Preview Newsletter
PM ACC 2/2/2016
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(ACC Mentioned) Mixed Results for Recycling in New Reports
Feb 2, 2016 | Plastics News
By Jim Johnson
Insider lingo calls them post-consumer non-bottle rigid plastics. A bit of a mouthful. Average folks call them tubs and caps and lids and cups and the like. -
(ACC Mentioned) ACC Reports Increases in Recycling of Rigid and Film Plastics
Feb 2, 2016 | Recycling Today
Postconsumer rigid plastics recycling increased by 276 million pounds, or 27 percent, in 2014 to reach a new high of more than 1.28 billion pounds for the year, according to a report released Monday, Feb. 1... -
(ACC Mentioned) More Evidence That ‘BPA-Free’ Plastic May Still Pose Risk
Feb 2, 2016 | Washington Post
By Rachel Feltman
Most folks have heard of Bisphenol A, or BPA, a chemical found in many plastics and in the epoxy resins used to coat metal cans. -
(ACC Mentioned) Study Raises Health Questions About BPA Substitute
Feb 2, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Sam Pearson
A common chemical used as a replacement for bisphenol A may cause some of the same health problems, according to a study published yesterday. -
(ACC Mentioned) Safer Plastic Alternative (BPS) Not Much Safer Says Study
Feb 2, 2016 | ValueWalk
By Brendan Byrne
When Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) was told that the future was “plastics” he was clearly to busy chasing after Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) to ask, “OK, but at what cost.” -
(ACC Mentioned) California To Post Prop 65 Chemicals Online, Despite Industry Objections
Feb 2, 2016 | Chem.Info
By Andy Szal
California environmental officials recently adopted procedures for listing potentially hazardous products on a state website despite continued opposition from industry groups. -
(ACC Mentioned) An Industrial Chemical Finds Its Way into Great Lakes Trout
Feb 2, 2016 | Michigan Radio
By Lindsay Scullen
An industrial chemical is showing up in trout from all five of the Great Lakes. It’s called perfluoro-1-butane sulfonamide, or FBSA. -
Will Chemical Safety Law Be Better?
Feb 2, 2016 | Environmental Working Group
By Melanie Benesh and Scott Faber
In the coming months, congressional negotiators will try to reconcile two bills aimed at fixing the nation's broken and outdated chemical safety law, the Toxic Substances Control Act. -
EPA Simply Must Do Better on Transparency and Chemical Data Access
Feb 2, 2016 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Richard Denison
Under this Administration, EPA has taken some significant steps toward reversing decades of passivity and secretive practices that evolved under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) when it came to transparency... -
How a Baseball-Sized Tumor Woke Me Up to the Dangers of Everyday Chemicals
Feb 2, 2016 | Quartz
By McKay Jenkins
On a crisp fall afternoon a few years ago, I visited an orthopedist to have him look into some twinges I had been feeling in my left leg -
Flint Spotlights Contentious Rewrite of EPA Lead Rule
Feb 2, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Tiffany Stecker
Lead contamination in the Flint, Mich., water supply points to what many see as the next big fight over a U.S. EPA water regulation. -
Human Error Possible in Deadly ’15 Amtrak Crash, Documents Suggest
Feb 1, 2016 | New York Times
By Emma G. Fitzsimmons
Federal officials investigating an Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia last year left open the possibility on Monday that human error led to the crash as they released documents showing that no problems were found... -
(ACC Mentioned) Extracting Rare-Earth Elements From Coal Could Soon be Economical in U.S.
Feb 2, 2016 | Penn State News
By Liam Jackson
The U.S. could soon decrease its dependence on importing valuable rare-earth elements that are widely used in many industries... -
GOP Chairman Takes Aim at Climate Rules in Energy Debate
Feb 2, 2016 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Devin Henry
Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) has introduced a set of amendments to a Senate energy bill designed to diminish or scrutinize Obama administration climate rules. -
Appellate Rulings Underscore Limits On Environmental Law Citizen Suits
Feb 2, 2016 | InsideEPA
By David LaRoss
A pair of recent appellate court rulings blocking citizen groups' suits trying to enforce federal air and water laws underscore limits that judges have placed on such cases, legal observers say, highlighting the need for... -
FBI Joins Flint Drinking Water Probe
Feb 2, 2016 | PoliticoPro - Whiteboard
By Annie Snider
The FBI has joined the federal investigation into the lead contamination of Flint, Mich.'s drinking water, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Detroit said this morning. -
Chamber of Commerce Study Rips Brick MACT Rules
Feb 2, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Sean Reilly
Brick manufacturing firms face a crippling struggle to comply with new air toxics standards that will yield relatively little in the way of added health benefits, , the U.S. Chamber of Commerce charged today... -
Industry, Greens Strike Deal on Phasing Out HFC Refrigerants
Feb 2, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Amanda Reilly
Environmentalists and industry officials have agreed to a timeline to phase out certain refrigerants that have high global warming potential.
Industry and Association News
Chemical Management News
Chemical Security News
Transportation News
Energy and Environment News
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(ACC Mentioned) Mixed Results for Recycling in New Reports
Feb 2, 2016 | Plastics News
By Jim Johnson
Insider lingo calls them post-consumer non-bottle rigid plastics. A bit of a mouthful. Average folks call them tubs and caps and lids and cups and the like.
Whatever the name, recycling of these plastic products spiked by 27 percent in 2014 in the United States, according to brand new statistics from the American Chemistry Council.
Unveiled Feb. 2 in conjunction with this year’s Plastics Recycling Conference in New Orleans, the 2014 National Postconsumer Non-Bottle Rigid Plastic Recycling Report is the work of Moore Recycling Associates Inc., for the trade group and its plastics division.
The 27-percent jump from 2013 to 2014 translates into an additional 276 million pounds being recycled from one year to the next. A total of 1.28 million pounds of the material were recycled in 2014, ACC reports.
“There’s strong programs to grow rigid recycling. One of the big issues in the case of non-bottle rigids is we’ve seen that the material is very valuable and there are strong markets for it. We’ve seen collection of the material and access for the material grow dramatically,” said Keith Christman, managing director of plastics markets for ACC.
Increases in recycling programs as well as standardization of terminology surrounding the collection and recycling of these non-bottle rigids have both helped recycling numbers increase, he said.
“It helps communication. Helps make it easy for consumers and for people to recycle plastics beyond bottles,” Christman said.
More than 60 percent of the nation’s population has access to non-bottle rigid recycling. That’s up from just 40 percent in 2007, he said.
“In the case of non-bottle rigids, the recycling of that material is four times higher today than it was in just 2007. Really just huge growth and expansion in non-bottle rigid recycling, Christman said.
Post-consumer non-bottle rigid recycling totaled 325.4 million in 2007.
The dramatic increase from 2013 to 2014, Christman said, also can be attributed to the Green Fence program that China put into place to improve the quality of recyclables entering the country.
Green Fence required recyclers around the world to pay better attention and improve their bales or risk the possibility of having their shipments rejected once they hit Chinese soil.
“I think the market somewhat suffered from that in the 2013 timeframe,” Christman said. Non-bottle rigid recycling dipped slightly from 2012 to 2013, falling by about 1 percent. At the same time there also was a big increase in the amount of this material being reprocessed domestically.
While Green Fence was a primary factor in this decline in the last report, ACC’s Plastics Division Vice President Steve Russell said at the time that changes in reporting methodology also could have had a small impact on the numbers as well.
“In the 2014 timeframe, collectors of the materials, material recovery facilities and others have found ways to increase and take advantage of the material. We’ve seen improved bail quality, growing standardization of the bales,” Christman said.
Film recycling growth slows
While non-bottle rigids enjoyed large gains in 2014, plastics film recycling growth certainly was more modest.
Moore Recycling also authored the 2014 National Postconsumer Plastic Bag and Film Recycling Report for ACC. This study showed recycling in that segment increased by 3 percent, or about 29 million pounds, in 2014 to reach 1.17 billion pounds.
That increase compares to an 11-percent jump, or 116 million pounds, in last year’s report.
Plastic film recycling is up by 79 percent since 2005.
“Some years, we see increases in film. Some years, we see big increases in rigids. That’s why it’s important to take a longer-term look. Last year [2013], we saw that giant bump in film recycling and this year it was more modest. So there’s some fluctuations in that. But overall, the long-term trend is for that tremendous growth. And I think that will continue,” Christman said.
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(ACC Mentioned) ACC Reports Increases in Recycling of Rigid and Film Plastics
Feb 2, 2016 | Recycling Today
Postconsumer rigid plastics recycling increased by 276 million pounds, or 27 percent, in 2014 to reach a new high of more than 1.28 billion pounds for the year, according to a report released Monday, Feb. 1, at the 2016 Plastics Recycling Conference, hosted by Resource Recycling in New Orleans. The “2014 National Postconsumer Non-Bottle Rigid Plastic Recycling Report” also indicates that the reported volume of recycled rigid plastics—tracked separately from bottles or film—is now four-times greater than the volume reported in just 2007.
“This is really exciting news,” says Steve Russell, vice president of plastics for the American Chemistry Council (ACC). “The combination of more advanced sorting technologies coupled with expanded consumer access is making a positive difference, and we look forward to seeing growth in rigid plastics recycling continue.”
Sonoma, California-based Moore Recycling Associates Inc., which authored the report, attributes much of the strong gain to a rebound from the 2013 Green Fence effort in China, improved bale quality and growing standardization of plastics bales—the unit by which postuse plastics are sold after collection.
The source of nonbottle rigid plastics collected with the biggest increase in 2014 was the prepicked bale, which is generated from municipal programs and contains a mixture of products with bottles removed.
The rigid plastics category contains food containers, caps, lids, tubs, clamshells, cups and bulky items, such as buckets, carts and lawn furniture, along with used commercial scrap, such as crates, battery casings and drums, the ACC says. Typical end markets for these materials include automotive parts, crates, buckets, pipe, lawn and garden products and thick-walled injection molded products.
As in prior years, polypropylene (PP) and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) comprised the two largest resins in this category, representing 38.3 percent and 34.1 percent, respectively, of total rigid plastics collected.
Approximately 64 percent of the 1.28 billion pounds of rigid plastics collected for recycling was processed in the United States or Canada, down slightly from 2013. The remainder was exported overseas, primarily to China, the report notes.
A separate report also released today found a minimum of 1.17 billion pounds of postconsumer plastic film was recycled in 2014, an increase of more than 29 million pounds, or 3 percent, from the prior year.
The “2014 National Postconsumer Plastic Bag and Film Recycling Report,” also authored by Moore Recycling, marks the 10th consecutive year of the report, and a 79 percent increase in plastic film recycling since 2005. Based on data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the recycling rate for film has grown from 6.6 percent to 17 percent of production during the same period, the ACC says.
The plastic film category includes commercial film packaging, a variety of consumer wraps and bags—all made primarily from thin, flexible sheets of polyethylene. Of the film collected for recycling in 2014, approximately 45 percent was processed in the United States or Canada, with the remainder going primarily to China, the report notes.
Primary uses for recycled plastic film include composite lumber, new film and sheet, agricultural products, crates, buckets and pallets.
"We’re pleased to see growth in these important areas of plastics recycling,” says Patty Moore, president of Moore Recycling. “Continued expansion of a healthy sorting and processing infrastructure and further development of end markets for recycled materials are essential for building on recent gains.”
Information on tracking the recycling of plastic bottles is documented annually in a third series of reports. The “25th Annual National Post-Consumer Plastics Bottle Recycling Report” with results from 2014 was released in November 2015.
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(ACC Mentioned) More Evidence That ‘BPA-Free’ Plastic May Still Pose Risk
Feb 2, 2016 | Washington Post
By Rachel Feltman
Most folks have heard of Bisphenol A, or BPA, a chemical found in many plastics and in the epoxy resins used to coat metal cans. Some research has linked the chemical compound to cancer, infertility, asthma, heart disease, developmental disorders and other health problems. As a result, many manufacturers have removed it from their products. But a new study adds to a growing body of evidence that one common alternative could be just as problematic.
The latest study, published recently in the journal Endocrinology, compared the effects of BPA on zebrafish embryos with the effects of Bisphenol S (BPS), a common alternative used in some (though not all) plastics labeled "BPA-free."
"Back in 2007, when my lab did its first work looking at effects of BPA on embryonic development, what we saw was rather shocking to us," senior author Nancy Wayne, a reproductive endocrinologist and a professor of physiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said.
Wayne saw what many endocrinologists have reported: The chemical had an immediate and profound effect on non-human embryos exposed to it.
"It scared us," Wayne said. "It scared all of us, and I couldn’t get funding from the federal government to study it." The FDA still states that the level of BPA that humans are exposed to is safe, and several other agencies across the world stand by the same conclusion. But the American Endocrine Society disputes these findings.
"BPA is a huge business, huge," Wayne said. "Sometimes I wonder who the government is representing."
Wayne wasn't able to do much work on BPA without federal funding. Then along came Wenhui Qiu, a visiting graduate student from Shanghai University who wanted to study BPA and embryo development. She brought with her funding from her own government, and she and Wayne set to work exposing the embryos of zebrafish — commonly used for such experiments because their see-through embryos make it easy to observe cell growth — to BPA.
Because a few studies have suggested that the common alternative BPS might have harmful effects as well, Qiu and Wayne decided to compare the two chemicals in action.
In both sets of embryos, which were exposed to levels of BPA and BPS comparable to what one would find in a polluted river, the researchers saw an acceleration in hatching times leading to premature births. They also saw abnormal growth in the brain cells that would eventually control reproduction in the fish, as well as other signs that genes associated with reproduction were working overtime.
"We were really surprised to see how similar the responses were," Wayne said. "It was rather shocking to us."
BPS seemed to be acting as an endocrine disrupter, just as BPA did.Endocrine disrupters cause harm by mimicking, blocking or otherwise interfering with the naturally occurring chemical hormones of the body.
"It’s not the way that people think of a classic toxin, it’s not like you’re exposed and you die," Wayne explained. But many in her field are concerned that these chemicals could be tied to a whole host of human issues: Cancers of the reproductive organs, premature births, early puberty and genital malformation, just to name a few.
"The message here is that BPS is not necessarily safer," Wayne said.
The American Chemical Council has previously expressed skepticism over BPA and BPS experiments using zebrafish, arguing that humans are only exposed to trace amounts of the chemicals through their diet and that these compounds don't accumulate in the body. And it's true: A zebrafish is not a human, and we don't know how directly human embryos are even exposed. But since ethical roadblocks prevent endocrinologists from exposing human embryos and infants to the chemicals, it's unlikely we'll get more direct evidence that these substances cause us harm.
Now that Wayne is back to having limited funding for BPA projects, she hopes other groups will continue looking at BPS.
"I don’t have funding for this, and it takes money," she said. "I’ve been supported by UCLA, and I’ll continue to do a little bit of work on this. But I’m hoping the endocrine community will pick it up and take it forward. It’s going to take the whole community."
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(ACC Mentioned) Study Raises Health Questions About BPA Substitute
Feb 2, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Sam Pearson
A common chemical used as a replacement for bisphenol A may cause some of the same health problems, according to a study published yesterday.
Though the chemical industry has insisted for years that bisphenol A doesn't harm people, many companies have shifted amid research and public skepticism to substitute chemicals, including a similar one, bisphenol S.
BPS, though, may speed up embryonic development and disrupt the reproductive system, scientists at UCLA report -- some of the same health risks some studies have pinned on BPA. Their findings were published yesterday in the journal Endocrinology.
The findings show "that making plastic products with BPA alternatives does not necessarily leave them safer," senior author Nancy Wayne, a reproductive endocrinologist and a professor of physiology at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, said in a statement.
The scientists examined exposure to BPS in zebrafish at levels they said are common in river water in the United States. They evaluated the fish's responses to both BPS and BPA.
Wayne called the findings "the aquatic version of the canary in the coal mine."
BPS's ability to speed up embryonic development may mean it is linked to early puberty, which warrants further study, Wayne said.
Previous studies have also identified health risks from BPS.
Last year, a study by researchers at the University of Calgary found that both BPA and BPS can cause alterations in brain development that lead to hyperactivity in zebrafish (Greenwire, Jan. 13). An earlier study also found that BPS disrupted some reproductive functions in rats (Greenwire, Jan. 17, 2013).
Industry groups described the study's findings as limited.
In a statement, Steven Hentges of the American Chemistry Council's Polycarbonate/BPA Global Group said the study's implications for human health are "unclear."
"The findings of the study do not demonstrate that low levels of BPA have any effects on human health, as suggested by the authors," Hentges said.
Hentges said the authors' use of aquatic exposures did not reflect human exposures to "trace amounts" of BPA through food consumption.
Hentges noted that the Food and Drug Administration has declined to restrict BPA and has stated it is safe for use.
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(ACC Mentioned) Safer Plastic Alternative (BPS) Not Much Safer Says Study
Feb 2, 2016 | ValueWalk
By Brendan Byrne
When Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) was told that the future was “plastics” he was clearly to busy chasing after Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) to ask, “OK, but at what cost.”
As we covered a few weeks ago, we’ve worked ourselves into a new geological epoch largely owing to nuclear testing and plastic. While I understand most things that I enjoy cause cancer at some level, plastic seems to be one of those things that we just can’t get right. Whether by its design that seems to menace sea life if you don’t cut it up when you’re done with that six pack, or the cancer risk it poses, plastic just doesn’t seem to be something that we can get right.
The known endocrine disruptor BPA, which was largely replaced in the western world with BPS in order to harden plastics, doesn’t seem to be the best of choices after all. Decades of studies have revealed an ugly truth, plastic sucks if you don’t want to increase your risk of prostate or breast cancer or enjoy the normal rate of embryonic development in your soon to be child.
A new University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) study led by reproductive endocrinologist Nancy Wayne suggests that despite mandated “BPA free” we haven’t really done ourselves any favors.
“Our findings are frightening and important,” says Wayne. “Consider it the aquatic version of the canary in the coal mine.”
Her study involving zebrafish shows that BPS as an alternative to BPA is lovely if you don’t mind its effect on brain cells and genes that control reproduction.
“Our research showed that low levels of BPS had a similar impact on the embryo as BPA,” Wayne told CNN. “In the presence of either BPA or BPS, embryonic development was accelerated. Additionally, BPA caused premature birth.”
Both BPS and BPA affect estrogen according to Wayne and a host of other studies that support her work (or vice versa) but they don’t stop there. Neither is a huge fan of thyroid hormones either.
“Because of thyroid hormone’s important influence on brain development during gestation,” said Wayne, “our work holds important implications for general embryonic and fetal development, including in humans.”
Beyond the layer of plastics we’ve essentially created on the sea floor, we also experiment on zebrafish.Her work joins others’ BPS studies
We’re not talking about huge amounts of either BPA or BPS, I’m not saying to ignore your toddler when they are chewing on Tupperware’ I’m saying that a Texas study from 2013 suggests that BPS at just one part per trillion affects normal cell dynamics and can even cause cell death. This study also involved zebrafish.
Switching to rats, another study found BPS to cause heart arrhythmia. The author of that study, Hong-Sheng Wang wrote, “Our findings call into question the safety of BPA-free products containing BPS.”
Essentially, we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Never mind that it’s not necessarily you but our corporations don’t much seem to mind too much. It’s not that they are giving us a pill that guarantees cancer or birth defects just that they always going to look for that cost-effective “regrettable substitution.”
I’m not leading a charge against corporate America or multinational companies, I’m simply pointing out that I’ve heard people say something like, “I’m staying at home and doing some canning this weekend, or ‘I’m making a bunch of currant jelly.” I’ve not once heard my neighbor say, “I’m staying in and making plastic on Sunday.”
The American Chemical Council (ACC), which represents BPA manufacturers, takes issue you with Dr. Wayne in a manner expected from a group of lobbyists. “Many government bodies around the world have evaluated the scientific evidence on BPA and have clearly stated that BPA is safe for use,” the ACC said in a statement provided to CNN. “For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) responded recently to the question, ‘Is BPA safe?’ with one unambiguous word: ‘Yes.’ In comparison, the results of this new study on zebrafish provide little or no meaningful information to assess the safety of BPA.”
And therein lies the problem.
This is all a moot point if you wear gloves when handling plastics, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon. BPS is not going to outright kill you, it’s not yellow cake uranium and won’t be part of any “dirty bomb” that is hopefully never constructed. It’s just another one of those myths……like climate change.
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(ACC Mentioned) California To Post Prop 65 Chemicals Online, Despite Industry Objections
Feb 2, 2016 | Chem.Info
By Andy Szal
California environmental officials recently adopted procedures for listing potentially hazardous products on a state website despite continued opposition from industry groups.
The rule, Chemical Watch reports, will apply to companies that must disclose toxic chemicals in their products in accordance with the state's Proposition 65.
Beginning in April, companies must report the names of the Prop 65 materials included in their products if requested by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.
Companies would also be required to notify the agency regarding the locations and concentrations of chemicals in their products, along with exposure pathways and levels.
They would not be required to run additional tests, and the requirement includes protections for trade secrets.
Industry groups, however, questioned OEHHA's authority to implement the rule and signaled their opposition to several remaining elements.
The standard does not require companies to be notified about their appearance on the website or allow them to review information prior to publication.
In addition, business groups called for a minimum threshold for reporting Prop 65 chemicals and for a longer window to respond to agency requests.
"In a dynamic and changing marketplace, there are many open questions whether [OEHHA] will be able to maintain this yet-to-be created website in a manner that provides accurate, meaningful and up-to-date information to consumers," the American Chemistry Council told Chemical Watch.
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(ACC Mentioned) An Industrial Chemical Finds Its Way into Great Lakes Trout
Feb 2, 2016 | Michigan Radio
By Lindsay Scullen
An industrial chemical is showing up in trout from all five of the Great Lakes. It’s called perfluoro-1-butane sulfonamide, or FBSA.
Researchers traced this chemical back to several products on the market. Those include detergents and surfactants first used in 2003. Surfactants are materials made to stainproof and waterproof products.
This research was published in the Environmental Science and Technology journal.
Robert Letcher is one of the study's authors. He’s a senior research scientist for Environment and Climate Change Canada, a department of the Canadian government.
Letcher says his team tested trout samples from seven different sites throughout the Great Lakes. They also tested fish from four other lakes in Canada.
Almost all of the fish his team tested had detectable levels of the FBSA chemical in their bodies. Thirty-two of the 33 samples tested came back showing the chemical. To be clear, we’re talking low levels here — parts per billion low.
Letcher says it was a surprise to find the chemical in fish.
“We were the first ever to find this compound in the environment — like to demonstrate its presence,” he says. “It’s never been reported before.”
The researchers don’t know exactly what’s happening here. It could be that other chemicals are breaking down into FBSA in the environment. But the chemical might also be coming straight from industrial products.
Letcher says some companies started using FBSA to replace a different chemical, called FOSA, or perfluorooctane sulfonamide. Studies showed that chemical was breaking down, and part of it was building up in the food web.
In 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency put together an industry-wide agreement to phase that chemical out. So industries replaced it with chemicals like FBSA. And that’s the chemical Letcher and his team are now finding in fish.
He says scientists often have to play catch up to figure out if there are problems with new chemicals brought onto the market.
“When a body of evidence — scientific evidence — builds up great enough to basically render a negative decision against a compound, and it gets regulated or what have you, companies phase these compounds out and they look for alternatives which to use that are safer, but also to serve their purpose,” Letcher says.
Unknown effects
He says research into FBSA is so new, they just don’t know much about what this might mean for fish or for people who eat the fish.
“It’s completely impossible to tell, because nobody’s done anything regarding toxicology,” Letcher says. “That’s usually the way things go. Somebody like us, we find a new chemical, and in this case in fish. And obviously a lot of aquatic fish toxicologists out there are going, ‘Well, we should really try to understand what this chemical could be doing to the fish.’”
Letcher says one of the next steps is to look at other species in the food web. That way his team can figure out if this chemical is building up in other creatures.
The American Chemistry Council said the FBSA chemical is not made by any of itsmember companies, and was therefore unwilling to comment.
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Will Chemical Safety Law Be Better?
Feb 2, 2016 | Environmental Working Group
By Melanie Benesh and Scott Faber
In the coming months, congressional negotiators will try to reconcile two bills aimed at fixing the nation's broken and outdated chemical safety law, the Toxic Substances Control Act.
As we’ve made clear time, time and time again, neither bill will fix what ails TSCA – a law so broken that the Environmental Protection Agency has only been able to regulate five chemicals since 1976.
The real question is whether the final bill will be any better than current law. That's a low bar, but Congress may not clear it.
Here are seven things Congress should do to make TSCA better than current law:
Preserve a leading role for the states. For decades, states have been the only cops on the chemical safety beat, regulating scores of chemicals and driving marketplace innovation. Legislation that claims to be better than current law would clearly preserve all existing state laws, permit state action until an EPA rule is final and preserve a state’s ability to act under its own clean air and water laws.
Provide adequate funding. Even the best law will be meaningless if EPA doesn’t have the funding needed to review the hundreds of dangerous chemical already on the market. To make TSCA better than current law, Congress should provide enough funding to review the most dangerous chemicals in a generation – not a century. The chemical industry is reaping record profits and can certainly afford to share the cost of regulation.
Eliminate cost from consideration. Both bills purport to end the current requirement to consider the cost of regulation when considering whether to regulate, but each includes poison pill provisions that could keep EPA tied inlegal knots. Using the same tough safety standard that is already applied to pesticides and food chemicals makes more sense, but negotiators should at least strike vague requirements that rules be "cost-effective” or “appropriate.” Most importantly, new chemicals must be proven safe before they are allowed on the market.
Review bad chemicals. This seems like a no-brainer, but it remains to be seen whether EPA will have authority to review the most dangerous chemicals – or just those the industry would like reviewed. A better law would ensure that EPA evaluates the chemicals that cause cancer or build up in our bodies first.
Act fast. It’s taken a decade to "reform" a broken law by producing two bad bills, so acting fast is a new concept for Congress. A law that ensures that the most dangerous chemicals are quickly assessed – and has real deadlines for EPA and for company compliance – would be a breakthrough.
More data, please. EPA cannot review dangerous chemicals without data, so an updated version of TSCA must give EPA broad authority to demand chemical testing without having to first show a chemical is unsafe. And a better law would require companies to tell EPA which chemicals they are actually using.
No secret chemicals. Strict limits are needed on what the chemical industry can keep secret, such as the identity of chemicals in health and safety studies. There should be strict deadlines for companies to ask EPA permission to keep certain manufacturing practices secret, and old "trade secret" claims should be reviewed again. If there’s any doubt about a chemical’s safety, EPA should be able to review these claims.
To see EWG’s letter to congressional conferees addressing these and other issues, click here.
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EPA Simply Must Do Better on Transparency and Chemical Data Access
Feb 2, 2016 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Richard Denison
Under this Administration, EPA has taken some significant steps toward reversing decades of passivity and secretive practices that evolved under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) when it came to transparency in decision-making and providing access to chemical information it obtains or develops.
Several initiatives undertaken through what EPA originally termed its enhanced chemicals management program have developed and laid out clearer policies and procedures in areas such as: chemical prioritization (leading to its Work Plan Chemicals Program); enforcing limits on and reviewing confidential business information (CBI) claims asserted by industry (leading to its declassification of hundreds of previously hidden chemical identities and health and safety studies that companies had illegitimately claimed confidential or no longer merited protection from disclosure, but that EPA had not bothered to review or challenge before now); and EPA’s regulatory efforts to reduce risks from exposures to toxic chemicals (leading to its Action Plans on high-concern chemicals and proposed follow-up activities for work plan chemicals where assessments – the first completed in decades – have identified significant risks).
EPA has also developed new databases and tools to provide greater access to chemical information in its possession and regulatory decisions and supporting documents it develops; these include the Chemical Data Access Tool and ChemView.
All of these efforts are still very much works in progress but hold significant potential to improve transparency, information access and risk reduction.
But sometimes the Agency does something that makes clear just how far it still has to go in these respects. Unfortunately, a case in point is its recent effort toward assessing risks of a cluster of flame retardant chemicals, the brominated phthalates, some of which are in wide use and are showing up in everything from house dust to dolphins.
We just blogged about the comments we submitted last week on EPA’s “Problem Formulation and Data Needs Assessment” for the brominated phthalates cluster [hereafter “Data Needs Assessment”].
Our comments also addressed a serious lack of transparency in the EPA documents, which is the focus of this blog post. Specifically, our review turned up:
unchallenged unlawful confidentiality claims for health and safety information;
inappropriate withholding of non-confidential identifying information for cluster members;
public access only to summaries of industry studies, the quality and completeness of which is impossible for the public to judge and may not have been examined by EPA.
The result of these deficiencies is that the public lacks access to all or even most of the information on which EPA is relying in deciding not to conduct risk assessments of these chemicals at this time.
Below we summarize our comments on each of these concerns.
Unchallenged unlawful confidentiality claims for health and safety information
EPA repeatedly cites, as a basis for statements in its documents, an August 27, 2012 letter from Chemtura Corporation to EPA that lists health and safety studies the company was transmitting to EPA on one member of the cluster, TBB (CAS# 183658-27-7). The letter notes that it enclosed a “CD containing CONFIDENTIAL studies” on TBB (emphasis in original).
EPA’s documents include other references to “confidential” health and safety studies or data, information from which it excluded from its documents. Yet TSCA expressly precludes health and safety studies and their underlying data from being protected from public disclosure as confidential business information (CBI), with two narrow exceptions for information that would reveal process or mixture portionality (see section 14(b)).
Despite this, EPA never challenged the company’s blanket confidentiality claim covering these studies and as a result has not made the studies available or provided any means of accessing them in the present documents. Until we raised the issue with EPA staff, it appears Chemtura’s illegitimate claim had gone unnoticed.
EPA should immediately reject the confidentiality claims asserted by Chemtura, which should never have been allowed in the first place, and provide public access to these health and safety studies. We are hopeful that our raising these concerns with EPA staff will lead to prompt rectification of this situation, and that procedures are put in place or enforced to ensure this does not happen again.
Inappropriate withholding of non-confidential identifying information for cluster members
When EPA released its Problem Formulation and Data Needs Assessment last August, it listed two members of the brominated phthalates cluster only as “Confidential A” and “Confidential B.” No further identifying information was provided in the cluster documents. This was wholly unacceptable.
TSCA and its implementing regulations require that, where the specific identity of a chemical is deemed confidential business information (CBI), the CBI claimant is to provide a structurally descriptive generic name and EPA is to use that name to publicly identify the chemical (see TSCA Section 5(d)(2); and 40 CFR §§ 720.85(b)(5), 720.90(c) and(d)). Once manufacture of such a chemical commences, the generic name and a tracking number assigned by EPA are to be placed on the non-confidential portion of the TSCA Inventory.
Yet EPA did not even provide the generic names and tracking numbers – which by definition are NOT confidential – for these two cluster members. Importantly, those generic identifiers are already public, including on the TSCA Inventory, but their exclusion from the Data Needs Assessment made it impossible for the public to find even the limited information available on them because EPA replaced them with “Confidential A” and “Confidential B.”
EDF raised our strong concerns about this approach directly to EPA staff. We were told that EPA had unilaterally decided to withhold the generic names and accession numbers for these two chemicals, based on an argument that associating even the generic names of these two chemicals with this cluster might somehow reveal their confidential identities. That argument appears far-fetched – how would generic identifiers allow someone to glean the specific identities? – and it flies in the face of the very purpose of a generic name – which is required to be used publicly to refer to a chemical for which the specific identity is confidential and cannot be disclosed.
In response to our pressing on this, EPA contacted the company(ies) and was told, we understand, that they did not object to the generic names being made available. After several additional inquiries from us, EPA disclosed the generic names and Premanufacture Notice (PMN) case numbers for these two chemicals, through a memo it released on December 7th, 2015. EDF was then able to use these identifiers to locate Federal Register notices that announced receipt of their respective PMNs and of their subsequent notices of commencement of manufacture (NOCs). The limited information we were able to find is below.
While inconspicuous in EPA’s documents, the Agency issued a TSCA Section 5(e) consent order in 2009 on Confidential A as a result of EPA’s review of the chemical prior to its first manufacture. Once EPA made public the PMN case number for Confidential A, as described above, we were able to obtain a heavily redacted version of this consent order. The consent order indicates serious concerns, based on data from chemicals structurally similar to Confidential A, regarding liver and kidney toxicity; potential persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic (PBT) characteristics; and potential carcinogenicity due to formation of byproducts during combustion of consumer products in municipal incinerators.
In the consent order, the Agency concluded that “the information available to the Agency is insufficient to permit a reasoned evaluation of the human health and environmental effects of the PMN substance,” and imposed testing requirements that would only be triggered if production reached a specified (redacted) volume. EPA’s Data Needs Assessment indicate the triggering volume for testing has not been reached.
Confidential B, which is structurally related to Confidential A and other cluster chemicals, was apparently not subject to a consent order or any testing. It is now a high production volume (HPV) chemical, produced at more than 1 million pounds annually.
Links to the respective receipt notices for the PMNs and NOCs, and to the Consent Order, are as follows:
Confidential A/P-04-0404: PMN Receipt, Notice of Commencement receipt, Consent Order
Confidential B/P-96-0965: PMN Receipt, Notice of Commencement receipt
The data needs for Confidential A and Confidential B are completely obscured in EPA’s documents – an omission we can only presume is related to EPA’s inappropriate withholding of even generic identifying information on these chemicals. EPA states only: “The nature of Confidential A and Confidential B cannot be disclosed. Data Gaps and Data Needs should be considered for both reactive and additive uses.” We fail to understand how identifying data needs for these chemicals would constitute disclosure of legitimate CBI.
Had we not pressed EPA to release generic identifying information on these chemicals, the public would not be able to discern that:they were new chemicals that went through the PMN process;they are now listed on the TSCA Inventory and are in commerce;for one of the chemicals (Confidential A), it is subject to a consent order EPA negotiated based on significant toxicity concerns, which includes yet-to-be-triggered testing requirements;for the other of the two (Confidential B), it apparently had no conditions placed by EPA on its commercialization, because no associated consent order or significant new use rule appears to have been issued.
In sum, we are very concerned that EPA unilaterally withheld non-confidential information about these two chemicals from the public, based on an argument that is wholly inconsistent with TSCA and its implementing regulations, which expressly provides for the public disclosure of generic identifiers where specific chemical identity is claimed to be CBI. EPA should publicly describe steps it will take to ensure withholding of such information from the public does not occur again.
Public access only to summaries of industry studies, the quality and completeness of which is impossible for the public to judge and may not have been examined by EPA.
When we made inquiries about the “confidential” or missing studies referred to in Chemtura’s 2012 letter, EPA indicated that “robust summaries” of all of them were provided in a 2004 risk assessment conducted by the Australian government on a mixture containing some of the chemicals.
While such summaries of many of the referenced studies are indeed in an attachment to the Australian assessment, there are not summaries for at least four. After considerable further investigation, we were able to discern that these four studies were mandated to be conducted by consent orders EPA negotiated with Chemtura, three of them several years after publication of the Australian report. No robust study summaries appear to be publicly available anywhere for these studies.
Even for those studies for which summaries are available through the Australian report, it is entirely unclear whether those summaries, which likely were prepared by Chemtura, were reviewed against the full studies for quality and completeness by the Australian government agency or by EPA. It appears most likely that the summaries were prepared by the manufacturer and simply passed along by the Australian government agency via their attachment to its assessment, and now by EPA via its reference to the Australian report. It is not clear the extent to which EPA itself has access to the full studies, as that is not indicated anywhere in EPA’s Data Needs Assessment.
This is an unacceptable situation: It violates the clear language of TSCA, which precludes health and safety studies and their underlying data from being protected from disclosure. It obscures the extent to which EPA is relying on the manufacturer’s conclusions as to the findings of the studies. And it denies the public any ability to independently assess the conclusions EPA draws as to the adequacy of available data or the data needs EPA has identified.
EPA needs to act promptly to rectify this situation:
It should promptly reject confidentiality claims asserted by Chemtura, and provide public access to these health and safety studies.If EPA intends to utilize robust summaries as a primary means of providing initial public access to health and safety studies, it must, at a minimum:
itself prepare the summaries, or carefully review summaries prepared by another entity (whether Chemtura or another government) against the full studies and vouch for their accuracy and completeness;
make clear that such studies are not eligible for CBI protection and make the full studies publicly available upon request; and
if EPA does not have access to a full study it cites, EPA must:
make that abundantly clear;
promptly seek access to the full study, using all available authorities; and
clearly identify the preparer of any summary of the study to which EPA refers, and in the case of summaries prepared by a company making or using the chemical, take into account the potential for bias in any decision EPA makes that relies to any extent on such a summary.
It must put in place procedures and enforce practices internally to ensure this situation does not arise in future Work Plan chemical reviews.
Conclusion
We understand that the Work Plan Chemical Program is relatively new and that the current Problem Formulation and Data Needs Assessment is the first to be published through this program. However, we are concerned that the early products of this program will be precedent-setting to some extent. We urge EPA to strive to improve transparency, clarity, and data availability regarding these chemicals as they move through review under the program, and also to recognize the need for improvement in conducting reviews of other Work Plan chemicals in the future.
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How a Baseball-Sized Tumor Woke Me Up to the Dangers of Everyday Chemicals
Feb 2, 2016 | Quartz
By McKay Jenkins
On a crisp fall afternoon a few years ago, I visited an orthopedist to have him look into some twinges I had been feeling in my left leg. It was probably nothing, I figured—a pulled ligament, most likely. But after rotating my leg a few times, the doctor suggested I get an MRI just to make sure nothing else was going on.
What turned up surprised us both. A tumor the size of a baseball was growing between my left hip and my pelvic bone. As the father of four-year-old son and 18-month-old daughter, I was devastated.
One agonizing month later, I found myself in New York City, wearing a surgical gown and waiting to be rolled into the operating room. As I sat there, trying to keep it together, a pair of researchers approached, clipboards in hand, and asked if they could go over my history of chemical exposure.
My what? I was a college professor, I said, not an industrial worker. I wrote and read books for a living. What could I possibly have been exposed to?
A lot, it turns out. Seven petrochemicals—ethylene, propylene, butylenes, benzene, toluene, xylenes, and methane—form the building blocks for tens of thousands of consumer products. These substances are in our cosmetics, water bottles, air fresheners, detergents, paints, flame retardants, weed killers, and even our mattresses. The objects we have come to depend upon contain chemicals that few of us ever stop to think about.
As it turned out, my surgery went well. The tumor was large but benign. But as I left the hospital, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my life–and all our lives–had become saturated with chemicals few of us ever stop to think about.
For the next two years, I investigated both the science and the history of what I came to think of as our synthetic century. I wanted to understand how it is that everything we do, from brushing our teeth in the morning to laying our heads down at night, puts us in contact with potentially harmful chemicals.
In the mid-1970s, some 62,000 chemicals were being used in the United States. Today that number is thought to be closer to 85,000. In the last 25 years, the country’s consumption of synthetic chemicals has increased an estimated 8,200%, according to Michael Wilson, a research scientist with the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of California, Berkeley.
The rapid proliferation of products made from petrochemicals has vastly outpaced our ability to monitor their effects on our health and the environment. The US Environmental Protection Agency has a full set of toxicity information for just 7% of the country’s high-volume chemicals. And the US chemical industry, a $637 billion-a-year business, is so woefully under-regulated that the vast majority of chemicals have never been tested for their effects on human health.
It’s not enough for modern consumers to try to limit our exposure to toxic chemicals by buying safer products. Unfortunately, what we do know is worrisome. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been conducting chemical “body burden” studies for years, trying to quantify just how many chemicals are finding their way into our bodies. Exposure to phthalates, the plastic used to make water bottles, is “widespread,” the CDC has found.Insecticides are found in the bodies of “much of the US population.”
In 2005, a study conducted by nonprofit organization The Environmental Working Group found some 287 chemicals—including 180 that can cause cancer in people or animals, 217 that can be toxic to the brain, and 208 that can cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests—in umbilical cord blood taken from a sample of 10 babies around the United States. The blood samples, initially collected by the Red Cross, contained “pesticides, consumer product ingredients, and wastes from burning coal, gasoline, and garbage.” Other studies have reached similar conclusions.
All this can seem quite disheartening. That’s especially true when you consider that, thanks to the political influence of the powerful chemical industry, the federal Toxic Substances Control Act has not been updated since the 1970s.
But just as toxins can accumulate and spread around the world, so too can information—and, occasionally, political action. Consumers of everything from lipstick to laundry detergents are using databases like the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep to find safer products. And voters in states from Maine to Oregon have passed chemical safety laws that are tougher than any bills coming out of the federal government.
Yet it’s not enough for modern consumers to try to limit our exposure to toxic chemicals by buying safer products. We must also work to more strictly regulate the industries that create these chemicals in the first place. Chemical contamination is like climate change: We can take small steps to address the problem ourselves. But we also need politicians to stand up to the chemical lobby and fight for a cleaner, safer world.
McKay Jenkins is the author of ContamiNation: My Quest To Survive In A Toxic World.
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Flint Spotlights Contentious Rewrite of EPA Lead Rule
Feb 2, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Tiffany Stecker
Lead contamination in the Flint, Mich., water supply points to what many see as the next big fight over a U.S. EPA water regulation.
At issue is the 25-year-old Lead and Copper Rule (LCR), which requires utilities to put anti-corrosive additives in drinking water if it's shown that untreated water is chewing away at old lead pipes.
Lead water lines aren't rare. In the United States, there are between 7 million and 11 million lead service lines -- underground pipes that connect residences with water-distribution lines -- more than 50,000 miles of pipe. Replacing those pipes, water utilities say, could carry a $30 billion price tag.
At work on revamping the rule since 2010, EPA is expected to post a proposed rule on the revisions by next year. "EPA will carefully review these recommendations and other stakeholder perspectives as it develops proposed revisions to the LCR," spokeswoman Monica Lee said. "EPA will also consider the lessons learned from the experience in Flint."
The threshold for action under the rule is 15 parts per billion of lead and 1.3 parts per million for copper. If more than 10 percent of homes exceed those levels, then a water utility must take action to avoid corrosion. Lead is a potent neurotoxin than can lead to mental and learning disabilities in young children.
The rule's thresholds have worried health experts for some time. Most say there's no safe level of lead, and so experts question what they see as a weak federal response. The rule allows 1 in 10 residences to run water with unlimited lead levels. And it requires the replacement of lead service lines after the 10 percent level has been broken, leaving no incentive for proactive removal of pipes.
The rule's critics have also lambasted the sampling methods used by utilities, which can be manipulated in ways that don't give an accurate picture of lead contamination. In addition, it's often the same homes with a low risk of having lead that are tested multiple times, leaving out possible contamination in the wider community.
Even large utilities can sample only once every three years.
Bottom line, the advocates say: If EPA wants to protect communities from lead in drinking water, those lead service lines need to be removed and replaced, not maintained with anti-corrosive chemicals.
Government agencies "seem to have lost touch with protecting people from lead," said Tom Neltner, chemicals policy director with the Environmental Defense Fund.
"The whole concept of forming a coating to keep the lead out," he said, "was good in theory."
But recent scientific research finds that simply adding chemicals for corrosion control can't guarantee that lead won't enter the drinking water system, said Neltner, a member of EPA's Lead and Copper Rule Working Group, an offshoot of the agency's National Drinking Water Advisory Council.
In April 2014, a state-appointed emergency manager allowed cash-strapped Flint to stop buying water from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department and start drawing supplies from the Flint River.
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality failed to impose a control system to accommodate the more corrosive river water and disqualified high-lead water samples under the Lead and Copper Rule to avoid hitting the "action level" to fix the water problems.
From March 2014 to June 2015 -- the same period in which Flint residents were encountering amber-colored and foul-smelling tap water and high levels of lead in children -- 16 EPA-picked advisers met in Arlington, Va. The Lead and Copper Working Group members were state agency representatives, environmental activists and water utility executives.
The last meeting was on June 24, coincidentally the same day EPA employee Miguel Del Toral sent an urgent memo to his supervisor 700 miles away in Region 5's Chicago office, warning him about the alarming levels of lead coming out of Flint's taps.
Dissent
In August, the lead and copper group submitted a 46-page report to the agency. EPA is now working on a rulemaking based on the recommendations.
The report calls on EPA to require proactive lead service line replacements, rather than reacting to high lead levels in drinking water. It also recommends that the agency boost public education programs, tighten corrosion control requirements when a municipality changes its water source and allow utilities to perform lead tests at the customer's request.
But one of that group's members claims those recommendation would weaken the rule, tossing out the regulation's only regulatory hammer to push for removal of lead pipes and fittings.
Yanna Lambrinidou, a medical ethnographer and professor at Virginia Tech, works with Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech researcher who helped uncover the widespread lead contamination in Flint's water (Greenwire, Jan. 29).
"Marc and I have been close collaborators on all things lead since 2007," Lambrinidou said in an email today. "Almost all of our activist work has been done in coordination/collaboration."
But she said her work on the Lead and Copper Rule Working Group "had nothing to do with Flint."
"Flint informed my dissenting opinion, to an extent, as an example that reinforced my pre-existing concerns," she said.
Lambrinidou said she and Paul Schwartz, a senior adviser with the Water Alliance, had to fight for a place on the working group.
"Let me say straight out, there's no members of the public in there," she said, "It's people who are state reps, and utility reps and some token nonprofit organizations ... basically people who don't have a connection or understanding of either the rule or the consequences of the exposures going on today."
In addition to water utility executives, who face high costs in removing lead service lines, the working group included people who had expertise in lead paint contamination, not lead pipe contamination, said Lambrinidou. The working group was assembled after EPA halted the work of an internal committee to make revisions, said Lambrinidou, an "unprecedented move" for rule revisions.
EPA did not respond to a request for comment on the Lead and Copper Rule Working Group.
Lambrinidou wrote a formal dissent to the recommendations last October, as the crisis in Flint started resonating nationwide. The recommendations, she wrote, allow public water systems to delay the removal of lead pipes for decades. Violations, she wrote in her dissent, would only be triggered if the utility did not perform "meaningful" outreach to residents, and would be based on testing methods that could fail to catch the worst-case-scenario lead levels.
The recommendations also rely on customer-initiated requests for lead sampling, which leaves out disenfranchised neighborhoods that are most at risk for lead poisoning, where residents may not have the ability or willingness to contact the local water utility for a test.
"All of the sudden, there's this weird thing of residents having to make decisions about what protocol they want," she said. "It's astounding to me."
Lambrinidou, along with Schwartz, Earthjustice attorney Jennifer Chavez and several others, have assembled an ad-hoc coalition of organizations together to weigh in on Lead and Copper Rule compliance and changes to the rule.
Under the current Lead and Copper Rule, replacement of lead service lines, which run between the city's mains and private homes, has been sluggish. In the early 1990s, there were an estimated 13 million lead service lines. Today, there are still between 7 million and 11 million lead lines underground.
There are some exceptions, EDF's Neltner said. Michigan's state capital, Lansing, has spent nearly $42 million since 2004 to eliminate the lead pipes, a goal they expect to reach in 2017. At a cost of $1,000 per replacement pipe, the tab quickly rises for water utilities. A spokesman for the American Water Works Association estimates the cost of replacing lead service lines could top $30 billion.
For many of the other members of the working group, the recommendations are a first step in a major overhaul in the rule. In addition to mandating the replacement of lead service lines over time, the requirement to improve communication on lead in water is a significant improvement to the status quo, said Stephen Estes-Smargiassi, director of planning and sustainability for the Boston-area Massachusetts Water Resources Authority.
"Looking at the Flint situation from afar," he said, "it's pretty clear that communication was one of their principal failings."Lambrinidou's 'fingerprints'
Estes-Smargiassi's water authority faces a major challenge in Boston, an old city with thousands of lead service lines.
The advisory group's recommendations call for an "aggressive" 5 percent annual removal of lead service lines, he said.
"The expectation is that there will always be some homeowners who aren't interested," he said. "If you don't have kids at home, if you don't have grandkids, it's not a high priority."
As for Lambrinidou's dissent, Estes-Smargiassi said many of her points were included in the group's report.
The report, he said, "definitively has her fingerprints on it."
Most of the group's meetings ran smoothly, members said.
Utility representatives focused on the costs of replacing the lead lines. Public health officials weighed in on the dangers of lead poisoning. Water experts dove into the pollution aspects of a corrosion-control system, given that adding phosphate to the water to mitigate corrosion can have Clean Water Act implications once the drinking water enters the sewer system.
"Why [Lambrinidou] waited until the very end, when the recommendations were completed, to voice her total dissent of the package I do not know. She was given every opportunity to voice her concerns throughout the process," said Gary Burlingame, director of the Philadelphia Water Department's Bureau of Laboratory Services, in an email.
Burlingame is currently embroiled in recent allegations that Philadelphia has been using lead testing protocols incorrectly in a way that could hide widespread contamination. The city has called the reports "inaccurate and highly misleading."
Dissenting opinions are not unusual on agency work groups, said Lynn Thorp, national campaigns director for Clean Water Action who was also involved in the Lead and Copper Rule report.
"I'm respectful of the report, and I'm also respectful of everyone on the group and any dissenting opinion," she said.
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Human Error Possible in Deadly ’15 Amtrak Crash, Documents Suggest
Feb 1, 2016 | New York Times
By Emma G. Fitzsimmons
Federal officials investigating an Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia last year left open the possibility on Monday that human error led to the crash as they released documents showing that no problems were found with the train or with the tracks and signals at the site of the accident.
While the National Transportation Safety Board did not lay blame on the train’s engineer or identify a probable cause for the derailment, officials said they would release their full findings and possibly recommendations in the next few months.
The safety board on Monday released hundreds of pages of reports from the investigation into the May 12 derailment, which killed eight people and injured more than 200 others. The documents included transcripts of two interviews with the engineer, Brandon Bostian, providing the best look yet at his memories of the crash.
In an interview three days after the accident, Mr. Bostian told investigators he had hurt his head and did not remember the crash. He said he did not recall any mechanical problems during the trip, though he remembered a loud wind noise from a nearby window.
Shortly before the crash, Mr. Bostian said, he grew worried when he heard over his radio that the windshield of a nearby train had been hit by an object. “I was a little bit concerned for my safety,” Mr. Bostian told investigators.
The train, en route from Washington to New York, hurtled off the tracks in Philadelphia shortly after 9 p.m. It was traveling 106 miles per hour as it entered a curve where the speed limit was 50 m.p.h.
In a second interview, in November, Mr. Bostian said he remembered a few more details, including the moments before the derailment as he lurched to one side and began to apply the brakes. He said he felt the train tip over and realized it was going off the tracks.
“I remember holding onto the controls tightly and feeling like, O.K. well this is it, I’m going over,” he said.
Mr. Bostian, who told investigators there were gaps in his memory, said he believed he accelerated from 70 m.ph. shortly before the crash because he thought the speed limit in the stretch before the curve was 80 m.p.h. Pushing the throttle to accelerate to 80 m.p.h. was the last thing he remembered until he found himself in the curve.
At night, Mr. Bostian said it was difficult to see where the curve began. “It would be easy to hit the curve a little bit hot by 5 or 10 miles an hour if you weren’t being careful and looking very carefully at the cues because it can sneak up on you,” he said.
In one safety board report, officials noted that Mr. Bostian said he did not look for speed restriction signs near the tracks because he believed they were sometimes missing or wrong. A footnote explained that Amtrak said the permanent speed restriction sign for the curve where the derailment took place was “properly displayed with the correct speed of 50 m.p.h.”
The report said Mr. Bostian tested negative for drugs and alcohol, had not been under high levels of stress and had not been given a diagnosis of a sleep disorder. In January 2015 he had Lasik eye surgery and no longer wore glasses, the report said.
Lawyers representing people killed or injured in the derailment said on Monday it was significant that Mr. Bostian had acknowledged that he was accelerating the train. The victims of the crash are still struggling to understand why the crash happened, said Robert J. Mongeluzzi, one of the lawyers.
“Nowhere in the 2,200 pages of documents is there any justification for why Brandon Bostian was going 106 miles per hour,” he said.
Investigators examined Mr. Bostian’s cellphone and found no evidence that he was using it at the time of the crash. They have also focused on reports that two trains in the area were struck by flying objects on the night of the accident.
On Sunday night, an Acela train traveling from Washington to New York was struck by an object around 7 p.m., not far from the site of the derailment in the Bridesburg section of Philadelphia. Amtrak is investigating the incident, which did not lead to injuries to the passengers or the crew, said Craig Schulz, a spokesman.
Mr. Bostian, 32, who grew up near Memphis and long had an interest in trains, had been working for Amtrak as an engineer based in New York since 2012, the documents said. He is on unpaid administrative leave.
Mr. Bostian’s colleagues praised his job performance in interviews with investigators. One conductor said Mr. Bostian was “on top of his game” and “very knowledgeable of the territory.”
The derailment renewed calls for railroads to install a system, known as positive train control, that safety officials said could have prevented the crash. The technology, which can automatically slow or stop a train, was not in operation on the tracks where the crash occurred.
Congress extended the deadline last year for commuter and freight railroads to install the system. In December, Amtrak said it had been installed on all tracks it owns between Washington and New York.
Mr. Schulz said the railroad was cooperating with the safety board. “The goal is for us to fully understand what happened and how we can prevent a similar tragedy from occurring in the future,” he said.
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(ACC Mentioned) Extracting Rare-Earth Elements From Coal Could Soon be Economical in U.S.
Feb 2, 2016 | Penn State News
By Liam Jackson
The U.S. could soon decrease its dependence on importing valuable rare-earth elements that are widely used in many industries, according to a team of Penn State and U.S. Department of Energy researchers who found a cost-effective and environmentally friendly way to extract these metals from coal byproducts.
Rare-earth elements are a set of seventeen metals -- such as scandium, yttrium, lanthanum and cerium -- necessary to produce high-tech equipment used in health care, transportation, electronics and numerous other industries. They support more than $329 billion of economic output in North America, according to the American Chemistry Council, and the United States Geological Survey expects worldwide demand for REEs to grow more than 5 percent annually through 2020. China produces more than 85 percent of the world's rare-earth elements, and the U.S. produces the second most at just over 6 percent, according to the USGS.
"We have known for many decades that rare-earth elements are found in coal seams and near other mineral veins," said Sarma Pisupati, professor of energy and mineral engineering, Penn State. "However, it was costly to extract the materials and there was relatively low demand until recently. Today, we rely on rare-earth elements for the production of many necessary and also luxury items, including computers, smart phones, rechargeable batteries, electric vehicles, magnets and chemical catalysts. We wanted to take a fresh look at the feasibility of extracting REEs from coal because it is so abundant in the U.S."
Using byproducts of coal production from the Northern Appalachian region of the U.S., the team investigated whether a chemical process called ion exchange could extract REEs in a safer manner than other extraction methods. For example, past research has examined "roasting," a process that is energy intensive and requires exposure to concentrated acids. In contrast, ion exchange is more environmentally friendly and requires less energy. Ion exchange involves rinsing the coal with a solution that releases the REEs that are bound to the coal.
"Essentially, REEs are sticking to the surface of molecules found in coal, and we use a special solution to pluck them out," said Pisupati. "We experimented with many solvents to find one that is both inexpensive and environmentally friendly."
The team reported in their findings, published in the current issue of Metallurgical and Materials Transactions E, that ammonium sulfate was both environmentally friendly and able to extract the highest amount of REEs. Extracting 2 percent of the available REEs would provide an economic boon to companies, the team said.
"We were able to very easily extract 0.5 percent of REEs in this preliminary study using a basic ion exchange method in the lab," said Pisupati. We are confident that we can increase that to 2 percent through advanced ion exchange methods."
The researchers used coal byproducts in their study, some of which were discarded or marked as refuse during mining operations due to poor quality. Finding more uses for discarded coal could provide yet another economic benefit to companies.
In their study, the team also identified the locations within the coal seam that contained the highest amounts of REEs. Often the highest concentration is found in the poorest quality coal, said Pisupati.
"You find some REEs in the coal itself, but the highest concentration is in what we call the coal shale, or the top layer of a coal seam. Knowing this, we can further target our operations to be more efficient," he said.
The team is now collaborating with several Pennsylvania coal-mining companies to explore the viability of a commercial REE-extraction operation.
Peter Rozelle, DOE Office of Fossil Energy, led this study. Collaborators from Penn State included Aditi Khadilkar and Nari Soundarrajan, graduate students, Nuerxida Pulati, postdoctoral researcher, and Mark Klima, professor. Morgan Mosser and Charles Miller, DOE National Energy Technology Laboratory, also collaborated on the research.
U.S. DOE supported this work.
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GOP Chairman Takes Aim at Climate Rules in Energy Debate
Feb 2, 2016 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Devin Henry
Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) has introduced a set of amendments to a Senate energy bill designed to diminish or scrutinize Obama administration climate rules.
Inhofe’s office said Tuesday that he has introduced or co-sponsored 16 amendments to the energy policy bill pending on the floor this week.
Several are designed to chip away at President Obama’s landmark emissions rule for power plans, with three blocking the government from implementing the rule until it’s proven to make no change to grid reliability, energy prices or employment. Other amendments would require new reports on various impacts of the Clean Power Plan.
Inhofe also co-sponsored two amendments to delay an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule limiting the acceptable amount of surface level ozone and another to “ensure EPA adheres to existing regulatory standards” as laid out in the law.
Inhofe also co-sponsored a handful of bipartisan amendments related to the cleaning up potentially contaminated sites and alternative energy.
The Oklahoma senator is one of the loudest critics of environmental policies instituted by the EPA during the Obama administration, and he’s held a series of hearings on the agency and its rulemaking since taking the gavel of the Environment an Public Works Committee last year.
Senators have filed more than 200 amendments to the energy reform bill. The underlying legislation has broad bipartisan support, and several of the 11 amendments approved last week did as well.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a bill co-sponsor and the chairwoman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said Monday that she and staffers are working through the rest of the amendments to figure out which will get votes on the floor.
“Eleven is a good number, but honestly I had hoped that we would have been able to process more amendments last week,” she said. “I want to move forward and process even more over these next couple days.”
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Appellate Rulings Underscore Limits On Environmental Law Citizen Suits
Feb 2, 2016 | InsideEPA
By David LaRoss
A pair of recent appellate court rulings blocking citizen groups' suits trying to enforce federal air and water laws underscore limits that judges have placed on such cases, legal observers say, highlighting the need for advocates to ensure they quickly intervene in other enforcement cases filed by regulators to push for major penalties.
Rather than setting new limits on citizen suits, one environmentalist attorney says, recent decisions emphasize that advocates hoping to win strict penalties against the target of an enforcement action should seek formal intervenor status in that action, in order to win a role in arguing the case or crafting a settlement agreement. EPA-led enforcement actions under the Clean Air Act and other laws are often resolved with settlement agreements.
"Once the settlement is done, the strong interest in settlement finality often trumps citizen suits," according to the attorney. "So that highlights how important it can be for citizen groups to comment on these proposals, or to intervene in suits that are going to produce a consent decree," the source adds.
Intervening in a federal or state enforcement suit allows citizen groups to participate as full parties in settlement talks and to appeal a decision even if the enforcement agency would not otherwise do so.
Environmentalists pursue citizen suits to enforce the air law, Clean Water Act (CWA) and other environmental laws either against EPA or states where they feel regulators are failing to enforce the statues, or against companies that advocates believe have violated environmental laws but might not be subject to an EPA or state enforcement action. But the two recent appellate decisions show that there are limits on citizen suits.
A unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit ruled on Jan. 6 in Group Against Smog and Pollution (GASP) v. Shenango, Inc., that environmentalists could not bring an air law enforcement suit against an emitter already subject to a consent decree with state or federal regulators for the same violation.
"Unfortunately, I'd love to say that it's groundbreaking, but it's more a reflection of the settled law," says the environmentalist attorney of the 3rd Circuit ruling.
Separately, the 6th Circuit issued a unanimous ruling also on Jan. 6 in Larry Askins and Vickie Askins v. Ohio Department of Agriculture, et al., that blocked Ohio citizens' bid to reverse the state's transfer of some concentrated animal feeding operation CWA permitting powers from environmental to agricultural regulators, issuing a novel ruling that says regardless of whether the state acted improperly citizens have no right to sue over the transfer.
'Long-Standing Principles'
A second attorney says the Askins ruling fails to expand the situations in which citizen groups can sue regulators but appears unlikely to limit other citizen suits. The ruling is based on "long-standing principles" limiting the kinds of CWA violations that can trigger a citizen suit, the source says.
The 6th Circuit held that since a transfer of permit authority is not governed by one of the CWA provisions listed as justifying a citizen suit, only EPA can take action against a state accused of violating that requirement. "If Congress intended the citizen suit to be all encompassing, it would have permitted suit for all violations of the Clean Water Act, rather than specifying limited circumstances," Chief Circuit Judge R. Guy Cole Jr. wrote in the ruling.
The second attorney says the Askins ruling appears to leave previously-established citizen suit authority under the CWA intact, but blocks the Ohio citizens' bid to expand such suits into issues of state's exercise of delegated power under the water law.
Even before the Askins decision, citizen groups accusing states of violating the legal standards for a delegated program under the CWA or Clean Air Act have petitioned EPA for federal action, rather than suing in federal court.
Most recently, the groups Environmental Defense Fund and Caddo Lake Institute filed a Jan. 11 petition with the agency urging the withdrawal of Texas' delegated authority to issue certain water and air permits. In that petition, the advocates are claiming that recent changes to state laws and a lack of adequate state environmental agency funding mean that Texas is in "ongoing noncompliance" with federal permitting requirements.
It is rare for EPA to rescind a state's delegated environmental authority, or even to threaten such action, but some advocacy groups in recent years have pressed for more frequent reprisals against states they say are being unlawfully lax. For example, advocates five years ago petitioned EPA Region 4 -- which covers several Southeastern states -- to revoke Alabama's power to issue CWA discharge permits due to alleged flaws in its program.
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FBI Joins Flint Drinking Water Probe
Feb 2, 2016 | PoliticoPro - Whiteboard
By Annie Snider
The FBI has joined the federal investigation into the lead contamination of Flint, Mich.'s drinking water, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Detroit said this morning.
Federal prosecutors are "working with a multi-agency investigation team on the Flint water contamination matter, including the FBI, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, EPA's Office of Inspector General ... and EPA's Criminal Investigation Division," spokeswoman Gina Balaya said by email.
The U.S. attorney's office had previously said it was working with EPA on the investigation; the FBI's involvement now indicates the investigation extends to potential criminal wrongdoing.
EPA's Inspector General's office performs audits and investigations of the agency and its contractors. Its Criminal Investigation Division probes potential criminal violations of environmental law.
The disclosure comes as the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is poised to hold the first congressional hearing on the water contamination crisis tomorrow with state and federal officials called as witnesses.
Last week, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the issue as well.
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Chamber of Commerce Study Rips Brick MACT Rules
Feb 2, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Sean Reilly
Brick manufacturing firms face a crippling struggle to comply with new air toxics standards that will yield relatively little in the way of added health benefits, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce charged today in a report that seeks to link the case study to a broader critique of the federal regulatory apparatus.
"Rules such as these -- that do more harm than good to communities -- should never be allowed to become legally binding requirements," the report says.
It recommends that U.S. EPA conduct in-depth analyses of air quality regulations' effects on employment; it also urges Congress to pass H.R. 185, which would impose new restrictions on federal rulemaking. Dubbed the "Regulatory Accountability Act," the bill has been languishing in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee since winning House approval early last year. It has also drawn a White House veto threat.
EPA officials issued the final version of the air pollution regulations on brick makers and ceramics manufacturers last September, some 15 years after the original deadline imposed by the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments. The agency's first attempt at setting the standards in 2003 was struck down by an appellate court; environmentalists later sued to force the issuance of a new rule.
In the new rule, EPA officials predict it will carry a $28 million annual compliance cost while generating at least $48 million worth of net yearly health benefits. But the U.S. Chamber report cites a Brick Industry Association projection that the compliance price tag could be as high as $110 million per year; it also alleges that EPA imposed restrictions on manufacturers well beyond what it had required in the 2003 version of the regulations.
While the agency could have written the new rule to give the industry credit "for emissions reductions already achieved," the report says, "EPA in effect changed the rules for brick plants in the middle of the game."
An EPA spokesman had no immediate comment this morning. The agency has previously estimated that the new rules could cut emissions of hazardous air pollutants by about 375 tons per year but put two to four brick and structural clay manufacturing facilities at "significant" risk of closing.
In 2014, the U.S. brick industry encompassed 70 plants with 217 kilns that employed about 7,000 people, according to the report. It also portrays the industry as still reeling from the effects of a prolonged homebuilding slump, with plants running at only about 40 percent of capacity last year.
The new standards impose costs that are "cripplingly high" but will deliver scant health benefits beyond those provided by the 2003 regulations, the report says. The chamber, the nation's most prominent business lobby, is a long-standing critic of federal environmental regulations. In a speech last month, President and CEO Thomas Donohue labeled EPA a "runaway" agency (Greenwire, Jan. 14). The report posted online today is the latest in a series scrutinizing various aspects of the federal regulatory system.
The brick industry air pollution standards are already embroiled in lawsuits from both industry groups and environmentalists (Greenwire, Jan. 29). A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee has scheduled a hearing tomorrow on legislation that would block enforcement of the standards until all court challenges are settled (E&E Daily, Feb. 1).
In an email this morning, Megan Van Etten, a U.S. Chamber spokeswoman, called the timing of the report's release coincidental but said the organization is happy that the House "is looking into the issue."
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Industry, Greens Strike Deal on Phasing Out HFC Refrigerants
Feb 2, 2016 | E&E Greenwire
By Amanda Reilly
Environmentalists and industry officials have agreed to a timeline to phase out certain refrigerants that have high global warming potential.
In a letter yesterday to U.S. EPA, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute said they agreed on an eight-year timeline to phase out three types of refrigerants containing hydrofluorocarbons. The substances are used in air- and water-cooled chillers.
The groups asked EPA to finalize the timeline through its Significant New Alternatives Policy, or SNAP, program, which aims to promote the use of acceptable substitutes for ozone-depleting substances.
The refrigeration industry called the agreement a good example of business and environmental advocates working together to help the environment and provide manufacturers with predictability.
During the eight-year transition period ending Jan. 1, 2025, manufacturers would be responsible for designing and bringing to market chillers that use alternatives that are less potent greenhouse gases.
The transition period would also allow time to change building codes to accommodate the new refrigerants, NRDC and the industry group wrote.
"This schedule provides adequate time for industry to launch products that have been tested and certified by the existing laboratories and certification agencies," the groups wrote.
The proposed timeline comes as nations this year are poised to amend the Montreal Protocol to phase down HFCs (Greenwire, Nov. 6, 2015).
Climate advocates say phasing out HFCs is critical to meeting the greenhouse gas reduction goals laid out in the recent international climate change agreement negotiated in Paris.
Limiting HFC use worldwide has the potential to prevent up to 200 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from being released into the atmosphere by 2050 and could avoid up to 0.5 degree Celsius of warming by 2100, according to the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development.
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