EDF Health

Selected tag(s): Dioxane

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

By / Published: September 16, 2019

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equipment throughout chemical supply chains and the adequacy of OSHA regulations that either don’t apply or are decades out of date;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 »

Posted in EPA, Health policy, Health science, Industry influence, Regulation, TSCA reform / Also tagged | Comments are closed

1,4-dioxane: The case of the disappearing tumors

By / Published: September 11, 2019

Rachel Shaffer is a consultant.  Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Lead Senior Scientist.

As we highlighted in a previous post, EDF filed extensive comments on EPA’s draft risk evaluation for 1,4-dioxane. Among the many concerns we raised was a decision by the Trump EPA to completely dismiss female mouse liver cancer data used by EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) program as key inputs to its cancer risk modeling conducted in 2013. The Agency appears to be trying every trick in the trade – such as excluding most exposure sources and routes – in its effort to conclude that the chemical presents few or no risks to human health or the environment. Read on for more on this latest one. Read More »

Posted in Health policy, Health science, Industry influence, Regulation / Also tagged | Comments are closed

Should EPA grant industry’s hypocritical request to now address 1,4-dioxane’s risks as a byproduct, it must meet a number of conditions

By / Published: September 3, 2019

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

Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) submitted extensive comments last week to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that raise numerous serious concerns with EPA’s draft risk evaluation for the likely human carcinogen 1,4-dioxane.  EDF’s comments are available here.

I want to use this post to highlight one of the many issues:  For years, the industry has urged EPA not to include 1,4-dioxane’s presence as a byproduct in various formulated products within the scope of its risk evaluation for the chemical; see comments specific to 1,4-dioxane from the American Cleaning Institute, Procter & Gamble, and the Household & Commercial Products Association; and more general comments urging exclusions for byproducts and “trace levels” from the American Chemistry Council and the Consumer Specialty Products Association Comment.

Not surprisingly, the Trump EPA’s draft risk evaluation for 1,4-dioxane did just that, a major problem EDF objected to on legal and scientific grounds.

Then in late July, the industry abruptly reversed itself.  A comment letter submitted to EPA by the American Cleaning Institute and the Grocery Manufacturers Association says the industry has changed its mind and is now calling on EPA to include 1,4-dioxane’s presence as a byproduct as a condition of use in its risk evaluation.

Why the shift?  At this late hour it has dawned on the industry groups that any final action by the agency on the chemical that excludes 1,4-dioxane’s presence as a byproduct as a condition of use in its risk evaluation will not preempt states from acting to regulate this condition of use.

The industry’s hypocrisy aside, if EPA decides to grant this industry request, which has arrived long after EPA initiated the risk evaluation process, EPA should do so only subject to conditions that are critical to meet if its decision and risk evaluation are to maintain any semblance of credibility:

  • EPA needs to use its mandatory information authorities to require the submission and development of relevant information on the presence of 1,4-dioxane as a byproduct in industrial, commercial and consumer materials and products, as input into a revised draft risk evaluation.
  • EPA must promptly make all such information it receives public, subject only to redactions of information claimed confidential by the submitters that EPA determines meet all applicable requirements of TSCA section 14. It should be noted that much of the relevant information will constitute health and safety information that is not eligible for protection under section 14 and must be made public.
  • EPA needs to carefully and thoroughly develop and fully integrate an analysis of the potential exposures and risks arising from the presence of 1,4-dioxane as a byproduct into all aspects of its risk evaluation, given that inclusion of the presence of 1,4-dioxane as a byproduct will affect all of the exposure and risk estimates EPA has examined in the current draft risk evaluation.
  • EPA must publish a revised draft risk evaluation for public comment, providing the public with ample time to review the new draft and develop meaningful comments.
  • EPA must subject its revised draft risk evaluation to full peer review by the Scientific Advisory Committee on Chemicals (SACC), providing the committee with ample time to review the new draft and develop meaningful comments.

Any credible evaluation of the contribution to 1,4-dioxane’s overall health and environmental risks due to its presence as a byproduct must be based on complete, reliable information that is publicly accessible, and must reflect input from both the public and expert peer reviewers.  For EPA to do anything less will simply cast yet more doubt on its trustworthiness and independence from industry interests.

 

Posted in Health policy, Health science, Industry influence, Regulation / Also tagged , | Comments are closed

ACC and 1,4-dioxane: Its “late hit” tactics are just more of the same

By / Published: July 30, 2019

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

The American Chemistry Council (ACC) was up to all of its old tricks yesterday at the first day of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) panel that is conducting a peer review of EPA’s draft risk evaluation of the likely human carcinogen, 1,4-dioxane.  We blogged last week about the extensive comments EDF submitted to the peer review panel on this flawed assessment.

Yesterday ACC rolled out the same game plan the industry has used for years to slow down, derail, or obfuscate chemical assessments conducted by EPA’s Information Risk Information System (IRIS), and more recently, the last Administration’s effort, now aborted by the Trump EPA, to restrict high-risk uses of the highly toxic chemical trichloroethylene (TCE).

In the public comment period yesterday afternoon, ACC Senior Director Steve Risotto revealed to the peer review panel that ACC has sponsored a new “study” that he says – lo and behold – supports all of the positions downplaying 1,4-dioxane’s carcinogenicity that ACC has espoused for years.

The aim of this is to get EPA to set the level of exposure to 1,4-dioxane that would be deemed acceptable well above the level EPA would set if 1,4-dioxane is assumed to pose a risk at any level of exposure.  (Briefly, if EPA determines that 1,4-dioxane does not have a safe threshold, it must extrapolate exposures to zero to set acceptable risk levels in its risk evaluation. If, as ACC wants, EPA finds that there is a threshold below which exposure poses no risk, then the Agency’s risk calculations will be much less conservative.)

So, where is ACC’s new study?  Well, it’s not public.  It hasn’t been provided to the peer review panel.  It hasn’t been published by ACC.  There’s no indication it’s been peer-reviewed.  Read More »

Posted in Health policy, Health science, Industry influence, Worker safety / Also tagged , , | Read 2 Responses

Trump EPA grossly understates workers’ risks to 1,4-dioxane while ignoring those to the general public

By / Published: July 22, 2019

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

On Friday, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) filed extensive comments on a draft risk evaluation for the likely human carcinogen 1,4-dioxane EPA issued on July 1.  While the formal public comment period runs until August 30, Friday was the deadline EPA set for comments if submitters want them to be considered by the Scientific Advisory Committee on Chemicals (SACC), which will be conducting peer review of the draft risk evaluations for this chemical and another, the flame retardant hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD), next week.

In its draft risk evaluation for 1,4-dioxane, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has grossly understated the risks that workers and the environment face from exposure to the chemical.  EPA has also abdicated its responsibility under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to identify and evaluate the risks the chemical presents to consumers and the general population by excluding from its risk evaluation conditions of use and exposures that are known or reasonably foreseen.  EPA has not met its mandatory duty under TSCA to identify and evaluate the risks to vulnerable subpopulations, falsely asserting there is no evidence that certain subpopulations are or may be more susceptible to adverse effects from exposure to the chemical.  EPA has utterly failed to utilize the enhanced authorities Congress granted it in 2016 to ensure that it has or obtains robust information on 1,4-dioxane’s uses, hazards and exposures, resulting in serious information and analytic gaps and deficiencies that severely undermine the scientific quality of its risk evaluation.

EDF’s comments raised numerous major concerns with EPA’s draft.  Among them are the following (see the noted section of the full comments for the details):

  • EPA has ignored evidence that some subpopulations are or may be more susceptible to 1,4-dioxane exposures than the general population (see section 1.A).
  • EPA has distorted OSHA requirements and over-relied on personal protective equipment, ignoring its real-world limitations (see section 1.B).
  • EPA has, without scientific basis, sought to sow doubt on the use of a linear, non-threshold model for 1,4-dioxane’s carcinogenicity, an approach that reflects longstanding agency policy and consensus in the scientific community (see section 1.D).
  • EPA has dismissed the liver tumors observed in female mice in the key oral cancer study it uses to extrapolate dermal cancer risks. Its insufficient rationale ignores the IRIS program’s basis for including these tumors and its determination that they are the most sensitive endpoint, which has been affirmed through peer review.  As a result, cancer risk is significantly understated, a concern also noted by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. (See section 1.E.ii.)
  • EPA has excluded all exposures and risks to consumers (and to workers from at least one use), based on 1,4-dioxane’s presence in such products as a byproduct rather than being intentionally used, a distinction without any basis in science (see section 2.A).
  • EPA has excluded from its risk evaluation all general population exposures to 1,4 dioxane, based on EPA’s unsupported assertion that existing regulatory programs under other statutes EPA administers have addressed or are in the process of addressing potential risks of 1,4-dioxane in all media pathways (see section 2.B).
  • In several instances, EPA’s decisions are inconsistent with Agency guidelines (see section 4.B.i).
  • EPA fails to consider combined exposures to workers from different routes and sources (see section 4.B.ii).
  • EPA has significantly understated the extent of risks to workers it has identified (see section 5).
  • EPA’s “expectation” of compliance with existing laws and standards as a basis for not finding unreasonable risk is unwarranted (see section 6.A).
  • EPA finds no unreasonable risk even when the high-end risk exceeds relevant benchmarks, an approach that is not adequately protective (see section 6.B).
  • EPA’s allowance of a 1 in 10,000 cancer risk for workers is a major and unwarranted deviation from longstanding agency policy and practice to regulate upon finding cancer risks on the order of 1 in 1 million (see section 6.C).
  • EPA’s systematic review to support the risk evaluation is flawed and not reflective of best practices (see section 7).

 

Posted in Health policy, TSCA reform / Also tagged , , | Comments are closed

Hey Trump EPA, your extreme bias in favor of the chemical industry is showing again

By / Published: July 2, 2019

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

[See UPDATE in brackets below.]

The Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has just released drafts of two more chemical risk evaluations it has conducted under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).  One is for the likely human carcinogen and neurotoxicant 1,4-dioxane, which contaminates public water systems serving more than 7 million Americans in 27 states at levels exceeding the level EPA has traditionally (until now) aimed to meet for general population exposures.  The other is for the flame retardant hexabromocyclododecane, or HBCD, a persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic (PBT) chemical – toxic to human development and highly acutely and chronically toxic to aquatic organisms – that has been banned or heavily restricted in most of the rest of the developed world.

As might have been expected of the Trump EPA, the draft risk evaluations wholly exonerate HBCD and largely do so for 1,4-dioxane.  Especially in the latter case, EPA achieves its improbable finding through quite a sleight of hand:  EPA simply excludes most exposures to the chemical from the scope of its risk evaluation.[pullquote]Trump EPA political appointees have repeatedly argued that the agency needs to be doing a better job at “risk communication.”  I guess we now know what that means.[/pullquote]

Once finalized, EPA’s determinations that these chemicals “do not present an unreasonable risk” will mean it has no obligation or authority to impose any restrictions on their manufacture, processing, distribution, use, recycling or disposal.

We will be looking at these documents more closely in the very limited time EPA has provided for the public to review and comment on them.  But I want to draw attention right off the bat to a telling aspect of how the Trump EPA has presented its risk determination for 1,4-dioxane.

Read More »

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