios:  One is “SNURs that Precede “Not Likely” Determinations” and the other is “SNURs that Follow “Not Likely” Determinations.”

We have examined the accuracy of EPA’s claim that the first type of SNUR precedes EPA’s “Not Likely” determination for a given new chemical.  The timing is critical here:  If there is a significant lag between EPA’s “Not Likely” determination and the issuance of a SNUR, all kinds of problems arise, which we have discussed previously.  To name two:

  • If a company engages in what EPA plans to deem a “significant new use” during the gap between the determination and at least proposal of a SNUR, then EPA cannot subject that use to the notification requirements of the SNUR because the use is “ongoing” and no longer “new.” That includes a new use engaged in by the company that got a green light for its chemical based on EPA’s review of only its intended conditions of use.
  • Such a company that wants to have the ability to engage in uses beyond those it said it initially intended would have serious incentives to seek to avoid having EPA issue the SNUR. Because SNURs are done through rulemaking, the company can urge EPA to block or modify the SNUR through the rulemaking process.  It can also apply pressure on EPA not to pursue a SNUR at all.

So is EPA being accurate when it claims that a large number of its SNURs precede EPA’s “Not Likely” determination for those same new chemicals?

The answer is a resounding no:  Read More »

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