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ACC AM Dec 17

Industry and Association News

(ACC Mentioned) ACC Outlook: U.S. Chemical Industry Renaissance Just Beginning
Dec 16, 2015 | Chem Info

The business of American chemistry expanded 3.6 percent in 2015 despite global headwinds that included a strong appreciation of the U.S. dollar and a weakness in several key global markets. “The U.S. chemical industry renaissance is just getting started,” said Kevin Swift, chief economist of the American...
(ACC Mentioned) Why Chemical Stocks Are Worth Adding to Your Portfolio
Dec 16, 2015 | Nasdaq

The chemical industry is still feeling the bite of weak demand across agricultural and energy markets, slowdown in China and headwinds from a strong dollar, as witnessed in the September quarter. Nevertheless, the industry is gradually gaining strength, aided by an improving U.S. economy, sustained healthy momentum...

Chemical Management News

(ACC Mentioned) Senators Drop Hold on TSCA Bill; New Wrinkle Arises
Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Anthony Adragna

Republican Sens. Richard Burr (N.C.) and Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 16 they will no longer block the Senate from voting on a major revamp of the nation's primary chemical law (S. 697), clearing the biggest obstacle to the chamber considering the measure.
(ACC Mentioned) Class Versus Chemical-by-Chemical Flame Retardant Ban Mulled
Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Martina Barash

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering a petition to ban a whole class of allegedly toxic flame retardant chemicals from four categories of products, and the next step is to assess stakeholder input, including industry's contrary view that a chemical-by-chemical approach is better.
(ACC Mentioned) Bead Business
Dec 16, 2015 | Vineyard Gazette
By Suzan Bellincampi

Clean water is something all of us can agree is a good thing. And so is a clean face and body. However, these two things can sometimes be at odds. In many of our soaps, lotions, toothpastes, scrubs, body washes and even medicines, little water-polluting monsters lurk. Plastic orbs, known as microbeads or microspheres...
IRIS Work Extends Beyond Agenda
Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Pat Rizzuto

The Environmental Protection Agency may narrowly update the assessments of some chemicals in addition to the 37 compounds named in its Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) multiyear agenda, the director of the IRIS program said Dec. 16. Such narrow reviews could be triggered by agency need coupled...
New EPA Multi-Year IRIS Plan Delays Vanadium, Dioxin Risk Assessments
Dec 16, 2015 | InsideEPA
By Maria Hegstad

EPA's new multi-year agenda for its influential Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) chemical assessment program delays major pending risk reviews of the chemicals vanadium and dioxin, freeing the IRIS program to focus its work on other assessments that are seen as greater priorities for EPA programs and regional offices.
Sen. Boxer Blocks Chemical Safety Bill, Angering Inhofe
Dec 16, 2015 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Timothy Cama

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) is blocking Senate consideration of a measure to overhaul federal chemical safety rules. Boxer, the most outspoken opponent of the bipartisan effort to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act, applied her hold on the bill Wednesday to prevent quick consideration of it shortly after Sen. Richard Burr...
Udall Pushes Senate TSCA Bill Vote After Burr Lifts 'Hold'
Dec 16, 2015 | InsideEPA

Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) is pushing Senate leadership to allow a vote on the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) reform bill that he crafted with Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), after Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) lifted a “hold” preventing consideration of the bill that he had placed due to an unrelated fight over a land and water fund.
Even With 60 Cosponsors, Chemical-Reform Bill Can’t Find Finish Line
Dec 17, 2015 | National Journal
By Jason Plautz

The final roadblock to getting a long-awaited chemical-reform bill through the Senate appeared to have been lifted this week. But as has become customary in the tortured, Sisyphean path for the bill, another obstacle immediately appeared: Sen. Barbara Boxer.
Inhofe: Boxer Reneging On Promise Not To Hold Up TSCA
Dec 16, 2015 | PoliticoPro - Whiteboard
By Darren Goode

Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman Jim Inhofe said top panel Democrat Barbara Boxer has "reneged on her commitment" not to block quick debate and vote on a sweeping bipartisan update to 40-year-old chemical law. "We had an understanding," Inhofe said today. "And this morning she said, 'I've changed my mind.'"
North American OR Appointments Lagging
Dec 16, 2015 | Chemical Watch
By Kelly Franklin

North American appointments of only representatives, to carry out registration under REACH, have been under represented, compared to other non-EU companies, says the trade group Only Representative Organisation (ORO). It thinks the trend is due in part to many North American SMEs determining that “the internal costs for REACH...
Poinsoning The Well
Dec 16, 2015 | The Intercept
By Sharon Lerner

Lori Cervera had always been an active person. She liked camping, playing outdoors with her kids, and practically lived in her running shoes. She didn’t have much patience for illness. So when she developed a dull ache on her right side in May 2014, Cervera took a few Tylenol and did her best to ignore it.
Chemical Companies Challenge EPA's DSW Rule
Dec 16, 2015 | InsideEPA

Two specialty chemical companies are bolstering arguments that petroleum and other industry groups are making in their lawsuit that seeks to relax EPA’s Definition of Solid Waste (DSW) rule, targeting one of the rule’s criteria that the agency makes mandatory to prove that legitimate recycling is occurring.

Chemical Security News - There are no clips to report at this time.

Energy and Environment News

(ACC Mentioned) USGBC, American Chemistry Council Join Forces To Advance LEED
Dec 16, 2015 | Proud Green Building

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and the American Chemistry Council (ACC) have partnered on a new initiative designed to ensure the use of sustainable and environmentally protective products in buildings by applying technical and science-based approaches to the LEED green building program.
House Republicans Question BLM's Recent Lease Postponements
Dec 17, 2015 | E&E Daily News
By Phil Taylor

House Republicans yesterday blasted the Bureau of Land Management for postponing a pair of recent oil and gas lease sales, accusing the agency of flouting its duty under the Mineral Leasing Act and for kowtowing to anti-leasing environmental groups. The postponements for lease sales in Utah and Washington...
Funds For Obama Climate Deal Survive In Spending Bill
Dec 16, 2015 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Devin Henry

In a victory for the Obama administration, the spending package released by congressional leaders on Wednesday won’t block American financial contributions to an international climate fund for poorer nations. The bill, greens and Democrats say, doesn’t explicitly appropriate funding for President Obama’s pledged...
Spending Bill Keeps EPA Funding Flat In 2016
Dec 16, 2015 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Devin Henry

Congressional leaders have agreed to keep Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funding flat in 2016 and Republicans have yielded in their fight to block agency rulemaking through the spending process. Under the omnibus budget deal released early Wednesday morning, the EPA is funded at $8.1 billion in 2016, a level lower than it was...
Domestic Agenda Now Center Stage For White House
Dec 16, 2015 | E&E News PM
By Amanda Reilly

In the wake of the Paris global climate deal, the Obama administration is focusing on its domestic climate agenda, a senior White House official said today. Brian Deese, senior climate and energy adviser to President Obama, told a Washington, D.C., forum that the ...
House Bill Would Delay Ozone Implementation
Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report

The Environmental Protection Agency's 2015 national ozone standards of 70 parts per billion would be delayed under a bill (H.R. 4265) introduced Dec. 16 by Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas). The Clean Air Implementation Act of 2015 would require the EPA to halt implementation of the 70 ppb ozone standards while the agency conducts a study...
EPA Reports ‘Strong Year in Enforcement'
Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Renee Schoof

The number of environmental criminal cases opened by the Environmental Protection Agency declined to 213 in fiscal year 2015 from 271 in 2014, but the number of defendants charged was similar: 185 in 2015 and 187 in 2014. The amount of federal penalties assessed by the EPA doubled to nearly $205 million in 2015 from $100 million...
Republican Trio Offers Bill To Prevent EPA Carbon Limits
Dec 17, 2015 | E&E Daily News
By Amanda Reilly

A trio of Wisconsin Republicans this week introduced legislation aimed at limiting U.S. EPA's ability to issue further regulations over greenhouse gas emissions. The bill, H.R. 4259, would prohibit EPA from putting in place or enforcing any limits on aggregate carbon dioxide emissions from a state.
EPA Extends Comment Period on HFC Proposal
Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report

The Environmental Protection Agency will continue to accept comments until Jan. 25 on a proposed rule that would bar the deliberate venting, release or disposal of hydrofluorocarbons or other non-ozone-depleting substitute refrigerants when servicing or disposing of air conditioning and refrigeration equipment...

Transportation News

White House Stops PHMSA From Regulating Gravity Lines
Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Rachel Leven

The nation's pipeline safety regulator backed off its plan to regulate gravity lines under its recently proposed hazardous liquid pipeline rule after vetting from the White House, according to an administration document. In an initial version of the proposal (RIN 2137-AE66), the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety...
PHMSA Urges Court to Halt Crude-by-Rail Challenges
Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Rachel Leven

The nation's hazardous materials transportation regulator is urging a federal court to halt its consideration of several challenges to the agency's crude-by-rail rule, following the recent passage of a five-year highway bill (Am. Petroleum Inst. v. U.S., D.C. Cir., No. 15-1131, motion filed 12/15/15).

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Industry and Association News

(ACC Mentioned) ACC Outlook: U.S. Chemical Industry Renaissance Just Beginning

Dec 16, 2015 | Chem Info

The business of American chemistry expanded 3.6 percent in 2015 despite global headwinds that included a strong appreciation of the U.S. dollar and a weakness in several key global markets.
“The U.S. chemical industry renaissance is just getting started,” said Kevin Swift, chief economist of the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and lead author of the trade group’s “Year-End 2015 Chemical Industry Situation and Outlook,” published today. “The fundamentals are strong,” he added. “Key domestic end-use markets expanded, consumer spending accelerated, the job market began to firm, and households enjoyed extra savings from lower energy costs.”
Swift pointed to light vehicle sales, up five percent in 2015, and housing starts, up 12 percent in 2015, as two large, end-use markets that enjoyed banner years. Each light vehicle contains approximately $3,500 worth of chemistry, and each new home approximately $15,000 worth of chemistry products.
The annual publication forecasts a 2.9 percent increase in domestic chemical production in 2016, followed by a 4.4 percent expansion in 2017. During the second half of the decade, U.S. chemistry production is expected to expand at a pace of over four percent per year on average, outpacing that of the overall U.S. economy.
According to Swift, the momentum will continue as new capacity comes online in the next several years. As of December 15, 2015, more than 261 new chemical production projects had been announced since 2010 with a total value of more than $158 billion, and a full 34 percent already complete or under construction. “The United States is still the place for chemical companies to invest,” said Swift.
On a macroeconomic level, the global economy faltered in 2015 with geopolitical uncertainty and recessions in Brazil, Russia, Japan and other nations, as well as a pronounced slowdown in China. The economies of the United Kingdom and the Euro area advanced, as did that of the United States. U.S. GDP growth is expected to be in line with the underlying trend, about 2.6 percent. Growth is expected to moderate toward the end of the decade.
For the business of chemistry, after a promising start top the year, it is likely that overall global production only advanced 2.8 percent in 2015, slightly lower than the 3.0 percent pace in 2014. Prospects will improve in 2016, with global output rising 3.3 percent, then gaining some momentum and hitting 3.7 percent in 2017. In the long-term, the most dynamic growth will be seen in the developing nations of Asia-Pacific and Africa and the Middle East.
According to Swift, competitive advantages from shale gas will keep U.S. production strong as well, while these same issues, along with structural challenges, will cause Western Europe and Japan to lag helping the U.S. recapture global market share.
The business of chemistry is an $801 billion enterprise and one of America’s most significant manufacturing industries, accounting for more than 14 percent of all U.S. exports and 15 percent of the world’s chemicals. More than ninety-six percent of all manufactured goods are touched by products of chemistry.
Prepared annually by ACC’s Economics and Statistics Department, the “Year-End 2015 Chemical Industry Situation and Outlook” is the association’s annual review of the U.S. and global business of chemistry. It offers global and domestic chemical industry data related to production, trade, shipments, capacity utilization, R&D spending, capital spending, employment and wages.

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(ACC Mentioned) Why Chemical Stocks Are Worth Adding to Your Portfolio

Dec 16, 2015 | Nasdaq

The chemical industry is still feeling the bite of weak demand across agricultural and energy markets, slowdown in China and headwinds from a strong dollar, as witnessed in the September quarter. Nevertheless, the industry is gradually gaining strength, aided by an improving U.S. economy, sustained healthy momentum in the automotive space and rebounding construction markets. There are a number of reasons to be optimistic about the broader chemical industry for both the short and long haul, which we have highlighted below:

Shale Bounty Driving Chemical Investments

The shale gas revolution in the U.S. has been a huge driving force behind chemical investment on plants and equipment in the country. According to the American Chemistry Council (ACC), abundant shale gas production is driving U.S. chemical exports. New methods of extraction such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) are boosting shale production, bringing down prices of ethane (derived from shale gas) in the process.

Leveraging the abundant natural gas supply, chemical makers are ratcheting up investment on shale gas-linked projects which is expected to beef up capacity. The shale revolution made the U.S. an attractive investment hotspot and incentivized a number of chemical companies to pump in billions of dollars for setting up facilities (crackers) to produce ethylene and propylene in a cost-effective way.

Per an ACC report, domestic chemical investment related to shale gas has reached as high as $153 billion, more than 60% of which are from firms outside the U.S. Already 246 projects -- many backed by the Federal government -- have been announced by chemical makers to take advantage of ample natural gas supplies. Such investments are expected to boost capacity and export over the next several years.

Automotive Racing Ahead

The automotive sector is witnessing significant momentum. This major chemical end-use market is enjoying the fruits of low gasoline prices. Global automotive sales are expected to hit 88.12 million units in 2016, representing a 2.1% rise from 86.31 million units expected this year, according to IHS Automotive.

The U.S. auto industry also remains in high gear, with new car and light truck sales expected to jump to 17.3 million units in 2015 (from 16.4 million units in 2014) and further rise to 17.7 million units in 2016 on the back of reduced gasoline prices and low interest rate on auto loans, as per The National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) estimates.

In particular, U.S. light vehicles (a key end-user market) sales are expected to increase this year, riding on improving employment rates and household income, lower fuel prices, attractive financing options and pent-up demand. The Auto industry in Asian countries, especially China, is also expected to thrive over the next several years. As such, chemical makers are expected to gain from higher demand from this important end-market.

Strategic Moves

Chemical companies continue to shift their focus on attractive, growth markets (driven by megatrends) in an effort to cut their exposure on other businesses that are struggling with weak demand and input costs pressure. Moreover, cost-cutting measures -- including plant closures and headcount reduction -- and productivity improvement actions by chemical companies are expected to yield industry-wide margin improvements. Several chemical makers are also disposing non-core assets as they shift their focus on high-margin businesses.

M&A Activity Gathering Steam

Chemical companies remain actively focused on mergers and acquisitions to diversify and shore up growth in a still-challenging economic environment. These companies continue to explore growth opportunities in the fast-growing emerging markets, particularly in the lucrative regions of Asia-Pacific and Latin America. The industry saw a pick-up in consolidation activities in 2014 and the momentum continues this year.
Albemarle Corp.'s ( ALB ) $6.2 billion buyout of Rockwood Holdings, Inc., Eastman Chemical Company's ( EMN ) purchase of specialty chemical company Taminco Corp. for $2.8 billion, PPG Industries Inc.'s ( PPG ) acquisition of Mexican paint company Comex, Olin Corp.'s ( OLN ) acquisition of a significant portion of Dow Chemical's ( DOW ) chlorine business for $5 billion, Merck KGaA's $17 billion acquisition of Sigma-Aldrich, FMC Corp.'s ( FMC ) acquisition of Cheminova A/S, CF Industries' ( CF ) planned acquisition of certain assets of Netherlands-based OCI N.V. for around $8 billion, and the $130 billion proposed mega-merger of Dow Chemical and DuPont ( DD ) -- the largest chemical deal of all time -- are among the major deals that have taken place in the chemical space in the recent past.

A Rebounding Construction Space
A recovery across housing and commercial construction -- major chemical end-markets -- has been another supporting factor for the chemical industry recovery. After being hit hard in the recession, the construction industry is currently in the process of gradual healing.

The housing sector saw steady recovery in 2015 backed by stabilizing mortgage rates, improving job market and moderating home prices, and the momentum is expected to continue into 2016. While the U.S. housing market witnessed a slowdown at the beginning of 2015 due to harsh winter, housing activity picked up steam in the crucial spring and summer months.
However, housing data has been rather weak over the last couple of months and land and labor shortages are limiting the growth in home production. Nevertheless, this is viewed by the market as only a temporary setback. The underlying demand trends in the housing space remain strong and homebuilding is expected to pick up pace in 2016, aided by an improving economy, encouraging job picture, affordable interest/mortgage rates and rising consumer confidence.

The renewal of long-stalled construction projects and long awaited access to credit from lending institutions have helped invigorate the commercial construction sector. U.S. architecture firm billings continue to rise. The US Architecture Billings Index (ABI), an indicator that offers a glimpse into the future of U.S. non-residential construction spending activity, clocked 53.1 in October 2015 (a reading above 50 indicates an increase in billings).

Moreover, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) expects non-residential construction spending to go up nearly 8.9% in 2015 and 8.2% in 2016. This bodes well for demand for chemicals in the construction markets.

Wrapping Up

The chemical industry is finally looking up after being in a rut for long, making it an attractive investment proposition. As you can see from the above-stated factors, there are a few good reasons to be optimistic about the industry.

Chemical stocks that are well placed in the current operating backdrop include Celanese Corp. ( CE ), The Dow Chemical Company, LyondellBasell Industries NV ( LYB ), Air Products and Chemicals Inc. ( APD ), Eastman Chemical Company and PPG Industries Inc.

Read more: http://www.nasdaq.com/article/why-chemical-stocks-are-worth-adding-to-your-portfolio-cm555781#ixzz3uZQvGmZ5

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Chemical Management News

(ACC Mentioned) Senators Drop Hold on TSCA Bill; New Wrinkle Arises

Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Anthony Adragna

Republican Sens. Richard Burr (N.C.) and Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 16 they will no longer block the Senate from voting on a major revamp of the nation's primary chemical law (S. 697), clearing the biggest obstacle to the chamber considering the measure.
Both senators have for months held up a vote on the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, which would overhaul the Toxic Substance Control Act, until they received a vote to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund. But the fund, which uses revenues from offshore oil and gas development to establish national parks and other public spaces, is poised for a three-year extension in an omnibus government funding bill (H.R. 2029).
“I've already lifted the hold on TSCA,” Burr said.
But a new wrinkle emerged Dec. 16 when Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) raised new objections to limiting floor consideration of the measure to a previously agreed upon two hours, according to several Republican aides. Discussions are ongoing about how to resolve the differences, they said.
Sixty senators publicly back the legislation, as do major companies and associations like DuPont, 3M, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the American Chemistry Council, BASF Corp., the Consumer Electronics Association, Dow Chemical Co. and the National Association of Manufacturers.
Timing Remains in Flux
Some bill proponents believe there is still time to consider the measure this year, though other observers believe a Senate floor vote early in 2016 is more likely. There have been several instances this year when floor votes on the measure seemed imminent before ultimately falling through (226 DEN A-13, 11/24/15).
Conversations are ongoing between Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Boxer and Senate leadership about ways to allow a vote on the legislation this year, Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), one of the bill's lead sponsors, told Bloomberg BNA Dec. 16.
“Unanimous consent cleared on the Democratic side in October, and Sen. Burr has lifted his hold, so we should be able to pass TSCA reform this year,” Udall said in a statement. “We're hopeful that we'll be able to sort things out soon.”
Boxer's office didn't respond to requests for comment. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has expressed support for voting on the measure several times, though his office declined to comment on a potential chamber vote Dec. 16.

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(ACC Mentioned) Class Versus Chemical-by-Chemical Flame Retardant Ban Mulled

Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Martina Barash

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering a petition to ban a whole class of allegedly toxic flame retardant chemicals from four categories of products, and the next step is to assess stakeholder input, including industry's contrary view that a chemical-by-chemical approach is better.
Staff members will weigh testimony from a recent hearing and written public comments before making a recommendation to CPSC commissioners about how to address the petition by health, environmental and consumer groups, spokesman Scott Wolfson told Bloomberg BNA in a Dec. 14 e-mail.
The issue is an important one, CPSC Chairman Elliot F. Kaye said in opening comments at the recent December hearing. He said he's spent a lot of time since becoming chairman trying “to begin to crack the nut of chemical exposure to children.”
The flame-retardant issue is complicated, because it involves both the hazard of fire and the chronic hazard of exposure to chemicals that inhibit fire, he said.
At the hearing, health advocates and scientists aligned with them, urged a broad ban on all non-polymeric organohalogen flame retardants in a chemically “additive,” rather than “reactive,” form from children's products, furniture, mattresses and the casings of electronics.
In additive form, the chemicals more easily migrate out of products to the environment, Simona Balan of the Green Science Policy Institute and others said.
They argued that a ban on only a subset of the chemicals would lead to “regrettable substitutions” in which manufacturers replace one toxic flame retardant with another that also has toxic effects.
Case-by-Case Approach?
Representatives of the chemical industry, along with scientists who testified against a ban, urged a case-by-case, chemical-by-chemical approach to the evaluation of flame retardants. The substances are very different, they argued.
And the Environmental Protection Agency is already looking at the toxicity of flame retardants, they said.
The EPA has found that about 50 flame retardants are unlikely to pose a risk to human health out of 70 under review, Michael Walls, vice president of regulatory and technical affairs at the American Chemistry Council, said.
Flame retardants are among about 90 “work plan” chemicals the EPA announced in 2012 it would assess to determine whether some type of regulations or risk management was needed.
Environmental health organizations have recently criticized the EPA's proposed approach to assessing the flame retardants' risks as inadequate (235 DEN A-7, 12/8/15).
Petition Filed
The March 31 petition urges the CPSC to categorize the flame retardants as “banned hazardous substances” under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act (62 DEN A-16, 4/1/15).
The adverse human health effects associated with them include reproductive impairment; neurological issues, including “decreased IQ in children, impaired memory, learning deficits, altered motor behavior, [and] hyperactivity”; endocrine disruption; genetic harm; cancer; and immune-system problems, according to the petition.

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(ACC Mentioned) Bead Business

Dec 16, 2015 | Vineyard Gazette

By Suzan Bellincampi

Clean water is something all of us can agree is a good thing. And so is a clean face and body. However, these two things can sometimes be at odds.
In many of our soaps, lotions, toothpastes, scrubs, body washes and even medicines, little water-polluting monsters lurk. Plastic orbs, known as microbeads or microspheres, serve as additives to these and other personal care products. Some products can be made up of up to 10 per cent plastic microbeads. These additions exfoliate your skin, fill in your wrinkles, and serve to scratch that itch, leaving you feeling scrubbed and ready for the day.
Like the suds from your soap, microbeads wash down the drain, and in many places follow the pipes to the local wastewater treatment plant. Due to their small size, they flow right through the pipes and are discharged in treatment plant effluent to our waterways.
Microbeads, which are made of polyethylene, polystyrene, polypropylene and other plastics, are tiny, ranging from 10 to 1,000 micrometers. To give a sense of that micro-measurement, consider that one micrometer is 0.000039 inch.
Fish and marine life don’t distinguish them from foodstuffs and readily eat microbeads. From the lowest level of the sediments, microbeads work their way up through the food web from zooplankton through fish. Consumption of plastics is bad enough, but these microbeads also have been found to absorb and transfer environmental pollutants such as PCBs, DDT, and pesticides. In studies, scientists have found developmental delays, reduction in growth, liver stress and even mortality in animals as diverse as copepods (crustaceans) and fish. And guess who eventually eats microbead-filled fish?
The good news is that something is being done about these bad beads. The House of Representatives just approved a bill to phase out microbeads in personal care products. The bill, called the Microbead Free Waters Act of 2015, will phase out microbeads by 2017. This federal bill follows on the heels of state actions. Illinois, California, Ohio, Michigan, Colorado, Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey and Wisconsin all have efforts on the books or in progress.
If you love exfoliating, don’t despair. There are biodegradable alternatives to microbeads, including apricot pits, nut shells, salt crystals, pumice and Jojoba beans. Even trade groups, such as the Consumer Health Care Product Association and the American Chemical Council, have supported the bill.
It is great news that we have taken on a problem, and, with the force of our convictions, have solved it. A ban on microbeads makes good sense, and perhaps it will inspire action on other fronts. Automatic weapons, for instance, leap to mind. But I guess, one cause at a time. - See more at: http://vineyardgazette.com/news/2015/12/16/bead-business?k=vg567284accb934&r=1#sthash.4IChLGm5.dpuf

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IRIS Work Extends Beyond Agenda

Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Pat Rizzuto

The Environmental Protection Agency may narrowly update the assessments of some chemicals in addition to the 37 compounds named in its Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) multiyear agenda, the director of the IRIS program said Dec. 16.
Such narrow reviews could be triggered by agency need coupled with sufficient new scientific information about a chemical that would alter one particular part of the agency's existing assessment, said IRIS Director Vincent Cogliano.
Cogliano spoke with reporters the day after the agency released a long-awaited multiyear agenda (241 DEN A-1, 12/16/15).
The agenda offers insights into what the IRIS program will work on over the next few years but doesn't describe the program's entire workload.
IRIS assessments constitute part of the information needed to conduct a risk assessment. They evaluate the health hazards a chemical poses, the doses at which hazards may manifest and the potency of some hazards.
They are used by the agency's air, water and other offices, which add exposure and other information to complete a risk assessment and determine whether they should control risk through regulations or nonregulatory controls.
Items Covered on List
The agenda lists:
• which chemicals are already being evaluated by the agency;
• the stage of the IRIS process they are in;
• new chemicals that the agency will begin to assess over the next few years; and
• some additional projects it will undertake.
One of these additional projects is to develop a process to update and maintain final IRIS assessments that don't warrant a full IRIS reassessment.
An example could be that scientists newly determine that developmental exposure to a chemical can affect the developing neurological system.
If there is sufficient agency interest in that chemical coupled with sufficient scientific support to warrant the addition of that health effect to the other concerns already addressed in the IRIS assessment, a limited update of the old information could be undertaken, he said.
New staff the IRIS program is hiring will help expand the personnel available to undertake such work, he said.
To Archive Older Assessments
The IRIS program also will archive older assessments of pesticides when the Office of Pesticide Programs has conducted a more recent assessment of them, the multiyear agenda said.
Cogliano urged interested parties to view the multiyear agenda as a document that will be updated and revised as appropriate in coming years in response to the needs of the agency's regulatory and regional offices.
For example, the Dec. 15 agenda included nitrate, nitrite and perfluoroalkyl compounds, which weren't on the previous 2012 IRIS agenda.
Perfluoroalkyl compounds are contaminants found in drinking water for which the agency's Office of Water needs IRIS information, the Dec. 15 agenda said.
Dioxin, Vanadium Pentoxide Removed
The new agenda removes dioxin from the list of chemicals the agency will evaluate, because other chemicals have become higher priorities for the agency, it said.
An assessment of the non-carcinogenic health effects of dioxin also was completed in 2012. That assessment found current exposure levels to dioxins wouldn't pose a significant risk of health problems other than cancer, which the document didn't examine(33 DEN A-11, 2/21/12)
Vanadium pentoxide also was removed from the agenda.
The agency determined it would make more sense to evaluate vanadium compounds as a group of chemicals at a later date, Cogliano said.
Other projects the IRIS program is working on include how to adapt systematic review procedures from the medical field, in which they were developed, for use in environmental health assessments.
Systematic Review
Systematic review methodologies provide specific steps through which scientific literature is identified, evaluated for quality and potential bias and integrated to, ultimately, make a conclusion as to whether one or more health problems occur from a particular exposure.
Systematic review advocates like the clarity the process provides, yet it can be time-consuming.
The two-day workshop on the IRIS multiyear agenda was designed to identify methods worth pursuing.
A separate question is what studies or issues warrant the time and staff resources required.

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New EPA Multi-Year IRIS Plan Delays Vanadium, Dioxin Risk Assessments

Dec 16, 2015 | InsideEPA

By Maria Hegstad

EPA's new multi-year agenda for its influential Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) chemical assessment program delays major pending risk reviews of the chemicals vanadium and dioxin, freeing the IRIS program to focus its work on other assessments that are seen as greater priorities for EPA programs and regional offices.
In the agenda released Dec. 15, EPA touts its efforts to improve IRIS “and increase transparency and productivity” of its chemical reviews. “The multi-year agenda, which provides information about the status of active assessments and highlights assessments scheduled to begin in the future, is a current initiative that contributes to this overarching goal,” EPA says.
While the agenda outlines plans for 22 chemical reviews, EPA is dropping a dioxin cancer assessment promised in 2012 when it published the non-cancer portion of that long-running IRIS analysis. “As a part of prioritizing IRIS assessments, the need for an assessment of dioxin carcinogenicity was re-evaluated by the Agency,” EPA says. “The IRIS Program now intends to focus on other chemical assessment needs that have been identified as higher priorities to EPA program and regional offices and will defer completion of the dioxin cancer assessment at this time.”
Dioxin is a ubiquitous environmental contaminant that is formed by combustion and certain industrial processes, and also occurs naturally. EPA's re-assessment of the substance's human health had been in progress for nearly three decades when EPA decided to split the assessment in half in 2011, leading to the publication of the non-cancer portion of the analysis. The cancer portion of the assessment had always been more controversial because the low risk estimate derived in drafts of the review were below levels in the environment, critics argued. The draft findings prompted questions about how the new risk calculation could affect waste site cleanups.
Vincent Cogliano, director of IRIS, told Inside EPA on the sidelines of a Dec. 16 IRIS workshop in Arlington, VA, that “dioxin is important but the tradeoff is dioxin is very labor intensive.” He added that managers had to consider what other assessments could be completed in the time it would take to finalize the dioxin cancer assessment.
The agenda also postpones an assessment of vanadium pentoxide, which EPA in its fiscal year 2015 budget request said was the IRIS assessment closest to completion, and “anticipated to be complete in early 2015.” IRIS has finalized just one assessment in the past two years. Production has been a major concern of many IRIS stakeholders, and increasing output has been a stated goal of both Cogliano and his boss, Ken Olden, director of the National Center for Environmental Assessment (NCEA).
But the agenda says that the assessment, which has been listed as at the last stage of the IRIS process since last June, would be delayed so that it can be incorporated into a broader assessment of vanadium generally. “As a result of discussions during the development of the IRIS multi-year agenda, it was determined that an evaluation of the potential toxicity of multiple vanadium-containing compounds, including vanadium pentoxide, was a cross-Agency high priority need,” EPA says. “For this reason, EPA has decided that the ongoing assessment of vanadium pentoxide toxicity would benefit from a concurrent, systematic evaluation of all of the available vanadium speciation and toxicity information. Therefore, the draft vanadium pentoxide assessment will not be finalized at this time.”
The agenda adds that the new assessment of “vanadium-containing compounds” will start near the beginning of the IRIS process, undergoing scoping and problem formulation steps, systematic review to investigate and analyze human health risks and peer review by the Chemical Assessment Advisory Committee. EPA created that new subcommittee of the agency's Science Advisory Board to peer review IRIS assessments.
“Vanadium chemistry is very complicated,” Cogliano told Inside EPA. “We thought that we'd get a better, more defensible assessment if we folded vanadium pentoxide into a larger vanadium assessment.” He added that a deciding question was, “What are we really looking at, total vanadium or vanadium in a particular oxidation state?”
Pending Assessments
With vanadium pentoxide removed from the list of assessments in progress, the IRIS reviews closest to completion are ammonia, ethylene oxide and trimethylbenzenes, each in step five -- revise assessment after public comment and peer review -- of the six-step IRIS process. Half of the assessments, including some long-running projects, such as arsenic and hexavalent chromium, remain in the first step of the IRIS process, draft development.
IRIS and NCEA management began efforts to update and prioritize the last IRIS agenda, published in 2012, after Olden's determination that the IRIS program had too many active assessments to be efficient given existing resources. In June 2014, IRIS and NCEA began discussions with EPA program and regional offices that use IRIS risk estimates in their regulatory and other decision-making processes to prioritize a smaller list of environmental contaminants in need of IRIS scrutiny.
The result is a list of 15 assessments placed into three groups by priority. The agenda indicates that nearly all were on the 2012 IRIS agenda, “[w]ith the exception of nitrate, nitrite, and perfluoroalkyl compounds.” This group of 15 priority chemical assessments will be “Initiated in the Next Few Years,” according to the agenda.
Cogliano declined to elaborate on how long the agency might guide the program, indicating that managers intend the agenda to be living and able to consider urgent requests from program offices for new priorities.
The agenda indicates that managers are still discussing which of the perfluoroalkyl compounds will be included in the IRIS assessment, currently in the first group of new assessments to be undertaken by IRIS.
The agenda notes that “EPA’s Office of Water is in the final stages of completing Health Advisories for two perfluoroalkyl compounds that have been found in drinking water” with their underlying risk analyses peer reviewed in August 2014. “The IRIS Program is working with the Office of Water and other EPA programs and regions to determine the range of perfluoroalkyl compounds for which an IRIS assessment is needed.”
The first group of priority chemicals includes perfluoroalkyl compounds; vanadium and compounds; manganese; mercury; methylmercury and nitrate and nitrite. Methylcercury has been a longstanding concern for the agency and a controversial topic given the pending update to joint advice with the Food and Drug Administration to women of child-bearing age and children regarding how much and which kinds of fish to eat or avoid, due to methylmercury contamination.
Cogliano indicated last year at EPA's National Forum on Contaminants in Fish in Alexandria, VA, that the IRIS program was considering updating its 2001 methylmercury assessment, and what pondering other forms of mercury should be included. Public health advocates have raised concerns that newer publications suggest the reference dose, or the amount EPA estimates can be consumed daily without anticipating harm, is too weak.
The inclusion of nitrate and nitrite in the priority list comes as another NCEA risk analysis program is preparing its analysis of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulfur oxides (SOx) for a potential first-time joint NOx-SOx national ambient air quality standard. The analysis will be peer reviewed by the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), starting with EPA's recently released draft integrated review plan. During a preliminary conference call Dec. 1, several CASAC members urged staff to broaden the scope of that assessment to include other forms of nitrogen, including ammonia, which is in the second group of IRIS' newly prioritized chemicals.
The second group of prioritized chemicals also includes acetaldehyde; cadmium and compounds and uranium, to include “effects not associated with radioactivity.” The agenda indicates that “EPA has begun to identify the scope of the IRIS assessments for most of the chemicals in groups 1 and 2, which will then inform the order of assessment development. The problem formulation materials for these chemicals will be released starting in 2016.”
The third group contains di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate; dichlorobenzene isomers; methyl t-butyl ether (MTBE); nickel and compounds and styrene.
Multi-Year Agenda
Cogliano told Inside EPA that he hopes to slot updates to some older existing IRIS assessments in among the reviews on the multi-year agenda. These will have to be assessments that IRIS staff can undertake relatively quickly, because they do not require a complete overhaul of the existing assessment, he said, but rather evaluating new studies on one or two endpoints. They must be updates prioritized by the regulatory offices, he added. Lastly, the agenda states that program staff are working to make broader improvements to the IRIS database, such as “[b]eginning a project to evaluate chemical assessment needs both within and outside of EPA and the resources required to meet those needs,” and “[d]eveloping a process to update and maintain finalized IRIS assessments that do not warrant a full reassessment through the IRIS process.”

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Sen. Boxer Blocks Chemical Safety Bill, Angering Inhofe

Dec 16, 2015 | The Hill - E2 Wire

By Timothy Cama

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) is blocking Senate consideration of a measure to overhaul federal chemical safety rules.
Boxer, the most outspoken opponent of the bipartisan effort to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act, applied her hold on the bill Wednesday to prevent quick consideration of it shortly after Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) agreed to lift a hold he had kept in place for over two months.Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, accused Boxer of going back on her pledge to him to allow the legislation to move through consideration.
“It’s simply something that really bothers me because you’re breaking a commitment that you made,” Inhofe told reporters.
“She’s reneged on her commitment,” he said.
Inhofe is hoping to get the bill passed before the end of the week, when senators are scheduled to go home and end the year’s session.
Boxer’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
She has fought tooth and nail against the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, named after the late senator and now sponsored mainly by Sens. David Vitter (R-La.) and Tom Udall (D-N.M.).
While it has dozens of co-sponsors in both parties, Boxer argues the chemical bill would be a significant step back for safety that would reduce states’ authority to regulate substances and make it difficult for regulators to act on high cancer rates, among other problems.
“This is the environment committee, not the boardroom of the chemical companies,” she said when the committee passed the bill earlier this year.
Burr had placed a hold on the bill to demand that the Senate consider renewing the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF).
The government spending bill released early Wednesday would provide a three-year renewal of the LWCF, spurring Burr to drop his hold.
The LWCF, which enjoys bipartisan support, expired Sept. 30.

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Udall Pushes Senate TSCA Bill Vote After Burr Lifts 'Hold'

Dec 16, 2015 | InsideEPA

Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) is pushing Senate leadership to allow a vote on the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) reform bill that he crafted with Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), after Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) lifted a “hold” preventing consideration of the bill that he had placed due to an unrelated fight over a land and water fund.
But E&E News in a Dec. 16 article suggests that the bill could still face resistance from Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who serves as ranking member on the Environment & Public Works Committee (EPW) and has attacked various provisions in the bill.
EPW Chairman Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) says Boxer is backing away from an earlier agreement not to block the TSCA reform bill, S. 697, reaching a floor vote under a streamlined debate process, says the article.
However, Udall in a Dec. 16 statement to Inside EPA says that he is pushing for a floor vote imminently after lawmakers resolved the fight over the Land & Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). And the senator notes that the Democratic Senate minority in October agreed to unanimous consent to quickly consider S. 697.
“The Unanimous Consent cleared on the Democratic side in October, and Senator Burr has lifted his hold, so we should be able to pass TSCA reform this year,” Udall said in the statement. “A lot of conversations are happening -- I'm talking to leadership. We're hopeful that we'll be able to sort things out soon.”
Boxer had previously vowed to block the bill over concerns about language that the senator believed would broadly preempt existing state chemicals programs, such as regulations in place in California. However, revisions to the bill that were agreed to earlier this fall led to Boxer agreeing to let the bill come to a floor vote under an Oct. 21 unanimous pact to “hotline” the bill, which would let it move to a floor vote without amendments.
Boxer's office did not respond to a request for comment by press time, but if the senator tries to slow consideration of the bill it would be a fresh hurdle after the LWCF dispute was resolved.
Burr had prevented floor consideration of the TSCA reform bill because other senators opposed his attempts to add an amendment to the legislation to reauthorize the expired LWCF. But the pending omnibus fiscal year 2016 funding bill would reauthorize the fund, clearing the path for a vote on the TSCA bill.

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Even With 60 Cosponsors, Chemical-Reform Bill Can’t Find Finish Line

Dec 17, 2015 | National Journal

By Jason Plautz

The final roadblock to getting a long-awaited chemical-reform bill through the Senate appeared to have been lifted this week.
But as has become customary in the tortured, Sisyphean path for the bill, another obstacle immediately appeared: Sen. Barbara Boxer.
A bipartisan bill from Republican Sen. David Vitter and Democratic Sen. Tom Udall to overhaul the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act has had a magic number of cosponsors—a filibuster-proof 60—since early October, and sponsors say they have an agreement for a quick, drama-free vote to get it through.
The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, named for the late Democratic senator, was then immediately held up over an unrelated issue. Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina had been blocking the bill to force a reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a popular public-lands program that expired in September. That program is set to be reauthorized for two years in the omnibus spending package released this week.
Burr lifted his hold on the chemical bill Wednesday, but Boxer quickly stepped in to put her own hold on it. Boxer has long fought against the bill, but had reached a deal with sponsors behind the scenes to let it go through. Sen. James Inhofe, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, told reporters that Boxer had reneged on the deal and was “breaking a commitment,” according to The Hill.
An aide for Boxer, the ranking member on the committee, told National Journal that the hold wasn’t about language at all, but was about making sure leaders did not try to negotiate the Senate bill with a House-passed version without a public conference.
“Senator Boxer continues to support the substitute language that she worked on with [the] majority, and she has also asked that they go to a formal conference and have a transparent process,” the aide said.
Boxer has said she wants to continue to make changes to the chemical bill in a conference with the House—which passed a TSCA bill last spring—but the aide said there hasn’t been an assurance of a formal negotiation. Udall and Inhofe have talked publicly about holding a conference with the House, but a formal arrangement to hold one is not part of a unanimous-consent agreement cleared by the Democratic caucus.
In a statement, Udall said “we should be able to pass TSCA reform this year” and that he was talking to leadership about it.
It’s another hurdle in what’s been an arduous process to bring a chemical-reform bill to the floor. The 1976 statute, which has never been updated, is widely criticized for leaving the Environmental Protection Agency with little authority to regulate toxic chemicals in commerce. Of the 80,000 or so chemicals currently in commerce, EPA has required testing for only about 200 since the original TSCA legislation was passed, and has partially regulated just five.

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Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, had tried for years to get a reform bill through, but only got traction in 2013 when he drafted a bipartisan agreement with Vitter. After Lautenberg’s death that summer, Vitter and Udall continued to try to get a bill through the Environment and Public Works Committee.
Their bill would set up minimum benchmarks for EPA to test and regulate chemicals, establish a new user-fee system to pay for it, and set a schedule to clear a lengthy backlog of untested chemicals. It would also give EPA guidance to evaluate chemicals based only on their health and safety risk at first.
Boxer, however, has long objected to the bill over concerns that it would overstep states’ rights to regulate chemicals on their own. She had pitched her own, competing TSCA bill and vowed to use every tool in her power to block the bipartisan bill from the floor.
With periodic changes and tweaks, Udall and Vitter ended up convincing even liberal Democrats like Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Edward Markey to join with Inhofe and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as cosponsors, finally getting the 60th cosponsor in October. Boxer then agreed that the language was good enough to pass the Senate, although she has said she’d like more changes to be made in conference.
The House passed its own TSCA reform bill in the spring, and sponsors on both sides say they think the differences are workable enough to get a final compromise easily.
Now the only question is when they can get to the table.

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Inhofe: Boxer Reneging On Promise Not To Hold Up TSCA

Dec 16, 2015 | PoliticoPro - Whiteboard

By Darren Goode

Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman Jim Inhofe said top panel Democrat Barbara Boxer has "reneged on her commitment" not to block quick debate and vote on a sweeping bipartisan update to 40-year-old chemical law.
"We had an understanding," Inhofe said today. "And this morning she said, 'I've changed my mind.'"
Inhofe said Boxer didn't explain why she now is threatening to block an agreement to hold two hours of debate on an update to the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act. The bill enjoys a filibuster-proof margin of support, but individual senators can stymie agreements to speed up consideration.
Boxer aides did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Inhofe had hoped to get the bill through the Senate before the upper chamber adjourns, no later than next week. Republican Sens. Richard Burr and Kelly Ayotte had been holding it up to secure a reauthorization for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and they dropped their holds after a temporary reauthorization was included in the omnibus spending deal.
Boxer has said she would vote against the TSCA bill because it preempts state toxics laws, but she had pledged not to block a time agreement after she helped secure last-minute changes.
Inhofe said he will continue to negotiate with Boxer but said the bill should be able to pass next year if she does not relent before the Senate adjourns. If it passes the Senate, the bill would have to be reconciled with a narrower House-passed version.

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North American OR Appointments Lagging

Dec 16, 2015 | Chemical Watch

By Kelly Franklin

North American appointments of only representatives, to carry out registration under REACH, have been under represented, compared to other non-EU companies, says the trade group Only Representative Organisation (ORO).
It thinks the trend is due in part to many North American SMEs determining that “the internal costs for REACH are too high and not justifying the small portion of their EU business.”
According to ORO president Dieter Drohmann, some North American SMEs may choose to focus on sales to the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) region rather than devoting resources to register substances in the EU. He says that this could create opportunities for EU companies to fill supply vacancies, but also could result in certain substances failing to be registered under REACH in 2018.
"To my mind it's possible that there will be disruptions to the supply chain," he adds.
ORO has suggested that downstream users, sourcing from the Americas and Asia, reach out to upstream suppliers to ensure that the substances they use in products will be registered by the 2018 deadline.
Increased collaboration between ORO, the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic) and Echa could also help ensure that essential substances are registered by the deadline, says Dr Drohmann. Such a collaboration took place leading up to the 2010 deadline and is being planned for that of 2018.
According to a report given by Echa's Mercedes Viñas, at the recent Chemical Watch Global Regulatory Summit in Washington, the agency is expecting up to 25,000 substances and 70,000 dossiers to be registered for substances manufactured or imported in quantities of 1-100tonnes/year. This compares to a total of approximately 6,400 substances and 29,000 dossiers for the first two deadlines combined.
A high percentage of 2018 registrants are expected to be SMEs – which are the most frequent ORO customer. The group estimates that as much as 75% of substances, registered by its OR members on behalf of non-EU companies, will be for the 2018 deadline.
More recently, some members of the group have seen an increase in North American appointments as companies prepare for it. The Society of Chemical Manufacturers and Affiliates (Socma) has also been in contact with ORO to work through questions on the REACH registration process, being raised by its members.
However, Dr Drohmann acknowledges that a bottleneck in OR capacity may result, especially as ORs respond to demand in other markets, such as under South Korea's K-REACH.

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Poinsoning The Well

Dec 16, 2015 | The Intercept

By Sharon Lerner

Lori Cervera had always been an active person. She liked camping, playing outdoors with her kids, and practically lived in her running shoes. She didn’t have much patience for illness. So when she developed a dull ache on her right side in May 2014, Cervera took a few Tylenol and did her best to ignore it. But after a few days in which the pain grew sharper and more intense, she went to the hospital, where a CT scan revealed a mass. To her complete surprise, Cervera, a mother of four and grandmother of two who was 46 at the time, was diagnosed with stage 2 kidney cancer. That July she underwent surgery to remove both the tumor and almost half her right kidney.
Cervera returned to her home in Warrington, Pennsylvania, relieved to be alive but also perplexed. She had no family history of kidney cancer, and the diagnosis felt like it came out of left field. So with 22 staples still in her belly and a drainage tube coming out of her wound, Cervera propped herself up in bed and took to Google, intent on learning more about what might have caused her illness.
Her research quickly led her to a recent report on PFOA, or perfluorooctanoic acid, also known as C8, a chemical that for six decades was used by DuPont in the production of Teflon and other products. Research on people in West Virginia and Ohio who had consumed water contaminated by leaks from a nearby DuPont factory showed probable links between the chemical and six diseases, including kidney cancer.
Cervera soon discovered that the very same chemical, as well as a related one, PFOS, had been found in drinking water in her area. Both were part of a larger class known as perfluorinated chemicals, or PFCs, “emerging contaminants” that were still being studied — and had yet to be regulated. And, according to public notices from the local water and sewer authorities, both had come from foam that was used to put out airplane fires and train soldiers at two nearby military bases — the Naval Air Warfare Center in Warminster and a former naval air station at Willow Grove, now owned by the Pennsylvania Air National Guard.
Cervera knew the bases well. One of her daughters works across the street from the Naval Air Warfare Center, which everyone calls Johnsville. Willow Grove is only about a mile south of her house; she drives by it practically every day. The Wawa convenience store where she buys milk and gas is directly across the street from Willow Grove, which the Navy shut down in 2011. It wasn’t hard to imagine how water from that former base would make its way to her home. The road that runs between the two parallels a creek that floods practically every time it rains.
When they moved 25 miles north to Warrington from Philadelphia in 2000, the Cerveras had found the well at their new home charming. Now, after reading about the contamination, she regarded it with suspicion. Had the water she drank and used to make coffee, brush her teeth, fill kiddie pools, and mix infant formula for her grandchildren over the years contained chemicals from the military bases?
In August 2014, she decided to find out and requested a free test of the well water, which the local EPA office was offering to families living close to the bases. Three months later, an agency staffer rang her bell to hand-deliver the results: Though the chemicals were present in their well, they weren’t at levels of concern, he assured her. “We were so relieved,” said Cervera, who went on drinking and cooking with the water.
However, EPA monitoring done around the time of Cervera’s surgery showed that the Warminster municipal water authority, which provides water to the township adjacent to Warrington, had the third-highest level of PFOS of all public drinking water systems tested in the entire country — 1.09 parts per billion — as well as a very high rate of PFOA, .349 ppb. The Warminster water authority stopped using two of its public wells last year because of the contamination. Warrington Township, where the Cerveras lived, found PFCs at elevated levels in three of its public supply wells and also shut them down. The chemicals had spread into some private wells, too. By June 2015, 45 had been identified with either a PFOA or PFOS level above the safety threshold set by the EPA. The chemicals were also present at lower levels in more than 100 other wells.
In late January 2015, a second test of the Cerveras’ well showed higher levels of contamination, but they were given no indication that they should stop drinking the water. Then, in August, a few weeks after a third test of their well water, a worker from the lab that processed their sample called to tell them to stop drinking it immediately. A few days later, several 5-gallon jugs of water arrived at their home. Cervera noticed the same plastic jugs began to appear outside many of her neighbors’ homes as well.
IN MAY 2014 when Cervera was first noticing the pains in her side, Andrea Amico read in her local paper that PFCs had been found in the water on the former Pease Air Force Base near her home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The level of PFOS in one of the wells serving Pease was 12 times a provisional safety level set by the EPA — so high, in fact, that the city promptly decided to shut it down.
Pease, which was a Strategic Air Command facility and Air Force base until 1991, is now home to a golf course, a commercial airport, and more than 250 businesses employing some 9,500 workers. Amico works as an occupational therapist for a hospital that’s based there, and her husband, a graphic artist, worked at Pease for more than eight years. But when she heard about the contamination, Amico’s thoughts immediately turned to her son and daughter, ages 2 and 4, who have attended Great Bay Kids’ Company, one of two childcare centers at Pease, since they were 12 weeks old.
The answers she has received over the past several months have often contradicted one another, sending Amico on a journey through medical journals, doctors’ offices, and public forums. What is indisputable is that PFOA and PFOS are part of a group of man-made chemicals that have been tied to a range of health effects, from obesity in children to reproductive problems and cancers. Used to make Teflon, stain- and water-resistant coatings, cosmetics, and hundreds of other products, PFCs persist in the environment and are easily absorbed by the human body. Both PFOS and PFOA, the best studied of these chemicals, have been shown to be “endocrine disruptors,” tiny amounts of which can interfere with the hormonal system.
What was less clear to Amico was how being exposed to these contaminants would affect her family. PFCs, she knew, can cross the placenta, showing up in cord blood and newborns. They also accumulate in breast milk. And several studies have shown children to be particularly vulnerable to their effects.
Yet some state officials she encountered at community meetings seemed more interested in calming her down than giving her an honest picture of the dangers of PFCs. “They weren’t giving us the whole story,” said Amico. “There’s this apprehension that we’re going to freak out.”
Nor were the local authorities of much help when it came to finding out how much of the chemicals her family members had in their bodies. Right after the contamination was discovered, Rick Cricenti, director of the Emergency Services Unit at the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, promised to help Amico get blood tests, she said. But eventually he stopped replying to her emails and returning her calls, and Amico spent more than seven months trying to find anyone to help her determine the level of PFCs in her family’s blood.
Jet fuel is made to burn. When airplanes crash, the reserve of the hydrocarbon liquid can produce a massive, violent fireball. Water, which doesn’t mix with the fuel, does little to extinguish these explosive fires, often just boiling off or sinking ineffectually under the fuel itself. So, about 50 years ago, the Minnesota-based chemical manufacturer 3M, in conjunction with the Navy, developed a product that would help extinguish such fires.
The sudsy liquid, dubbed “Aqueous Film-Forming Foam,” or AFFF, put out hydrocarbon fires more quickly and effectively than ever before by smothering them. Since it was developed, the military has been using huge quantities of the foam, which has been heralded for saving firefighters’ lives. Unfortunately, 3M’s miracle product also contained PFOS. And the other official formulation of the foam purchased by the Department of Defense contains “telomers,” compounds that can break down into PFOA and other PFCs. In addition to being linked to health problems, PFOA and PFOS stay in the human body for years and, unless they are removed, persist in the environment indefinitely.
The extent of contamination would no doubt be far less if the military had just used the foam to put out crash fires, which are fairly rare. Between 1979 and 2000, for instance, there were only four plane crashes near Willow Grove. But the foam is also used to teach soldiers to put out fires, and those training exercises are common. A typical exercise, which has been conducted by various branches of the military many thousands of times since the 1960s, involves flooding a fire pit with flammable liquids, lighting them on fire, and then putting out the flames with between 75 and 100 liters of firefighting foam. For decades, no one thought to construct barriers at these sites to contain the foam, which sank down through the earth into the water table.
CONTAMINATION FROM THIS frequent dousing with PFC-laced foam is a far bigger problem than either Amico or Cervera imagined. Water testing done in or near military bases, which isn’t yet complete, has already shown that the chemicals spread into public drinking water systems around Willow Grove, Pease, and a third base — Eielson, in Alaska. PFCs have also been detected in the ground water at many more bases, including the Air National Guard base in Delaware; the Grissom Air Reserve Base in Indiana; and the Naval Air Station in Fallon, Nevada. Indeed, according to a 2013 presentation by the Air Force, PFCs were found at every Air Force base that had been tested, which so far includes Randolph in Texas; Robins in Georgia; Beale and McClellan in California; Eglin in Florida; Ellsworth in South Dakota; and F.E. Warren in Wyoming.
In some of these places, huge amounts of chemicals from the foam have been found in soil and water. At Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, for instance, one of the telomers that can decay into a chemical similar to PFOA was found at 14,600 ppb. Near the Naval Air Station in Fallon, Nevada, where fire-training exercises were conducted for more than 30 years, PFOA has been recorded in the groundwater at levels as high as 6,720 ppb. And, at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Michigan, where crash trainings also took place for more than three decades, one plume of groundwater had concentrations of total PFCs between 100,000 and 250,000 ppb.
It’s clear that the full extent of the contamination will be much bigger still. As of 2014, there were 664 current or former military fire- or crash-training sites in the U.S., according to a statement from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The Air Force and Navy have the largest number of these spots. Although the DOD has said it’s too early in the cleanup process to know how many of these sites have been contaminated with PFCs, it is likely that all of them have, said Jennifer Field, a professor of environmental and molecular toxicology at Oregon State. Field has been studying the environmental fate of the chemicals used in firefighting foam and has yet to see an area where the foam was used in which PFCs have not been detected.
The U.S. military, which has been using the foam in fire-training exercises since the 1960s, is the biggest user — and polluter — by far. But commercial airports, airplane hangars, oil refineries, fire departments, petrochemical transfer and production sites, and heliports have also used firefighting foam containing PFCs for decades, which likely pushes the total number of contaminated sites into the thousands, according to Thomas Bruton, a PhD candidate in environmental engineering at Berkeley who is studying PFC contamination.
There’s little doubt that, together, widespread use of firefighting foam has contributed to the exposure of huge numbers of people to PFCs. EPA monitoring begun recently found PFOS in water systems serving almost 10 million Americans, most of whom have no idea they’re drinking it. The number of potentially exposed people climbs to more than 14 million when the other five PFCs now being monitored by the EPA are included. And those six chemicals are only the tip of the iceberg; more than 2,000 PFCs have already been identified on the global market, and scientists expect that number to climb to 4,000.
Even as the Air Force, Navy, and the Department of Defense struggle to clean up this massive environmental mess, the military continues to use PFC-containing firefighting foam for both training purposes and emergencies. The military has the largest stockpile of PFOS-containing firefighting foam in the United States, with around a million gallons, according to a 2011 estimate by the Fire Fighting Foam Coalition, an industry group. While the EU and Canada have banned the use of stockpiled foam containing PFOS, the U.S. has no restrictions on its use.
In fact, the current military specifications for firefighting foam require that the product contain PFCs. In response to a list of questions provided by The Intercept, a military spokesperson wrote: “Until non-PFC formulations are certified, DOD is implementing measures to prevent uncontrolled releases of firefighting foams during maintenance and firefighting training exercises. Additionally, DOD will be removing stocks of PFOS-based foam where practical.” While the military can still use the stockpiled foam, according to the DOD response, “Non-PFOS based foams, which do contain shorter-chain PFCs, will continue to be the main product used for firefighting until non-PFC formulations can be tested and certified to meet the military performance specifications.”
These products using “shorter-chain” PFCs, which manufacturers have been shifting to in recent years, consist mostly of molecules with either four- or six-carbon bases, as opposed to eight, like PFOS and PFOA. Industry has claimed that the new compounds are safer, because the shorter-chain molecules have a shorter half-life. But since long-chain chemicals persist indefinitely, the practical difference may not amount to much. To date, little research has been completed about the health effects of these chemicals. Experts disagree about their potential to cause harm, but they are suspected to persist in the environment and to accumulate in the human body.
In recent years, biologists have begun to trace the path of chemicals from firefighting foam through the environment, and PFCs from the foam have been shown to accumulate in earthworms. At levels between 10 and 120 ppb, PFOS can damage the worms’ DNA. Fish swimming near the Wurtsmith base had internal PFOS levels as high as 9,580 ppb. Birds that eat these fish have PFCs in them, too.
The chemicals are clearly entering humans’ bodies as well. Before the 1940s, when the first PFCs were developed, no one had them in their blood. Now, it’s virtually impossible to find anyone who doesn’t have at least trace amounts of these man-made substances in their bodies, most of which likely come from exposure to the chemicals in consumer products.
The PFCs from firefighting foam can add substantially to this burden, as Andrea Amico now knows. After several months of public meetings, letter writing, and phone calls, she finally managed to get free testing approved not just for her family but also for anyone who drank the water on Pease. Rick Cricenti, the New Hampshire official who stopped responding to Amico’s communications, referred me to a spokesperson for the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, who did not dispute her version of events but said, “I feel good about the department’s response ultimately to this contamination.” Eventually, that response included working with the CDC to offer blood testing to anyone who was affected. So far, 1,600 people have had their blood tested for the presence of nine PFCs. The first of the results, which were released in August and September, showed that the average level of PFOS in children who were exposed to water from Pease was more than double the rate measured in a comparison group of children. Levels of another PFC called PFHxS were particularly high — more than triple the national average among adults and five times higher than a comparison group among children.
Amico’s daughter, who was just 4 when she had her blood tested, had a PFOS level that was more than four times that of a group of children from elsewhere in the country; her PFHxS level was more than 12 times higher.
IN 2006, THE EPA helped broker a deal under which the eight companies in the U.S. that were making or using PFOS and PFOA would stop doing so. As of this year the companies say that they have. But the federal agency dedicated to protecting human health and the environment has yet to set a safe level of lifetime exposure to the chemicals.
As The Intercept reported in August, Robert Bilott, an attorney representing people living in West Virginia and Ohio near a DuPont plant, first asked the EPA to regulate PFOA in 2001 under the Toxic Substances Control Act, “on the grounds that it ‘may be hazardous to human health and the environment.’” Bilott based his plea on decades of research on PFOS and PFOA he had uncovered through his legal work. In one of the many studies he unearthed, which was reported by 3M scientists in 2001, two of six male monkeys exposed to PFOS died. The chemical also caused monkeys to lose weight, increased the weight of their livers, and interfered with various hormones.
Still, the EPA didn’t address the question of how much PFOA or PFOS might be safe until 2009, after the agency discovered that sludge containing high levels of both chemicals had made its way from a wastewater treatment facility in Decatur, Alabama, to nearby fields. For 12 years, it turned out, that contaminated sludge had been spread across 5,000 acres of local grazing land. The fear was that the chemicals would make their way into animals and humans in the rural area. And, in fact, they did. But even so, the EPA didn’t enact binding regulation, which could have been used to force the companies responsible for the chemicals’ presence in water, including 3M, to clean up the contamination.
Instead, the agency came up with a temporary, unenforceable solution to the PFC problem. The Provisional Health Advisory on PFOS and PFOA that the EPA released in 2009 referred to the industry’s monkey research and other evidence of disturbing health effects of PFCs on animals when it calculated the maximum levels of these chemicals that humans should be exposed to through drinking water. For PFOS it was 0.2 ppb; for PFOA, 0.4 ppb. But these levels fall short of enforceable regulations.
And both are for “short-term exposure,” which according to the EPA means they are supposed to apply to periods of exposure that last from “weeks to months.” Yet Andrea Amico’s oldest child was exposed for years — indeed, for most of her life. In all likelihood, Lori Cervera and her family drank contaminated water for as long as 15 years. And many others living near fire-training sites may have been exposed to the chemicals for far longer, since the military has been using the foam for close to 50 years.
Although the EPA has repeatedly said it would update these numbers, it hasn’t done so since 2009. In a written response to questions from The Intercept, Cathy Milbourne, an EPA spokesperson, said the agency expects to finalize health advisories for PFOA and PFOS “this winter.” Once published, those numbers will supersede the provisional health advisories from 2009.
In the meantime, the military continues to use the provisional safety levels to guide its response to contamination from AFFF. One of the agency’s Q&A sheets, for instance, assures people living near Willow Grove that these levels “are intended to ensure protection of public health, with a margin of safety built-in.” Those in charge of the cleanup there use the numbers to determine who receives bottled water and which homes now reliant on contaminated private wells will be connected to public water systems. And residents whose wells contain even slightly less than this amount and who have been drinking the chemicals for years may be reassured, as Cervera was, that their water is safe to drink.
SINCE THE EPA SET these provisional levels, evidence has emerged suggesting that guidelines for safe levels of PFC exposure over the long term should be much lower. In 2009, the same year that the EPA set its short-term level for PFOA at .4 ppb, a group of water experts appointed by New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection calculated what they thought should be a safe lifetime limit for drinking water: .04 ppb, one-tenth the EPA’s provisional level. And since then, much evidence has emerged showing that the long-term level should be lower still.
In 2012, data gathered from plaintiffs in a class-action suit Bilott and others filed against DuPont found that exposure to PFOA was likely linked to kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid diseases, ulcerative colitis, high cholesterol, and preeclampsia. The minimum level of contamination in water districts represented in the suit was low — just .05 ppb, a small fraction of the level now being used to guide cleanup — and more recent research suggests maximum levels for drinking water should be even lower than that.
For years, industry did the vast majority of research on PFCs, most of which was never made public. “We didn’t pay attention to the PFCs because it looked like there was nothing,” said Philippe Grandjean, a physician and environmental health researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. But in 2000, after conducting a study of the health effects of PFOA on monkeys, 3M announced that it would phase out production of both PFOS and PFOA. “It was when industry said ‘oops,’ that’s when the academics got started,” said Grandjean.
Grandjean himself became interested in PFCs after he noticed a 2008 study in which researchers looked at how the chemicals affected mice. “Animal toxicologists got to the immune system and — bing! — they found these very strong effects.” Grandjean wondered whether the chemicals might have similar effects in children and devised a way to find out: He looked at the blood from group of young children before and after they were vaccinated for tetanus and diphtheria. His findings, which were published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association in 2012, were striking: After being vaccinated, 7-year-olds who had very slightly elevated levels of PFCs in their blood tended to have lower levels of antibodies to those diseases. For each doubling of exposure to the chemicals, the risk that the vaccine didn’t take increased twofold to fourfold.
“I fell off my chair when we got our first results,” said Grandjean, who believes the study has broad implications for overall immune function, which affects the development of allergies, autoimmune diseases, cancers, and a huge range of other illnesses. Indeed, a separate study, published in 2013, bears out his hunch. This one mapped certain illnesses to exposure to very low levels of certain PFCs in Norwegian children. Those who had higher levels of PFOA and another perfluorinated chemical, PFNA, got more colds. And those who had higher levels of PFOA and PFHxS, the chemical found at elevated levels in many of the people near Pease, were more likely to get stomach infections.
Based on his findings — which were corroborated by other research showing an association of very small amounts of PFCs in the blood of pregnant women in Demark with increased risk of miscarriage — Grandjean came up with a maximum level of the chemicals that would be safe to ingest that was much lower than the provisional level set in 2009. “You need to get down to something like several hundredfold less than what EPA originally set,” said Grandjean, who has suggested a safe level should be set below .001 ppb instead of 0.2 or 0.4.
Though it came close, the contamination detected in Lori Cervera’s well never exceeded the EPA’s guidelines for short-term exposure. After years of exposure, though, even tiny amounts of the chemicals can be harmful, according to Grandjean. Because PFCs accumulate in the body — it takes five years for people to get rid of just half of PFOS in their bodies, for instance — for people who have been chronically exposed, like Cervera, “any additional exposure should be prevented,” said Grandjean.
And the effort to rid the environment of PFCs from firefighting foam promises to be especially messy and difficult. Not only have these chemicals been spread across the entire country, they’re often mixed in with other contaminants, including jet fuel, benzene, and other byproducts of combustion. This is certainly the case at Eielson, Pease, and Willow Grove, all of which were Superfund sites well before they were known sites of PFC contamination from firefighting foam.
So far, the best method for cleaning up PFCs requires putting contaminated water through an “activated” carbon filter, and then burning the chemicals that have been filtered out. The process is expensive, as is the pumping of the water from the ground to a place where it can be treated.
Indeed, in July, the Navy agreed to pay $8.8 million to treat the public drinking water wells of the Horsham Water and Sewer Authority near the Cerveras’ home and almost $4 million to clean the water at the Warminster Municipal Authority in the next town. And those costs are only for cleaning wells that have PFCs above the provisional advisory levels.
Because PFCs are unregulated, the law doesn’t require their cleanup — and the costs of getting them out of the environment aren’t covered by the Superfund program. Nevertheless, the Air Force has decided it will address the contamination on a case-by-case basis, reviewing and addressing requests for action on PFCs when “direct human exposure, and/or off-site migration is identified.”
The consequences of not adequately cleaning the PFCs loom large. At Willow Grove, for example, plans are already underway to develop housing, a school, and a retirement community.
IN OCTOBER, A JURY found DuPont liable for $1.6 million in damages to a woman who had developed kidney cancer after drinking PFOA-contaminated water near one of the company’s plants. Though she developed the same disease after similar exposures, at this point, Lori Cervera is unlikely to have such success in the courts.
In the DuPont cases, the second of which will be tried in March, there is ample evidence the company was responsible for putting the chemical into local drinking water. And, according to the terms of the class-action suit from which the case stemmed, the jury had to accept that PFOA can cause kidney cancer.
If Cervera were to sue, her lawyers would have to sort through a tangle of potentially responsible parties. Over time, the bases near her have been home to several branches of the military, including the Navy, the Air Force, the Air National Guard, and the Army Reserve. Suing any of them is notoriously difficult. And then there is the challenge of sorting out which of several companies made the particular foam in question. Though 3M was the sole supplier of firefighting foam to the U.S. military until 1982 and made about three-quarters of the military’s entire stockpile, six other manufacturers, including Ansul, Chemguard, National Foam, and Buckeye Fire, have also sold firefighting foam to the military. And they bought some of the chemicals used in the foam from other companies.
National Foam, Ansul, and Chemguard declined to comment for this story. Buckeye Fire did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 3M provided the following statement:
“3M’s AFFF products were all sold with material safety data sheets, or MSDSs, that advised how to handle and dispose of the product in a safe and effective manner,” Donna Fleming Runyon, spokesperson for 3M, says. “When used properly, we believe AFFF was safe and effective. In fact, the products are widely credited with benefiting the military and civilian firefighters around the world. They are known in many cases to have saved lives.”
“We believe that PFCs, such as PFOS and PFOA, do not present health risks at the levels they are typically found in the environment or in human blood,” says Carol A. Ley, MD, vice president and corporate medical director, 3M Medical Department. “In more than 30 years of medical surveillance, we have observed no adverse health effects in our employees resulting from their exposure to PFCs such as PFOS and PFOA,” says Ley. “This is important since the level of exposure in the general population is hundreds, if not thousands, of times lower than that of production employees who worked directly with these materials.”
Still, Cervera was considering her legal options — and, for months, waiting for calls back from the Centers for Disease Control, the EPA, and the local base closure office to get more information about her exposure over the years. But at press time, a routine blood test had heightened her doctors’ suspicions that her cancer had returned — and banished, for now, Cervera’s questions about why she got sick.
Back in New Hampshire, Amico is now part of a recently formed community advisory board at Pease that is working with the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to design a health study to see how the PFCs in drinking water might have affected the health of people who drank water there. It will likely be years before any results emerge from this research.
PFC contamination from the foam has recently been discovered in Europe, Japan, and Australia, where TV coverage likened the widespread contamination to “Agent Orange, all over again.”
Perhaps the most instructive response to the problem has been in Ronneby, a small town on the southern coast of Sweden. In December 2013, the level of PFOS in drinking water there was found to be elevated. As in the U.S., the Swedish contamination was tied to firefighting foam used by Sweden’s air force. But unlike in the U.S., the response in Ronneby was thorough, swift, and very open.
As soon as the problem was discovered, it was widely reported to the public and clean water was distributed. Blood sampling of exposed residents got underway by February and initial results from those tests were reported in March. Within months, a Swedish university received an emergency research grant to study the health effects in the population and the government mobilized a network of national agencies to work on the issue.
As in the U.S., plenty of questions remain about the PFCs in Ronneby. Epidemiological studies of the health of the local population, while already funded, won’t get underway until 2016, according to Kristina Jakobsson, a professor of occupational and environmental medicine at Gothenburg University. But the process is clearly already a governmental priority — or as Jakobsson put it simply, “an act of responsibility.”

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Chemical Companies Challenge EPA's DSW Rule

Dec 16, 2015 | InsideEPA

Two specialty chemical companies are bolstering arguments that petroleum and other industry groups are making in their lawsuit that seeks to relax EPA’s Definition of Solid Waste (DSW) rule, targeting one of the rule’s criteria that the agency makes mandatory to prove that legitimate recycling is occurring.
In a Dec. 16 amicus brief filed by specialty chemical companies Eastman Chemical Company and Solvay USA Inc. in the case American Petroleum Institute, et al. v. EPA, the two companies contend the rule’s fourth legitimacy criterion exceeds EPA’s federal waste law authority and contains vague requirements that give EPA wide latitude to act “arbitrarily and capriciously” to declare a recycling operation a sham.
The brief adds to the host of legal issues being raised in the litigation, filed by API and other industry sectors, as well as environmentalists. The groups' opening briefs highlight the contrary views on whether the DSW rule issued by EPA earlier this year is too strict or too lax.
The long-awaited rule responds to earlier litigation by environmental groups over a Bush-era rule and attempts to close what EPA saw as regulatory gaps in the 2008 version of the rule by mandating use of all four of the agency's criteria for determining that recycling of hazardous waste is legitimate, rather than just two under the Bush-era rule.
In their brief, Eastman and Solvay -- which manufacture hundreds of chemical products and regularly recycle hazardous secondary materials -- say the court should consider their separate brief because they are “well situated to illustrate to the Court how the challenged rule, and specifically legitimacy factor four, would apply in a typical chemical manufacturing setting, and to explain how such rule unlawfully invades the manufacturing process, for which EPA has no statutory authority.”
Legitimacy factor four requires that products made from recycled hazardous secondary materials be comparable in their constituent composition and concentration to products made with virgin materials; otherwise the recycled secondary materials must be regulated as hazardous waste, the brief says.
But the companies argue this is an “unlawful” factor for three reasons. The first is EPA is exceeding its authority under the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act “by imposing burdensome regulations on non-discarded materials that are destined for recycling and reuse as part of a continuous industrial process.”
Second, they say, the factor includes “criteria that are so undefined that they do not provide reasonable notice to recyclers of what is required to demonstrate that their recycling is legitimate, and conversely, they give EPA broad latitude to act arbitrarily and capriciously in finding specific recycling practices to be sham.”
Third, EPA lacks a “record basis” to add this factor as a condition that companies must meet before relying on the pre-2008 exclusions from solid and hazardous waste regulation, they say. On this, they say over 20 rules prior to this excluded various hazardous secondary material from solid waste regulation, but the final DSW rule dramatically altered these, by requiring recyclers to first meet the four legitimacy factors before relying on the pre-2008 exclusions.
The fourth factor, they say, “is especially burdensome, often infeasible to comply with, and undeniably invasive of the manufacturing operation.”

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(ACC Mentioned) USGBC, American Chemistry Council Join Forces To Advance LEED

Dec 16, 2015 | Proud Green Building

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and the American Chemistry Council (ACC) have partnered on a new initiative designed to ensure the use of sustainable and environmentally protective products in buildings by applying technical and science-based approaches to the LEED green building program. This initiative acknowledges USGBC’s success in leading the transformation of the built environment and sets up a pathway to take advantage of the materials science expertise of ACC and its members, according to a release from the ACC.
“USGBC and ACC share the goal of advancing sustainability in the built environment, and we will work together to take advantage of our collective strength and experience,” said Rick Fedrizzi, president, CEO and founding chair of the USGBC. “The looming impacts of climate change and the possibilities of improving human health and wellbeing favor collaboration and engagement as key strategies. The goal is forward progress.”
ACC President and CEO Cal Dooley echoed those sentiments.
“Modern energy efficiency gains, building safety advances and carbon footprint reductions would not be possible without the products of chemistry,” he said. “From windows to insulation, adhesives to flooring, chemistry provides solutions that enable the energy efficient and sustainable buildings that consumers expect in today’s world. By combining USGBC, a leader of the green building movement, with the scientific know-how of ACC, we can develop a path to stronger, science-based standards that achieve measurable progress in sustainability.”
LEED is regularly updated through a rigorous development process that includes public comments, technical review and balloting. USGBC and ACC will work within that framework to incorporate state-of-the-art safety, sustainability and life-cycle based approaches to LEED. LEED has facilitated advances in building technologies, integrated design and operating practices, as well as the tremendous growth of the green building sector, which supports or creates 7.9 million jobs across all 50 states and contributes $554 billion to the U.S. economy annually.
The American business of chemistry employs nearly 800,000 Americans and supports nearly 25 percent of the U.S. GDP. Chemistry-based plastic building and construction materials saved 467.2 trillion BTUs of energy over alternative construction materials – enough energy saved over the course of a year to meet the average annual energy needs of 4.6 million U.S. households. Energy savings made possible by innovations in chemistry in homes in the U.S. prevented nearly 283 million tons of CO2 emissions in 2010—equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of 50 million passenger vehicles.

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House Republicans Question BLM's Recent Lease Postponements

Dec 17, 2015 | E&E Daily News

By Phil Taylor

House Republicans yesterday blasted the Bureau of Land Management for postponing a pair of recent oil and gas lease sales, accusing the agency of flouting its duty under the Mineral Leasing Act and for kowtowing to anti-leasing environmental groups.
The postponements for lease sales in Utah and Washington, D.C., are "troubling" considering that the total number of new leases issued each year has fallen by more than 50 percent since 2008, the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Interior Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management Janice Schneider, who oversees BLM policy.
BLM is violating an MLA requirement to hold at least four lease sales annually in each state with leasable lands, the lawmakers said.
"Furthermore, your recent statement to the media about the BLM's legal obligations regarding mineral leasing as 'something we're sorting through' raises questions as to whether the BLM is committed to its straight-forward obligations under federal law," said the letter, signed by 15 members and spearheaded by House Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah).
A BLM spokesman could not be reached last night.
BLM said it postponed the sales to secure a venue to accommodate protesters from the Keep It in the Ground movement, which opposes federal mineral leases due to their contribution to climate change. The movement has rekindled a debate over BLM's legal obligations to facilitate development of the nation's fossil fuel resources (Greenwire, Dec. 10)
The lawmakers' letter asks BLM to "clearly define the number of permitted attendees per auction with preference given to bidders, and to utilize the online bidding process as necessary to prevent future disruptions."
It noted that protesters who disrupt a lease sale -- as was contemplated by activists who were planning to protest a Dec. 10 sale in Washington, D.C. -- are liable for stiff fines and prison time under MLA. Moreover, the letter says BLM is not obligated to allow the general public to attend sales.
"Hence, we question the validity of the excuse -- that the BLM needed a larger venue to accommodate increased interest," they wrote.
The lawmakers said congressional oversight of BLM's program will continue and may include hearings in the coming weeks.

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Funds For Obama Climate Deal Survive In Spending Bill

Dec 16, 2015 | The Hill - E2 Wire

By Devin Henry

In a victory for the Obama administration, the spending package released by congressional leaders on Wednesday won’t block American financial contributions to an international climate fund for poorer nations.
The bill, greens and Democrats say, doesn’t explicitly appropriate funding for President Obama’s pledged contribution to the Green Climate Fund (GCF). But since the legislation doesn’t formally block money for the GCF either, Obama is expected to be able to use current discretionary funding streams to send American money to it.
“Based on what we have reviewed so far, there are no restrictions on our ability to make good on the president’s pledge to contribute to the Green Climate Fund,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said on Wednesday. The GFC is a pot of public and private money designed to help poorer nations prepare for climate change. Obama pledged last year to spend $3 billion on the fund by 2020, and he asked Congress to appropriate up to $500 million for it in 2016.
Republicans have opposed providing money to the fund, and a House appropriations bill blocked the funding this summer.
During negotiations over an international climate deal, the GOP said it would work to block GFC money in any omnibus bill unless the Senate got a chance to vote on ratifying the climate agreement.
“Congress will weigh in on whatever comes out of the Paris climate talks, and the money that the president has requested as part of his budget,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said in November. “Congress will have a say.”
Democrats were able to include an amendment allowing the funding in a Senate spending bill.
Neither language was included in the omnibus spending bill leadership released early Wednesday morning. But that allows Obama to move funding from other spending areas to the GFC if he wants to, fund supporters say.
“This is a rebuke to those congressional extremists who tried to play politics with desperately needed money to help the world’s poor take climate action,” Friends of the Earth senior analyst Karen Orenstein said in a statement Wednesday. “Morality and reason, rather than science-denying isolationism, prevailed in this case.”

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Spending Bill Keeps EPA Funding Flat In 2016

Dec 16, 2015 | The Hill - E2 Wire

By Devin Henry

Congressional leaders have agreed to keep Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funding flat in 2016 and Republicans have yielded in their fight to block agency rulemaking through the spending process.
Under the omnibus budget deal released early Wednesday morning, the EPA is funded at $8.1 billion in 2016, a level lower than it was in 2010 but on par with 2015. The bill keeps agency staffing levels at their lowest level since 1989. This spring House Republicans proposed cutting EPA funding by $718 million next year, but a bill authorizing the cut never made it to the House floor.
At the time, Republicans also looked to use the spending bill to block a slate of new EPA rules — including the Obama administration’s climate rule for power plans and another redefining which waterways the federal government can regulate — but those provisions were also left out of the final spending deal.
The omnibus deal does direct regulators to work with states on a new coal mining rule, and it beefs up congressional oversight of mine permitting. It also asks the Obama administration to report to Congress on its climate-change spending.
The bill also blocks the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service from putting the greater sage grouse on the Endangered Species list. Conservationists have been concerned about the dwindling range of the bird, but industry groups and Republicans worry an endangered status would hurt energy development in the Western U.S.
Funding for the Fish & Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Parks Service and wildfire operations will go up in 2016 under the omnibus deal. In total, Interior and EPA funding will hit $32.2 billion in 2016, up from last year but still $1.1 billion below what Obama requested in his budget.

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Domestic Agenda Now Center Stage For White House

Dec 16, 2015 | E&E News PM

By Amanda Reilly

In the wake of the Paris global climate deal, the Obama administration is focusing on its domestic climate agenda, a senior White House official said today.
Brian Deese, senior climate and energy adviser to President Obama, told a Washington, D.C., forum that the administration's main domestic policy goal is to "get as many states as far along" as possible with preparing compliance plans for the Clean Power Plan, U.S. EPA's program for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants.
The president is also continuing to interact with other nations, Deese said. Since the agreement was finalized in Paris last weekend, he said, Obama has placed phone calls to world leaders to offer congratulations and discuss next steps, including a conversation this morning with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The Paris agreement calls on nations to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius and says that nations will "pursue efforts" to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Under the agreement, the countries are required to update their current emissions reduction pledges by 2020 and every five years afterward (ClimateWire, Dec. 14).
From the White House's perspective, the agreement "fundamentally" changed three metrics, Deese said. It's more ambitious than other global efforts to address climate change, more durable due to the stipulation that nations reassess targets periodically, and more transparent because of carbon inventorying requirements, he said.
"Is this agreement sufficient to save the planet? I don't think that anybody would argue that," he said. "But is it the best chance that we have, and does it reflect what I would argue is a sea change in the way that the global communities are thinking about how to go about addressing this crisis? I think absolutely, yes."
Along with the Clean Power Plan, which faces a host of legal challenges, Deese listed as White House post-Paris priorities rulemakings in the area of light- and heavy-duty vehicles and methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, as well as conservation initiatives.
"We've got to continue implementing aggressively our domestic climate and energy agenda," Deese said.
Obama is also hoping to deepen bilateral and multilateral cooperation to build on the momentum from Paris, he said.
Deese predicted that the Paris agreement would spur a shift of private-sector investment toward low-carbon technologies.
"There's going to be a massive reorientation of private-sector investment into lower-carbon technologies," Deese said. "Perhaps its most significant impact is that it sends an incredibly strong signal to the global capital markets that something has fundamentally changed."
He acknowledged the deep political divides on the issue of climate change that remain in the United States but said that the Paris agreement represents a rise above those politics.
"What you saw in Paris was the world's nations moving well beyond the politics of this issue in the United States," Deese said. "And I think we're seeing the private sector also move well beyond the politics."

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House Bill Would Delay Ozone Implementation

Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report

The Environmental Protection Agency's 2015 national ozone standards of 70 parts per billion would be delayed under a bill (H.R. 4265) introduced Dec. 16 by Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas). The Clean Air Implementation Act of 2015 would require the EPA to halt implementation of the 70 ppb ozone standards while the agency conducts a study on the effect of foreign pollution on areas that are unable to comply. Several states, particularly in the Western U.S., have raised concerns that uncontrollable background pollution levels, including pollution from Asia and Mexico, could make it difficult to attain more stringent ozone standards. The bill also would extend the mandatory review period of national ambient air quality standards from five years to eight years and allow the EPA to consider the feasibility of achieving a tighter standard in its decision on where to set the standard. The Clean Air Implementation Act is co-sponsored by Reps. Bob Latta (R-Ohio), Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.), and Henry Cuellar (D-Texas). Olson in March introduced the Clean Air, Strong Economies Act (H.R. 1388) which would have prevented the EPA from issuing its final rule (RIN 2060-AP38) to revise the ozone standards in 2015 (52 DEN A-17, 3/18/15).

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EPA Reports ‘Strong Year in Enforcement'

Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Renee Schoof

The number of environmental criminal cases opened by the Environmental Protection Agency declined to 213 in fiscal year 2015 from 271 in 2014, but the number of defendants charged was similar: 185 in 2015 and 187 in 2014.
The amount of federal penalties assessed by the EPA doubled to nearly $205 million in 2015 from $100 million the previous year. The amount of pollution reduced also increased to an estimated 532 million pounds in 2015 from 515 million pounds in 2014, the EPA said in its annual enforcement results report released Dec. 16.
The agency in recent years of tightening budgets has said it was focusing on fewer large cases rather than smaller ones. That approach continued in 2015 with its focus on “high impact cases that drive compliance across industries,” the EPA said in a press release.
More than 15,400 inspections or evaluations were conducted by the EPA in fiscal year 2015, down from 15,600 reported in 2014.
Data for environmental crimes showed that defendants were sentenced to a total of 129 years in prison, compared with 155 years in 2014; fines and restitution increased from $63 million in 2014 to $200 million in 2015; and the value of court-ordered environmental projects also increased: It was $4 billion in 2015, compared with $16 million the year before.
Companies were required to spend more than $7 billion on pollution controls as a result of the agency's enforcement actions in FY 2015, compared to $10 billion last year.
Previous year totals were $20 billion in 2011, $9 billion in 2012 and $7 billion in 2013.
Superfund Settlements Rise
Superfund settlements increased over recent years and, in some cases, were the second highest the agency had reported.
Private party cleanup commitments were nearly $2 billion, the second highest amount committed to be spent on site cleanups during a fiscal year, the agency said.
That total was higher than in any year since 2011, when it was $3.3 billion. Cleanup commitments, like the numbers for fines and other items in the report, vary from year to year based on when large cases are resolved.
The agency also billed private parties $106 million for oversight costs in 2015. In addition, responsible parties agreed to reimburse $512 million of the agency's past costs for cleanup at Superfund sites, the second-highest total since the program began in 1980, the EPA said. The Superfund program cleans up contaminated land and responds to environmental emergencies, oil spills and natural disasters.
EPA Sees Success
In addition to Superfund amounts, the EPA in its press release also flagged what it said was success in Clean Air Act and hazardous waste settlements. Cynthia Giles, the assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance, in a statement called 2015 “another strong year in enforcement.”
“The large cases we tackled in 2015 will drive compliance across industries, and protect public health in communities for years to come,” Giles said in the statement. “These cases are putting cutting edge tools to work and using innovative approaches to reduce pollution.”
The agency said air pollutants were reduced by an estimated 430 million pounds , and it obtained more than $39 million in environmental projects to help communities harmed by pollution.

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Republican Trio Offers Bill To Prevent EPA Carbon Limits

Dec 17, 2015 | E&E Daily News

By Amanda Reilly

A trio of Wisconsin Republicans this week introduced legislation aimed at limiting U.S. EPA's ability to issue further regulations over greenhouse gas emissions.
The bill, H.R. 4259, would prohibit EPA from putting in place or enforcing any limits on aggregate carbon dioxide emissions from a state.
EPA would also be barred from regulating aggregate CO2 emissions from a category of pollution sources in a state.
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner introduced the legislation Tuesday with his colleagues, Reps. Reid Ribble and Glenn Grothman, acting as original co-sponsors.
Sensenbrenner's office did not respond to a request for comment on the legislation.
The Republican, a climate change doubter, has been critical of EPA's past attempts to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. He recently called the agency's Clean Power Plan for existing power plants a "dangerous and costly climate initiative that would leave America at an international economic disadvantage."

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EPA Extends Comment Period on HFC Proposal

Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report

The Environmental Protection Agency will continue to accept comments until Jan. 25 on a proposed rule that would bar the deliberate venting, release or disposal of hydrofluorocarbons or other non-ozone-depleting substitute refrigerants when servicing or disposing of air conditioning and refrigeration equipment, according to a notice to be published in the Federal Register Dec. 17. The comment period on the proposed rule, issued under Section 608 of the Clean Air Act, originally closed Jan. 8. The administration announced the rule in October as major private sector companies, including Dow Chemical Co., Honeywell International Inc., Johnson Controls Inc. and Target Corp., also announced new commitments to slash emissions of HFCs (200 DEN A-4, 10/16/15). The EPA's notice is available at https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2015-31661.pdf.

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Transportation News

White House Stops PHMSA From Regulating Gravity Lines

Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Rachel Leven

The nation's pipeline safety regulator backed off its plan to regulate gravity lines under its recently proposed hazardous liquid pipeline rule after vetting from the White House, according to an administration document.
In an initial version of the proposal (RIN 2137-AE66), the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration had proposed to remove a regulatory exception for gravity pipelines—lines that move product using gravity. The agency wanted to propose that the estimated three operators to five operators that operate 17 miles to 28 miles of gravity lines be required to ensure those lines comply with existing hazardous liquid pipeline regulations.
PHMSA Dec. 15 posted its initial version of the proposed rule, which it had submitted to the White House for interagency review, to the regulatory docket. In it, the agency determined that “[A]fter review of this regulatory exception, PHMSA believes that gravity lines do involve safety and environmental risks and are subject to misuse.”
However, the Office of Management and Budget altered the rule to require only that those operators begin reporting information to PHMSA on their lines' transportation of hazardous liquids such as crude oil, petroleum products or carbon dioxide.
In the published version of its proposal approved by the White House, PHMSA said it “is aware of gravity lines that traverse long distances with significant elevation changes which could have significant consequences in the event of a release. In order for PHMSA to effectively analyze safety performance and pipeline risk of gravity lines, PHMSA needs basic data about those pipelines.”
Affects Nearly 200,000 Miles of Pipelines
The hazardous liquid proposed rule, which affects nearly 200,000 miles of pipelines, adds or updates inspection, repair and leak detection requirements for pipelines and establishes reporting requirements for gravity and gathering lines carrying hazardous liquids. It has come under fire from some pipeline safety advocates for not taking aggressive enough action on a number of fronts (195 DEN A-14, 10/8/15).
The proposed rule was published Oct. 13 and is available for public comment through Jan. 8 at Docket ID No. PHMSA-2010-0229. The docket is accessible through http://www.regulations.gov (197 DEN A-14, 10/13/15).

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PHMSA Urges Court to Halt Crude-by-Rail Challenges

Dec 17, 2015 | BNA Daily Environment Report

By Rachel Leven

The nation's hazardous materials transportation regulator is urging a federal court to halt its consideration of several challenges to the agency's crude-by-rail rule, following the recent passage of a five-year highway bill (Am. Petroleum Inst. v. U.S., D.C. Cir., No. 15-1131, motion filed 12/15/15).
The FAST Act that was signed into law earlier this month alters requirements within the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration's final rule on flammable liquids transportation by rail, the government told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a filing Dec. 15.
The court should hold the case in abeyance until Feb. 12 to allow the government and other parties in the lawsuit to figure out how the changes from the new highway law will affect existing challenges and the rule itself. The FAST Act altered parts of the rule and “may drastically alter the scope of the issues presented in this case,” the agency said.
According to the filing, most parties such as the American Petroleum Institute don't oppose the 60-day delay. Scenic Hudson and the Sierra Club oppose the motion and will be submitting written opposition statements, the filing said.
PHMSA finalized in May its rule (RIN 2137-AE91) delineating requirements, including speed restrictions and tank car retrofitting for movement of flammable liquids such as crude oil and ethanol by rail. But Congress rebuked many of the policy decisions and altered requirements on everything from tank car retrofitting to brakes in its FAST Act (Pub. L. 114-94), a five-year highway bill that was signed into law by President Barack Obama on Dec. 4 (234 DEN A-21, 12/7/15).
Responses to this motion are due Dec. 31.

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