{"id":33337,"date":"2016-03-11T08:31:28","date_gmt":"2016-03-11T12:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=33337"},"modified":"2016-03-11T08:31:28","modified_gmt":"2016-03-11T12:31:28","slug":"battle-lines-are-drawn-in-one-of-the-biggest-fights-against-toxic-chemicals-in-decades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=33337","title":{"rendered":"Battle Lines Are Drawn in One of the Biggest Fights Against Toxic Chemicals in Decades"},"content":{"rendered":"

The laws governing the tens of thousands of chemicals that saturate the marketplace are being reformed. But will it make any difference?<\/em><\/h3>\n

By Reynard Loki \/ AlterNet<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

2016 marks the 40th anniversary of the Toxic Substances Control Act. But there is little to celebrate. Signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1976, the TSCA has been sharply criticized for failing at what it was meant to do: protect public health and the environment from the tens of thousands of chemicals that saturate the marketplace, and the hundreds of new ones that are introduced every year.<\/p>\n

Adding to the concern is the fact that the law hasn\u2019t been significantly updated since it was enacted, during which time some 22,000 new chemicals<\/a> have entered American commerce, with around 700 new ones<\/a> rolled out each year. Many of these chemicals \u2014 most of which did not previously exist in nature \u2014 have been widely dispersed throughout the environment, into the air, soil and water where some will persist for decades, or even centuries.<\/p>\n

The figures are staggering. Every year, around 4 billion pounds<\/a> of toxic chemicals are released by American industries. In 2011 alone, 16 new chemicals<\/a> accounted for nearly 1 million pounds. There is far too little testing of these substances: Only a fraction of the nearly 3,000 high-production-volume (HPV) chemicals \u2014 chemicals that have an annual production run of at least one million pounds \u2014 have been studied for their potential toxicity. According to the EPA, the agency has \u201conly been able to require testing on a little more than 200 existing chemicals<\/a>\u201d out of the 62,000 that have been introduced since the TSCA\u2019s enactment. The EPA has banned just five.<\/p>\n

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It has been a long time in coming, but after several years of negotiations, two bills seeking to overhaul the TSCA have finally been passed in both houses of Congress. And while one might assume a federal effort to improve the TSCA would receive widespread popular support (a nationwide poll conducted in 2012 found that nearly 74 percent<\/a> of Americans believe the threat of chemical exposure to people\u2019s health is serious), the legislation has been met with fierce opposition \u2014 and not from the chemical industry.<\/p>\n

For decades, regulating chemicals in the U.S. has been a \u201ctoo little, too late\u201d exercise in futility. Now that Washington is on the verge of a major overhaul, chemical policy reform has become a pitched battleground. Several stakeholders have been vying for leverage, from federal lawmakers and state attorneys general, to chemical industry lobbyists and community activists, to public and environmental health activists. How did something so basic as keeping people and animals safe from dangerous substances become such a highly politicized arena?<\/p>\n

One Word: Plastics<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since World War II, some 80,000 new chemicals<\/a> have been invented. But it wasn\u2019t until the early 1970s when the President\u2019s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), formed in 1969 under the Nixon administration, proposed federal legislation to regulate American commerce in chemical substances. So why did it take so long for the government to address the potential health and environmental effects of chemicals? It\u2019s a familiar and tragic narrative: Public health regularly takes a back seat to corporate interests. Time and time again, major toxic disasters occur, reminding us just how susceptible humans, animals and the environment are to toxins produced by industrial activity. Look at Love Canal<\/a> in Niagara Falls in the 1950s, Times Beach, Missouri<\/a>\u00a0in the 1970s or theSummitville mine<\/a> in Colorado in the 1980s. More recently, there was the Exide lead contamination<\/a> in Los Angeles. Today, the Flint water crisis<\/a> unfolds in Michigan.<\/p>\n

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The reverb furnace feedstock room of the Exide Technologies facility in Vernon, California.\u00a0High levels of lead, arsenic, cadmium and other toxic metals pollute the soil under the facility. The operation of the plant also led to groundwater pollution and battery acid draining onto public streets.\u00a0(image: California Department of Toxic Substances Control\/Wikipedia<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n

While big disasters such as these make national headlines, it was actually a series of festering environmental contamination events around the country \u2014 and the community activism that gradually grew around them \u2014 that set the stage for the TSCA\u2019s passage.<\/p>\n

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were contaminating the Hudson River; polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) were contaminating agricultural produce in Michigan; and chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions were depleting the ozone layer. But it was the process behind making polyvinyl chloride, a plastic commonly known as PVC, that was ultimately the driving force that finally got the law passed. In their 2002 book Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution<\/a><\/em>, public health historians Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner write, \u201cWhile the discovery of various kinds of industrial pollution had led the EPA to begin pressing for passage of Toxic Substances Control Act, the publicity and seriousness of the vinyl crisis would become the impetus for more assertive efforts to get TSCA passed, with a view toward regulating more chemicals than vinyl chloride.\u201d<\/p>\n

Developed in the 1920s, PVC is one of the most used plastics in the world. Impervious to rust and rot, it is used predominantly in water systems, sewer lines and underground wiring, and also across a wide array of consumer goods, from tire treads and credit cards to children\u2019s toys and medical devices. In many ways, PVC has changed things for the better, particularly across the developing world, where almost all the clean water projects depend on bacteria-resistant PVC pipe<\/a>. Chemical engineer Arjen Sevenster, who sits on the board of EU vinyl industry trade group VinylPlus, is a vocal proponent of PVC, the third most widely produced synthetic plastic polymer in the world. \u201cPVC products make life safer, more comfortable and more pleasurable,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd, because PVC has an excellent ratio of economic cost to performance, it allows people of all income levels access to these important benefits<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there is a big problem with this popular plastic. In order to make it, you need to start with vinyl chloride (VC), an intermediary organic compound that was implicated in causing liver damage as early as the 1930s, when the PVC industry was still in its infancy. But it wouldn\u2019t be until 1949, when Russian researcher S.L. Tribukh published a paper about the health effects of VC that it became clear: VC exposure causes liver injury<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the decades to follow, her research would be tragically manifested in the workplace. A mortality study conducted in 1988 by the Health and Safety Executive, the United Kingdom\u2019s independent regulator for work-related health, found that between 1940 and 1974, there were 11 tumor-related deaths<\/a> among British vinyl workers \u2014 seven of them from angiosarcoma, an exceedingly rare cancer tumor of the liver. The HSE concluded that the deaths indicated \u201casignificant excess<\/a> of non-secondary liver tumors.\u201d By the late 1960s, the issue got attention in the United States, when four cases<\/a> of angiosarcoma were diagnosed among workers at a B.F. Goodrich tire-making plant near Louisville, Kentucky, between 1967 and 1973. The episode was one of the earliest reports<\/a>of an occupational disease outbreak published by the Center for Disease Control\u2019s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.<\/p>\n

The 1967 film\u00a0The Graduate<\/em> was one of the biggest movies of the period. One of its most famous lines was uttered by Mr. McGuire (Walter Brooke), who gives Ben, a 21-year-old recent college grad played by Dustin Hoffman, some friendly business advice: \u201cThere’s a great future in plastics.\u201d He was right, of course. In 1976, the global production of plastics was around 50 million metric tons. By 2002, that number had quadrupled. Today, more than 311 metric tons<\/a> of plastics are produced worldwide. In 2013, plastic wholesaling generated $55 billion<\/a> in the United States, which is behind only China<\/a> in total PVC production.<\/p>\n

But plastic\u2019s future would not be all bright. Just a few years after The Graduate<\/em>was released, VC health concern had reached critical mass in the U.S. Nancy Beach, who was coordinating the EPA\u2019s vinyl chloride efforts at the time, revealed that exposure to the toxin wasn\u2019t limited to factory workers. In a private session organized by the National Cancer Institute and attended by representatives from 10 federal agencies, including the FDA, OSHA, CDC and the National Institutes of Health, Beach revealed that some 6 percent of the VC used during PVC production was escaping into the outside air. \u201cIt sounds small,\u201d she said, \u201cbut if one considers that the annual production of PVC in the U.S. is well over 5 billion pounds a 6 percent loss figure is on the order of 250 million pounds<\/a>, which is somehow getting out of the workplace.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the summer of 1974, the FDA, EPA and Consumer Product Safety Commission moved to prohibit the use of VC in bottles and other consumer goods. In October, EPA administrator Russell Train announced<\/a> new air emissions standards for vinyl chloride. The announcement would have far-reaching implications: By framing the VC issue within the larger goal of regulating the hundreds of chemicals that enter the marketplace every year, Train helped pave the way for the passage of the TSCA:<\/p>\n

For the past five years, an estimated 600 new chemicals a year have been introduced into U.S. commerce. These chemicals have been sold without any systematic, advanced assessment of their potential impact on human health. As we have learned through our experience, materials such as vinyl chloride, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), asbestos, nitrosamines and several others, we often do not discover how harmful a compound can be until it has become a commonplace item in our everyday life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two years after Train\u2019s announcement \u2014 and after significant negotiation between the government and industry \u2014 the TSCA was finally signed into law by President Ford on Oct. 11, 1976, authorizing the EPA to test and regulate new and existing chemicals. In a statement accompanying the signing of the bill, Ford said, \u201cI believe this legislation may be one of the most important<\/a> pieces of environmental legislation that has been enacted by the Congress.\u201d He may have been right, but important does not equal effective.<\/p>\n

Fixing ‘Fundamental Weaknesses’<\/strong><\/p>\n

A large part of the problem with the TSCA is its fundamentally Sisyphean nature. In 1994, former EPA assistant administrator Lynn Goldman testified to Congress, saying, \u201cOur available tools for gathering testing data about these chemicals arecumbersome<\/a>.\u201d Later, she explained that under the provisions of the TSCA, \u201cIt\u2019s almost as if … we have to, first, prove that chemicals are risky before we can have the testing done to show whether or not the chemicals are risky.\u201d Since the TSCA was enacted, some 62,000 chemicals have never been tested by the EPA because they were grandfathered in and remain on the market.<\/p>\n

In 2009, Michael Wilson and Megan Schwarzman, environmental health scientists at UC Berkeley, published a damning analysis<\/a> of U.S. chemical policy, identifying \u201cfundamental weaknesses\u201d in the way the government protects Americans from toxic substances \u2014 weaknesses that not only leave the public unprotected, but hamstring the development of a chemical marketplace that is less toxic and more sustainable. \u201cThese policies have largely failed<\/a> to adequately protect public health or the environment or motivate investment in or scientific exploration of cleaner chemical technologies,\u201d they wrote in the paper, which was published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a peer-reviewed journal. \u201cOn this trajectory,\u201d they warned, \u201cthe United States will face growing health, environmental and economic problems related to chemical exposures and pollution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two bills, a House and Senate bill, which passed their respective chambers last year, represent Congress\u2019 first serious attempt to \u201creauthorize and modernize\u201d the TSCA. The Senate bill, S. 697<\/a> (the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act), has been hailed as the result of bipartisan compromise on Capitol Hill led by Sens. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and David Vitter (R-LA), who co-sponsored a bill in May 2013. A month later, Lautenberg died. Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) picked up the reins and worked with Vitter \u2014 an ally of the chemical companies \u2014 to improve the bill, which eventually secured enough support in the Senate to be filibuster-proof. Now dubbed the \u201cUdall-Vitter chemical safety bill,\u201d it passed<\/a> on December 17 by unanimous consent.<\/p>\n

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera sees a rare quality in the Udall-Vitter bill: \u201cIn this era of polarized politics,\u201d he writes, \u201cit is something of a miracle.\u201d He said Udall told him that the bill stood as \u201can example of good, old-fashioned legislating.\u201d Nocera also relayed<\/a> the opinion of Dominique Browning, a co-founder of the grassroots green group known as Moms Clean Air Force:<\/p>\n

Browning, an old friend of mine, describes herself as an environmental pragmatist. She concluded that whatever the flaws in the bill, it was a vast improvement over the status quo \u2014 a status quo in which the Environmental Protection Agency can\u2019t even regulate formaldehyde<\/a>. She and her brain trust decided that their 570,000-member group would work to improve the bill instead of oppose it. This is also the position taken by the ever-pragmatic Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund, with which Moms Clean Air Force is affiliated.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The House bill, H.R. 2576<\/a> (TSCA Modernization Act), was introduced in May 2015 by Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL-15) and passed in June. The next step is for the bills to be assessed in a conference committee to reconcile the two versions. (Richard Denison, lead senior scientist at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund has published an excellent side-by-side comparison<\/a> of how the two bills address 12 of TSCA\u2019s key limitations.)<\/p>\n

As the first major overhaul of the 40-year-old TSCA, the bills have several laudable goals and fix glaring omissions in the old law. For example, the TSCA gives no special consideration to segments of the population that may be more susceptible to toxins, such as infants, children, pregnant women, workers and the elderly. This is a striking oversight. Less than 20 percent<\/a> of HPV chemicals have been studied for their ability to impact child development. The Senate bill addresses this omission, expressly requiring protections for these vulnerable groups. Furthermore, the TSCA gives the EPA the authority, but regrettably no mandate, to restrict chemicals deemed to present an \u201cunreasonable risk.\u201d The new legislation closes this breach by requiring restrictions on such substances.<\/p>\n

Another target of reform is the \u201csafety standard.\u201d Under the TSCA, a substance of unreasonable risk requires the EPA to conduct a cost-benefit analysis, an unwieldy requirement that is ultimately not necessary \u2014 if the bottom line is protecting public health. Both bills address this by prohibiting the EPA from considering costs and other non-risk factors in making safety determinations, eliminating an onerous requirement of the TSCA that Denison characterized as a \u201cparalyzing regulatory hurdle<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The final bill will likely meet one of the threshold principles for the Obama administration: that the safety standard is a \u201chealth only\u201d standard and not a \u201ccost-benefit\u201d standard. In their analysis, Wilson and Schwarzman note three key \u201cgaps\u201d caused by the weaknesses in the TSCA:<\/p>\n