Preview Newsletter
PM ACC Clips Report - May 7, 2019
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(ACC Mentioned) ACC Urges US to Reject Higher Tariffs
May 7, 2019 | Plastics News
By Steve Toloken
The American Chemistry Council is pushing back against President Donald Trump's plan to raise tariffs on $200 billion in imports from China if Washington and Beijing are unable to agree on a new trade pact in talks this week. -
(ACC Mentioned) Tariffs Left His Distillery on the Rocks. Now He Wants To Know: What's Trump's Trade Endgame?
May 7, 2019 | Reason
By Eric Boehm
Last year, President Donald Trump's trade war left Tom Lix's distillery shut out of European markets. Now, as Trump threatens to escalate the trade war with another round of tariffs on Chinese-made goods, possibly... -
(ACC Mentioned) Statewide Polystyrene Ban Passes in Maine
May 7, 2019 | Resource Recycling
By Colin Staub
Maine lawmakers approved the first statewide prohibition on polystyrene foodservice packaging last week. The plastics industry quickly criticized the move. Single-use polystyrene foodservice packaging, including take-out... -
China Agrees to Resume U.S. Trade Negotiations
May 7, 2019 | Wall Street Journal
By Chao Deng and Lingling Wei
China is sending its top trade envoy to Washington to resume negotiations and confront U.S. demands that Beijing detail the laws it would change as a part of a trade deal, despite a threat by President Trump to raise tariffs on Chinese... -
EPA Pressed to Revise TSCA CBI Procedure Proposal
May 7, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Kelly Franklin
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has called on the US EPA to modify and begin a new consultation on its proposed TSCA confidential business information (CBI) procedural rule, to ensure it is consistent with a recent court... -
Dr. Wilson Mertens: Defining ‘Probable Human Carcinogens’
May 7, 2019 | Daily Hampshire Gazette
By Dr. Wilson Mertens
Carcinogens are substances with the potential to cause cancer. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has rated more than 1,000 agents as carcinogenic to humans, probably carcinogenic to... -
(ACC Mentioned) Feature: HCF 2019 to Explore Grouping Chemical Substances
May 7, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Andrew Turley
NGOs say that regulators must increase their use of grouping to avoid "regrettable substitutions". Last year, CHEM Trust published a report on the substitution of bisphenol A (BPA) with bisphenol S (BPS). BPA is associated with a... -
EPA’s Safety Standard for Perchlorate in Water Should Prioritize Kids’ Health
May 7, 2019 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Tom Neltner
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will soon propose a drinking water standard for perchlorate. The decision – due by the end of May per a consent decree with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)— will end a nearly... -
The EPA Is Meant to Protect Us. The Monsanto Trials Suggest It Isn't Doing That
May 7, 2019 | The Guardian
By Nathan Donley and Carey Gillam
Ever since Monsanto introduced its line of Roundup weedkillers to the world in 1974, the products have been touted by the company and regulators as extremely safe. The EPA reiterated that stance last week. But the emergence of long... -
Expert Focus: Using Chemical Substance Data for Global Compliance
May 7, 2019 | Chemical Watch
Samer Aburous, senior expert global notification Symrise AG, discusses how best to ensure acceptance of data in multiple jurisdictions. Compliance with global chemical management regulations is crucial when it comes to the... -
N.J. Home to 35 Sites Where Two PFAs Chemicals Top New State Limits
May 7, 2019 | WHYY
By Jon Hurdle
Researchers have identified 35 New Jersey sites where drinking-water tests in recent years reveal contamination with two toxic PFAS chemicals exceed limits now being implemented by state officials. Environmental Working Group, a... -
Toxic Stream of ‘Mystery Foam’ Near Detroit Was PFAs – but From Where?
May 7, 2019 | MLive
By Paula Gardner
The thick white foam pouring through a ravine and rolling over a roadway near an I-75 interchange in southwest Detroit seemed scary and mysterious in summer 2018. Police were called, Hazmat crews wore gloves and boots to get... -
New Prop 65 Safe Harbor Warnings for Residential Rental Properties
May 6, 2019 | Environmental Leader
By William M. Sloan, Tyler G. Welti and Gregory S. Berlin
On March 21, 2019, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) adopted amendments to California’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986 (known as Proposition 65 or Prop 65) that add... -
Environmentalists Press for Upstream GHG Review in FERC Suit
May 7, 2019 | Inside EPA
Environmental groups in their final reply brief in a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) challenge to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) approval of a natural gas pipeline are arguing that the panel unlawfully failed... -
Pembina Jordan Cove LNG Denied Oregon Water Quality Certificate
May 7, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Christina Buurma
Oregon Department of Environmental Quality denied a permit for LNG export project without prejudice, meaning Pembina Pipeline Corp. can reapply. The department planned to make the decision in September, but said in a... -
Eco-Friendly Fracking Patent Lawsuit Moves to South Carolina
May 7, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Brian Flood
A lawsuit over patents for “environmentally friendly” fracking chemicals must change venues, a federal court ruled. Green Source Holdings LLC develops methods of injecting compounds called “terpenes,” derived from natural... -
Lessons From Deepwater Horizon are Particularly Relevant Today
May 7, 2019 | Real Clear Energy
By Nicholas Bahr & Alfonsius Ariawan
President Trump’s recent announcement that his administration will no longer waive sanctions on nations that import oil from Iran demonstrates the economic and diplomatic advantages provided by America’s surging oil and natural gas -
National Oilwell Varco to Test Technology to Develop Automated, Remote-Controlled Drillships
May 7, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By Sergio Chapa
The auto industry is testing self-driving cars. Big deal. The oil and gas industry is working on self-driving drillships. The Houston oil field services company National Oilwell Varco said it plans to begin testing technology this summer... -
Enviros File FOIA Suits for Pesticide Docs
May 7, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Michael Doyle
Environmentalists went to court today in hopes of squeezing myriad pesticides-related documents out from several allegedly unresponsive federal agencies. In a flurry of four Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, the Center for... -
Explosion at Illinois Silicones Plant
May 7, 2019 | Chemical Engineer
By Amanda Doyle
An explosion and fire at a US silicones manufacturing plant has killed three people with one other still missing. The explosion occurred at around 21:30 local time on 3 May at the AB Speciality Silicones plant in Waukegan, Illinois. -
Pipeline Spills 80k Gallons of Saltwater and Oil on Farmland
May 7, 2019 | AP (In E&E - Greenwire)
A pipeline spill in Dunn County, N.D., released nearly 80,000 gallons of produced water and affected pastureland. North Dakota's Department of Environmental Quality said the spill is believed to have been caused by workers installing... -
(ACC Mentioned) Air Pollution Crisis Exposes More Environmental Racism in Illinois
May 7, 2019 | The Intercept
By Sharon Lerner
Wendy Abrams has used her wealth to help protect the environment and public health. She’s the founder of a public art exhibit meant to raise awareness on climate change, and she serves on the boards of NRDC Action... -
Judge Rules EPA Must Enforce Obama-Era Landfill Pollution Regs
May 7, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Rebecca Beitsch
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must begin enforcing pollution regulations that were set for landfills under the Obama administration. Haywood Gilliam Jr., a U.S. district judge in Northern California, sided with California... -
US Refused to Sign Arctic Agreement Over Climate Change Wording: Report
May 7, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Rebecca Beitsch
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left a Tuesday meeting of the Arctic Council without signing an agreement to manage resources due to a disagreement over how to describe climate change, Reuters reported. The council brings together... -
Here’s How Climate Voters Will Drive the 2020 Race
May 7, 2019 | Politico
By Bill Mckibben
For three decades in American politics, climate change has been the issue that wasn’t. Even as the temperature steadily rose, and evidence mounted that it was human behavior—and human policies—that were driving this change... -
Sunrise Movement Gets Boost Ahead of Election Push
May 7, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Nick Sobczyk
The Sunrise Movement is getting a $250,000 cash infusion from the Wallace Global Fund as the group ramps up its push to make the progressive Green New Deal a centerpiece of the 2020 presidential election. The fund yesterday...
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(ACC Mentioned) ACC Urges US to Reject Higher Tariffs
May 7, 2019 | Plastics News
By Steve Toloken
The American Chemistry Council is pushing back against President Donald Trump's plan to raise tariffs on $200 billion in imports from China if Washington and Beijing are unable to agree on a new trade pact in talks this week.
In a statement late May 6, ACC said that "the risks of continuing to use tariffs as a negotiating tactic with China are simply too high — and any potential benefits still unclear."
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told reporters May 6 that Washington was preparing to raise tariffs on May 10 on $200 billion in Chinese imports, from their current 10 percent level to 25 percent. President Trump first tweeted over the weekend that he planned to raise the tariffs.
U.S. officials accuse China of backtracking on previous commitments in the trade talks. A spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry told reporters that Beijing has "good faith" in continuing talks and that "raising tariffs won't resolve any problem."
The tariffs on $200 billion in imports from China were first imposed last year, in the largest of several rounds of U.S tariffs. ACC estimates that total U.S. tariffs on $250 billion in Chinese imports thus far include more than $15 billion in chemicals and plastics.
ACC said Beijing's retaliation to those tariffs has also hit nearly $11 billion in U.S. chemical and plastics exports to China and have put 55,000 America jobs and $18 billion in U.S. economic activity at risk.
ACC President and CEO Cal Dooley said in a statement that China is the 3rd-largest export market for the U.S. chemical industry, and that the trade war is hurting the industry.
"We are starting to see signs that the tariffs are disrupting supply chains, cutting off markets, and eroding U.S. chemical manufacturing competitiveness," Dooley said. "Although chemical imports from China grew by 22.7 percent in 2018, the retaliatory tariffs significantly dampened U.S. chemical exports to China, resulting in only a 2.7 percent increase in 2018 — nearly tripling the chemicals trade deficit, from $1.4 billion to $4.0 billion."
Dooley said that the U.S. chemical sector, including plastics materials makers, prefer other solutions to trade problems with China, rather than tariffs and counter-tariffs.
"Future growth for our industry depends on a strong trading relationship with China and a trade policy that creates certainty and predictability for investors, not a looming threat of more or higher tariffs," Dooley said.
This $200 billion round of tariffs also includes duties on some categories of plastic products, including vinyl flooring and some types of plastic packaging and closures. U.S. packaging maker Pactiv LLC had lobbied for tariffs.
Several large U.S. makers of vinyl flooring had urged Washington to impose the tariffs, saying it would benefit investment in U.S. factories. But other companies and importers argued it would raise home construction costs.
These are not the only tariffs on plastics industry goods. Tariffs on Chinese made injection molding machines, also at 25 percent, were imposed in an earlier round of tariffs last year.
The $200 billion at issue now first were imposed in September. Originally, the 10 percent duties were supposed to rise to 25 percent on Jan. 1 but that had been delayed while talks continued.
As well, 25 percent tariffs on Chinese-made injection molds, first imposed in a July round of tariffs, were lifted in January after protests from U.S. mold buyers.
President Trump also threatened in comments on Twitter over the weekend to impose tariffs on the remaining Chinese imports, estimated at $325 billion. That would require another regulatory rulemaking from Washington.
https://www.plasticsnews.com/article/20190507/NEWS/190509958
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May 7, 2019 | Reason
By Eric Boehm
Last year, President Donald Trump's trade war left Tom Lix's distillery shut out of European markets.
Now, as Trump threatens to escalate the trade war with another round of tariffs on Chinese-made goods, possibly before the end of the week, Lix says he doesn't understand where the president is going with all this.
"My morning coffee is from South America. I drive a Honda that's partially Japanese but was built here in the States," Lix, founder and CEO of Cleveland Whiskey, said Monday afternoon, as he spoke at an event organized by several groups opposed to tariffs and hosted at his downtown Cleveland distillery. "For me, I happen to make bourbon, and bourbon is something that's in demand around the world. We should be encouraging those types of trades. I just don't get it. I'm flabbergasted by it."
Prior to Trump's decision to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum imports last year, Lix says, about 15 percent of his sales were to Europe. When the tariffs took effect on June 1, the European Union responded by hitting American-made goods like blue jeans, motorcycles, and, yes, whiskey with retaliatory tariffs. From that point on, Lix says his distillery didn't sell a single bottle to the far side of the Atlantic.
At the time, the assumption was that both sides would quickly reach an agreement to roll back those tariffs and open up trade again. But months have passed, the Trump administration's attention has turned to China, and no trade deal has emerged with Europe. The tariffs remain in place—and, if anything, Trump seems more likely to hit European auto imports with a new set of tariffs than remove the ones already in place.
The most generous reading of Trump's trade strategy is that he's using tariffs as leverage to bring other countries to the table to sign trade deals that will, in the long run, allow for freer trade. That's certainly a more favorable argument than the nonsensical claim made Monday by Steve Bannon, former Trump advisor, who told Fox News' Lou Dobbs that the tariffs were necessary for the "self-empowerment" of the working class. Try imagining how Dobbs or Bannon would react to a Democrat saying higher taxes would be empowering.
Still, the evidence doesn't really back up the claim that Trump is using tariffs to get to freer trade. The only trade deal that's been completed under Trump's watch—a rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—is more protectionist than the old version. And the Trump administration apparently wants to keep the current tariffs on Canadian and Mexican steel and aluminum imports in place, even after the deal is finalized. It doesn't look like the administration is using tariffs to extract concessions, but rather that Trump wants them to be a permanent part of trade relationship among the three North American neighbors.
On other fronts, trade deals have not emerged as a result of the administration's bellicose strategy. Cleveland Whiskey—like many other businesses—is still waiting for European markets to open up again. Meanwhile, Chinese trade officials are heading to Washington this week to continue hammering out a potential deal—but Trump may have damaged the chances of finalizing an agreement this week after tweeting a threat to hike tariffs on Chinese imports.
"That just made my head spin. I think it's still spinning a bit," is how Ed Brzytwa, director of international trade for the American Chemistry Council, an industry group, described his reaction to seeing Trump's Sunday afternoon tweet. Speaking at the same event Monday afternoon, Brzytwa said any deal with China has to include the elimination of the tit-for-tat tariffs both countries have levied on one another's goods since last year.
"I think for the average business in the United States, they're probably having a hard time understanding what the endgame is here," he said. "Is it just a negotiating threat, or is this real? And it's really hard to plan around that."
Even if it all is nothing more than a complex negotiating tactic, is the pain worth the potential gain? A paper published in March by economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Princeton University, and Columbia University found that Trump's tariffs were costing American consumers and businesses about $1.4 billion each month.The costs of the tariffs "were almost completely passed through into U.S. domestic prices, so that the entire incidence of the tariffs fell on domestic consumers and importers," they found.
Trump continues to claim that China is paying for the tariffs, but even the president's own Council of Economic Advisors admitted in its year-end report that the estimated $14.4 billion in tariff revenue sent to the U.S. Treasury during 2018 was due to "costs paid by consumers in the form of higher prices."
If Trump follows through with his threat to slap more tariffs on Chinese-made goods, it could jeopardize as many as 2 million American jobs, according to The Trade Partnership, a pro-trade think tank. And, if implemented, they would make the United States far more protectionist than the rest of the world's top economies, according toCNBC economics reporter Steve Liesman.
There are other costs that can't be counted. On Monday, Lix highlighted the fact that his distillery was in negotiations to export their products to China before the trade war started. "The discussions we were having—which were taking years to get agreements in place—they all shut down because people said 'let's just wait until this is over. There's too much uncertainty,'" he said Monday.
That uncertainty created by the trade war rattled stock markets in both the U.S. and China on Monday. If Trump is truly using tariffs as nothing more than leverage against China, he might want to take a closer look at what that leverage is costing Americans.
"The idea that we would manipulate this and use this as, I believe, a political tool is just absurd," Lix says, "and it hurts a whole lot of people."
https://reason.com/2019/05/07/tariffs-left-his-distillery-on-the-rocks-but-whats-the-presidents-endgame/
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(ACC Mentioned) Statewide Polystyrene Ban Passes in Maine
May 7, 2019 | Resource Recycling
By Colin Staub
Maine lawmakers approved the first statewide prohibition on polystyrene foodservice packaging last week. The plastics industry quickly criticized the move.
Single-use polystyrene foodservice packaging, including take-out containers and service ware, will be banned across Maine beginning in January 2021. The bill passed an April 25 floor vote of the state Senate, where 23 senators – 19 Democrats and four Republicans – voted in favor and 10 Republican senators opposed the bill.
Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, signed the bill into law on April 30. Prior to the statewide ban, 14 Maine municipalities enacted their own prohibitions on polystyrene foodservice packaging.
“Polystyrene cannot be recycled like a lot of other products, so while that cup of coffee may be finished, the Styrofoam cup it was in is not,” Mills said in a statement. “In fact, it will be around for decades to come and eventually it will break down into particles, polluting our environment, hurting our wildlife, and even detrimentally impacting our economy.”
She added that the ban will “create consistency for businesses that operate in multiple municipalities,” promote alternative container use and provide plenty of time for stakeholders to adjust to the change.
But opponents in the plastics industry condemned the decision, stating that it will do “little to actually keep the state clean.”
“Polystyrene foam packaging is a safe, recyclable, durable, and cost-effective product for use in foodservice,” the American Chemistry Council (ACC) said in a statement. The industry association added that the ban will harm business owners who may have to spend more to purchase alternative materials.Recycling perspectives
The recyclability of polystyrene foodservice packaging has been hotly debated in recent years, perhaps most publicly in New York City. The city banned foam polystyrene containers from use in restaurants. Plastics producers and recycling operators sued the city multiple times. Ultimately, the ban took effect this year.
Stakeholders in the recycling field hold mixed views on hard-to-recycle materials such as expanded polystyrene. For example, the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR), an industry group representing stakeholders in the plastics recovery field, does not support product bans as a way to respond to recyclability challenges.
“They do not address the issue of supply,” APR President Steve Alexander told Resource Recycling (Disclosure: APR owns Resource Recycling, Inc.). “We support the expansion and improvement of recycling programs and infrastructure.”
Foam polystyrene presents several challenges for MRFs. Nonprofit MRF operator ecomaine said it prioritizes landfill diversion and uses the U.S. EPA waste management hierarchy when considering how materials should be handled. Difficult-to-recycle materials such as polystyrene are good candidates to be pushed higher up the hierarchy to waste reduction or prevention, according to ecomaine.
“Expanded polystyrene also comes with a logistical challenge in that densification of the material is costly and inefficient, and so you end up transporting air which obviously has a negative impact on the environment and can be very costly,” ecomaine CEO Kevin Roche told Resource Recycling.
https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2019/05/07/statewide-polystyrene-ban-passes-in-maine/
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China Agrees to Resume U.S. Trade Negotiations
May 7, 2019 | Wall Street Journal
By Chao Deng and Lingling Wei
China is sending its top trade envoy to Washington to resume negotiations and confront U.S. demands that Beijing detail the laws it would change as a part of a trade deal, despite a threat by President Trump to raise tariffs on Chinese goods.
After two days of uncertainty in which President Trump called for the higher tariffs and Chinese officials considered pulling out of the talks, Beijing announced Tuesday that Vice Premier Liu He will travel to Washington for negotiations starting Thursday, a day later than planned.
At the top of the agenda is a U.S. demand that a trade agreement lay out an inventory of laws and regulations that Beijing must revise for compliance, according to people briefed on the negotiations. China has objected to including the list, the people said. The U.S., though, sees it as essential to ensuring China delivers on promises of structural change.
The disagreement over the text of the trade agreement adds to a pile of still-to-resolve issues that include China’s subsidies to domestic companies and opening key Chinese markets, such as cloud computing. It also drove President Trump to Twitter on Sunday to threaten higher tariffs, the people said. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has said the punitive levies on $200 billion of Chinese goods will be raised to 25%, from 10%, on Friday.
In pushing ahead with Mr. Liu’s trip to Washington, China’s leadership decided a full breakdown in the talks may be difficult to repair and would exact costs on the Chinese economy, according to Chinese officials. In doing so, Chinese leaders broke from a public position that Beijing wouldn’t negotiate under threat.
“There is definitely a sense of urgency that we should get this resolved sooner rather than later,” said one of the officials, who is involved in policy-making. “An all-out trade war is in no one’s interest.”
As part of Beijing’s deliberations, a group of vice ministerial-level officials involved in the trade negotiations huddled Tuesday to discuss whether it would still be productive to visit Washington, according to a person familiar with the matter. The officials dissected information obtained from the news conference held Monday by Mr. Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the person said. The officials’ conclusion: Yes.
Two of those senior officials, Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen and Vice Finance Minister Liao Min, will lead an advance team to Washington on Wednesday, according to another person with knowledge of the matter. Vice Premier Liu plans to follow. He and his team will stay in a hotel across the street from the White House.
China’s Commerce Ministry, which announced Mr. Liu’s participation, didn’t respond to requests for comment on the government’s deliberations and the delay in Mr. Liu’s itinerary.
Asked about China’s decision, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang objected to the U.S.’s raising tariffs but said talks were the best way forward. “It’s only natural for the two sides to have differences,” he said at a Tuesday briefing. “We are sincere about continuing the consultation.”
U.S. officials have complained for years that Chinese industrial policies—from subsidies to coercive technology transfer—create an unfair advantage for domestic companies, and they have made changing that a central effort of the talks.
In previous rounds, Beijing has offered up broad language that it will pursue structural changes. But it has rejected U.S. demands for more details about implementation, including identifiable timelines, according to people close to the negotiations.
The specificity the U.S. demanded caused the latest impasse, particularly over the listing of particular laws and regulations to be changed, according to the people briefed on the negotiations. Beijing believes that the U.S. demand impinges on its sovereignty, limiting its discretion on implementation, and that changing laws would take time, according to one of the people.
By putting such an explicit pledge within a trade agreement, “not just government agencies, but the whole of society will have a negative response,” says Wang Yong, director of the Peking University Center for International Political Economy Research. “It would weaken the political standing of Chinese leaders.”
Some economists and China specialists say to introduce meaningful change, Beijing would need to revise a slew of laws, including ones that pertain to patents, copyright and criminal punishment.
Jingzhou Tao, lawyer at Dechert LLP in Beijing, said China could change its laws quickly if it musters the political will. While its legislature meets only once a year to review laws, a standing committee of lawmakers has the power to amend laws and it meets every other month.
China’s cabinet has the authority to revise regulations, Mr. Tao said. “This fast-track process has often been used in the past,” he added.
The legislature in March fast-tracked a foreign investment law, which goes into effect in 2020, in part to answer U.S. concerns about unfair treatment for foreign companies, and the government has promised necessary revisions to a raft of regulations.
Authorities, for example, are working on revisions that would raise the amount of compensation for infringement on trademarks and that would limit official discretion when issuing licenses. Other rules that some lawyers and analysts believe need to be revised include those on reviewing investments in sectors that affect national security.
Left unaddressed by the foreign investment law, however, are subsidies and many other industrial policies that the U.S. says favor domestic companies. In general, said a person familiar with Beijing’s thinking, Beijing and the U.S. are still far apart on the issue of how China will reform. “The U.S. wants changes that are too quick, too specific,” he said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-agrees-to-resume-u-s-trade-negotiations-11557236170?mod=hp_lead_pos1
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EPA Pressed to Revise TSCA CBI Procedure Proposal
May 7, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Kelly Franklin
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has called on the US EPA to modify and begin a new consultation on its proposed TSCA confidential business information (CBI) procedural rule, to ensure it is consistent with a recent court ruling.
The NGO’s request stems from a 26 April decision with respect to its 2017 legal challenge of the agency’s TSCA inventory notification rule.
In the matter of the case, EDF v EPA, the DC Circuit court ruled that the agency had erred by not requiring companies to substantiate that a confidential chemical identity is not discoverable through reverse engineering. The court’s decision means the EPA will need to revisit its inventory notification rule to address this misstep.
But in a 2 May letter to the agency, the EDF has argued that this has implications beyond the 2017 rule.
More specifically, the NGO says that the EPA’s recently proposed CBI rule – which lays out how it will require substantiation of existing confidentiality claims and then review them – incorporates the same "flawed questions" that the court determined were inadequate in the notification rule.
The agency, it says, must revise these questions and the rule’s substantive standard for review to comply with the court’s ruling.
Moreover, the EDF points out that the proposed rule allows companies that provided voluntary substantiation as part of the inventory notification process to rely on this to support a confidentiality claim. But it argues that because the substantiation guidelines the companies were adhering to for their submissions were inadequate, then those businesses will need to provide more information to be compliant with the statute.
It has therefore also called on the EPA to modify its proposed rule to require companies that already voluntarily substantiated their claims to provide information to address the reverse engineering factor.
The consultation on the agency’s proposed CBI rule is currently scheduled to end on 24 June.
https://chemicalwatch.com/77165/epa-pressed-to-revise-tsca-cbi-procedure-proposal
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Dr. Wilson Mertens: Defining ‘Probable Human Carcinogens’
May 7, 2019 | Daily Hampshire Gazette
By Dr. Wilson Mertens
Carcinogens are substances with the potential to cause cancer. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has rated more than 1,000 agents as carcinogenic to humans, probably carcinogenic to humans, possibly carcinogenic, not classified as to its carcinogenicity to humans and probably not carcinogenic to humans.
The term “probable human carcinogen” has been in the news recently with the voluntary recall by different companies of dozens of prescription drugs with the active pharmaceutical ingredient valsartan, losartan or irbesartan used to treat common cardiovascular conditions like high blood pressure.
The medications recalled were due to trace amounts in their active ingredient of either N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) or N-nitrosodiethylamine (NDEA).
These are chemical compounds in the nitrosamines class and are considered to be probable human carcinogens by both IARC and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The two are sometimes produced as an unintended byproduct of a manufacturing process.
Their detection in valsartan tablets was first announced by the Food and Drug Administration in July and the recall of products thought to have been contaminated as a result of the chemical process that makes their drug substance has continued.
The FDA is conducting an ongoing investigation and has published interim acceptable intake levels of nitrosamine impurities for manufacturers to ensure that finished drug products are safe and not subject to recall.
According to the FDA, this acceptable intake is a daily exposure to a compound such as NDMA or NDEA that results in a 1:100,000 cancer risk after 70 years exposure, or less than one additional case of cancer for every 100,000 people.
It has been estimated that Americans use 100,000 chemicals and that 1,000 new chemicals are introduced each year.
The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act amended the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act to enhance, among other powers, the EPA’s ability to evaluate industrial chemicals manufactured or processed in the U.S. over the past 10 years.
Some chemicals, like asbestos and arsenic, are known to cause cancer in humans, others are known to be carcinogenic in animals and are considered probable carcinogens in humans as a result.
It is not easy for researchers to evaluate which chemicals may cause which cancers, as cancer can be the result of many factors and take a long time to develop.
Carcinogens can directly cause cancer by how they change a cell’s DNA or in conjunction with other chemicals or they can cause it by how they are metabolized by the body.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer has rated both tobacco smoking and the consumption of processed meat as known human carcinogens — the latter over concerns that the curing process for such mean can cause potentially cancer-causing compounds.
It is estimated that at least 250 of the 7,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke are harmful and that 69 of the 250 can cause cancer. Mortality rates among smokers are said to be three times higher than among people who have never smoked.
Second-hand smoke is classified as a known human carcinogen as well and is said to be responsible for some 7,500 lung cancer deaths among adult non-smokers each year in the United States.
Cancer-risk concerns have been raised over the vaped aerosol of e-cigarettes as well as the chemicals used in their flavorings.
An individual’s risk for developing cancer from a carcinogen depends on a number of factors including how much they were exposed and over how long a period of time.
Lifestyle recommendations for cancer prevention remain good advice for any of us to follow.
These include engaging in daily physical exercise, wearing sunscreen against the sun’s ultraviolet rays, maintaining a healthy weight, eating a diet with a variety of vegetables, fruits and grains, keeping up with recommended screenings and being aware of what is in the products that we use and consume.
https://www.gazettenet.com/Cancer-Questions-24710057
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(ACC Mentioned) Feature: HCF 2019 to Explore Grouping Chemical Substances
May 7, 2019 | Chemical Watch
By Andrew Turley
NGOs say that regulators must increase their use of grouping to avoid "regrettable substitutions".
Last year, CHEM Trust published a report on the substitution of bisphenol A (BPA) with bisphenol S (BPS). BPA is associated with a large body of toxicological data, and using this data the EU has identified several hazards and implemented corresponding regulatory risk management measures.
These actions have led some companies to substitute BPA with BPS, which is structurally similar and has similar functional properties. However, experts are concerned that the two compounds may also have similar toxicological profiles. The legitimacy of these concerns are difficult to determine because BPS is associated with a much smaller body of toxicological data.
The EU has responded by asking registrants to expand that body of data for the purposes of risk assessment, independent of BPA. In its report, CHEM Trust argued that this has been the wrong approach and that, instead, at the outset, the EU should have addressed bisphenols as a group.
"Once a chemical has been regulated, the easiest thing for companies to do is often just to substitute one banned chemical with another unregulated one with a similar structure: it is likely to have similar properties in the application and desired function," Ninja Reineke, CHEM Trust senior policy advisor, told Chemical Watch.
PFASs
Several NGOs, plus one state government, have made similar arguments in relation to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), the potential risks of which the US EPA has pledged to address.
According to patent filings and chemical registries, PFASs currently in use commercially could number in the thousands, but the agency appears to be approaching each one separately.
Last year, for example, the EPA published draft hazard assessments of GenX and PFBS compounds for public consultation. In feedback published in February, the Environmental Working Group described the "single-chemical-by-single-chemical approach to assessing toxicity and setting regulations" as "untenable" for PFASs.
Treating PFAS chemicals as a group would "more efficiently and effectively protect public health", the organisation said. Grouping would also stop the chemical industry "transitioning from one concerning chemical to another without providing substantiating data", it added.
Six other NGOs, plus the Pennsylvania Departments of Environmental Protection and Health, made the same point.
"We recommend that US EPA prioritise PFAS efforts that address multiple PFAS compounds holistically," the Pennsylvania departments said in their comments.EU discussion
At least some regulators support the idea of increased use of grouping.
Echa put emphasis on grouping in its 2017 report, Strategy to promote substitution to safer chemicals through innovation, noting that the progressive substitution of SVHCs by suitable alternatives is one of the aims of REACH authorisation.
"Echa and member states are more and more working on groups of substances rather than taking action on individual ones," the report said. "Echa has also started to use this in the early stages of assessment such as for the screening and identification of substances of potential concern but also to avoid regrettable substitution."
Last year, however, a series of pilot studies run by Echa concluded that a collaborative approach to address chemicals by groups was costly and not necessarily an efficient or effective way to speed up substance evaluation processes.
In its final report, Echa said that addressing substances in groups, intensifying collaboration between authorities and initiating early interaction with registrants "can all be seen as useful elements". However, it did not recommend formalising these aspects under a specific process.
Nevertheless, Norway called for more use of grouping of substances for future restriction cases, in January, in comments submitted to the consultation on the REACH review action to improve the restriction procedure.
Industry objections
Industry, however, remains sceptical.
Steve Scherrer, of Lanxess Solutions – which develops, manufactures and markets engineered industrial specialty chemicals – told Chemical Watch in a 2018 interview that reviewing chemicals one-by-one has "some advantages since they are regulated individually and made by different companies". However, he added that grouping chemicals together would not be a "scientific approach".
Additionally, the American Chemistry Council argues that it is folly to try to use a one-size-fits all approach to regulating chemicals as a class.
"The physical, chemical, and toxicological properties of chemicals can – and do – vary widely within a class of substances. These differences mean sweeping statements about entire classes of chemicals may not only be misleading for the public and policymakers, they may be scientifically-inaccurate," an ACC spokesperson told Chemical Watch.
"One-size-fits-all regulation of chemicals as a class is an approach that has been disfavored – if not outright rejected – repeatedly by US agencies and other international regulatory bodies over the years. Consequences can range from deterring innovation to discouraging alternative product design," the ACC said.
"It can also go as far as completely eliminating a chemistry necessary to an essential product or enabling technology. Our industry supports examining alternatives to a one-size-fits-all class scheme for substances using a more deliberate approach that acknowledges the differences within the chemical family, but offers a pathway for prioritising research and data," the trade body added. "For example, while it can be a useful tool for screening-level hazard assessment of related chemicals, 'grouping' chemicals by classes does not take into account how the chemical is used, in what amount, or whether and how long exposure occurs, if it occurs at all."
The way forward
The situation raises important technical questions about the way forward: What activities do companies already engage in to avoid regrettable substitution? Do companies use grouping for risk assessment and management? If so, how do they use it? Could we standardise and validate grouping approaches? Should we? What role should ‘expert judgement’ play in grouping? What constitutes sufficient data for grouping? and; Are there significant research needs in this area? What are they? How could they be addressed?
This year, the Helsinki Chemicals Forum is running back-to-back with the SETAC Europe annual meeting, a five-day event on emerging research, regulatory developments and the latest methodologies in environmental toxicology and chemistry. SETAC is offering a reduced fee for HCF delegates. Furthermore, the agenda for day of the SETAC meeting has been design to be especially relevant to HCF delegates.
Chemical Watch Science Editor Andrew Turley will chair a panel on grouping on 23 May at the HCF featuring Jack de Bruijn, Echa's director prioritisation and integration, Kerry Nugent, principal scientist at Australia's National Industrial Chemicals Notification and Assessment Scheme (Nicnas), Ninja Reineke, CHEM Trust senior policy advisor and Maggie Saykali, Cefic's director of specialty chemicals.
https://chemicalwatch.com/77211/feature-hcf-2019-to-explore-grouping-chemical-substances
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EPA’s Safety Standard for Perchlorate in Water Should Prioritize Kids’ Health
May 7, 2019 | Environmental Defense Fund
By Tom Neltner
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will soon propose a drinking water standard for perchlorate. The decision – due by the end of May per a consent decree with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)— will end a nearly decade-long process to regulate the chemical that has been shown to harm children’s brain development.
In making its decision, EPA must propose a Maximum Contaminant Level Goal (MCLG) “at the level at which no known or anticipated adverse effects on the health of persons occur and which allows an adequate margin of safety.”[1] It must also set a Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) as close to the MCLG as feasible using the best available treatment technology and taking cost into consideration.
To guide that decision, EPA’s scientists developed a sophisticated model that considers the impact of perchlorate on the development of the fetal brain in the first trimester when the fetus is particularly vulnerable to the chemical’s disruption of the proper function of the maternal thyroid gland. As discussed more below, the model was embraced by an expert panel of independent scientists through a transparent, public process that included public comments and public meetings.
In April, a consulting firm published a study critiquing EPA’s model. The authors acknowledged the model as a valuable research tool but did not think it is sufficient to use in regulatory decision-making due to uncertainties. Therefore, the authors concluded that EPA should discard the peer-reviewed model and rely on a 14-year old calculation of a “safe dose” that does not consider the latest scientific evidence and has even greater uncertainties. They didn’t offer other options such as using uncertainty factors to address their concerns about the model’s estimated values.
Given the importance of the issue and the risk to children’s brain development, we want to explain EPA’s model, the process the agency used to develop it, and the study raising doubt about the model.
EPA’s model quantifies the relationship between perchlorate and fetal brain development
The model involves two steps. First, it links a pregnant woman’s exposure to perchlorate in the first trimester to the chemical’s impact on levels of a thyroid hormone known as free T4 (fT4). Second, it links decreased fT4 levels to negative effects on IQ, motor skills, cognitive and language development, reaction times in children. The result of the model is a quantitative relationship between maternal perchlorate exposure and harm to the fetal brain – which is important to understanding the risk posed by this chemical and to evaluating various regulatory options.
In a November 2017 blog, we applauded EPA’s scientists for developing the model, noting that:
A 1% shift in the population of women with hypothyroxinemia [low fT4] associated with perchlorate exposure would correspond to an increase of 4,000 impacted children; if there is a 5% shift, the number of impacted children born to hypothyroxinemic mothers would increase to 20,000.
While these percentages appear small, they represent a significant number of potentially affected children since neurodevelopmental harm is likely irreversible. According to the model, the 1% shift corresponds to an exposure of 0.3 micrograms of perchlorate per kilograms of body weight per day (µg/kg-bw/day). The 5% shift corresponds to 2.1 µg perchlorate/kg-bw/day. These exposure levels do not include uncertainty factors or provide “an adequate margin of safety” as required by law.
EPA followed an extensive public process to develop the model
EPA went through an arduous process that involved extensive review by independent scientists to develop the model. In 2013, its Science Advisory Board (SAB) reviewed an agency proposal to develop an MCLG and concluded EPA needed to do more to protect fetal brain development. The SAB directed the agency to focus on the more sensitive measure of thyroid dysfunction called hypothyroxinemia (i.e., low fT4 levels) because of its expected impact on the developing brain.
In 2016, EPA developed a Biologically-Based Dose Response Model(BBDR) that focused on the third trimester and breast-fed infants. A peer review panel, convened by the agency, provided positive feedback but challenged the agency to focus on the first trimester when the fetus is most vulnerable to hypothyroxinemia. In 2017, EPA rose to the challenge and refined the BBDR model for the first trimester after conducting a rigorous review of the science. It also drew on five distinct children studies showing a quantitative relationship between perchlorate exposure, low fT4 and harm to the developing brain.
After another round of public comments, the agency reconvened the peer review panel. In March 2018, the panel gave what amounts to high praise coming from independent scientists convened to be critical of the agency’s work. It said:
Overall, the panel agreed that the EPA and its collaborators have prepared a highly innovative state-of-the-science set of quantitative tools to evaluate neurodevelopmental effects that could arise from drinking water exposure to perchlorate. While there is always room for improvement of the models, with limited additional work to address the committee’s comments below, the current models are fit-for-purpose to determine an MCLG.
Critique of EPA’s model claims too much uncertainty to be useful
The American Water Works Association, a 501c(3) technical and education organization representing drinking water professionals and utilities that would be affected by the rule, funded a consulting firm, Ramboll, to evaluate EPA’s model. The authors of the report attempted to recreate the BBDR model and, in the study published in April 2019, they concluded that:
While the USEPA (2017) BBDR model represents a valuable research tool, the lack of supporting data for many of the model assumptions and parameters calls into question the fitness of the extended BBDR model to support quantitative analyses for regulatory decisions on perchlorate in drinking water. Until more data can be developed to address uncertainties in the current BBDR model, USEPA should continue to rely on the RfD [reference dose] recommended by the NAS [National Academy of Science] (USEPA, 2005) when considering further regulatory action.
In essence, rather than offering a solution to address uncertainties, the authors proposed ignoring new, compelling evidence that perchlorate exposure during pregnancy harms the developing brain. Instead, they called for EPA to use an RfD developed in 2005 that was estimated using a study of healthy non-pregnant adults, that evaluated a less-sensitive effect and that had added a 10-fold intraspecies uncertainty factor to protect the most sensitive subpopulation, the developing fetus.
The authors’ conclusion is at direct odds with those made by EPA’s independent peer-review panel through a multi-year transparent public process, which acknowledged the uncertainties but deemed them adequately addressed by the agency’s model. The recommendations appear to be an unrealistic demand for perfection. EPA’s model represents the “best-available, peer reviewed science,” which the Safe Drinking Water Act requires EPA to base its decisions upon.
To provide an ample margin of safety, EPA should adopt an RfD of 0.03 µg/kg-bw/day
The graph below, copied from the Ramboll study, provides a helpful comparison between the various “Points of Departure” (PoD) (green and blue bars) and the current RfD (red bar). According to EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) Glossary, a PoD is “the lower bound on dose for an estimated incidence or a change in response level from a dose-response model” such as the one EPA developed. In contrast, the RfD is the lowest PoD “with uncertainty factors generally applied to reflect limitations of the data used.” The green bars represent points of departure based on the five epidemiological studies in children that EPA and peer reviewers considered sufficient on which to build the model. The blue bars show the model’s PoD for the 1% and 5% increase in pregnant women population becoming hypothyroxinemic without any additional factors to address uncertainties in the model. The red bar is the current RfD developed in 2005 that incorporates an uncertainty factor to protect the developing fetus.
Figure 7 from Ramboll study.
Rather than discard the sophisticated model developed by EPA’s scientists because of recognized uncertainties, the agency should use 0.3 µg/kg-bw/day as the PoD since this is the lowest dose for which the model shows a change in fT4 level. To calculate the RfD, we recommend an additional 10-fold safety factor based on four considerations:The uncertainties identified by EPA, its independent review panel, and the Ramboll study’s authors.The reported variability in women’s iodine consumption and trend towards lower iodine consumption in women of childbearing age, that would make the risk from perchlorate exposure even greater.The measured adverse effects may only be indicators for other developmental problems. While the effects identified by EPA represent endpoints that have been standardized and commonly measured, they are likely only a few of the potential additional effects that be occurring.Most importantly, the developmental effects may be irreversible.
Therefore, based on our calculations, the RfD should be 0.03 µg/kg-bw/day – about 20 times more protective than the current reference dose. We believe this RfD better “allows an adequate margin of safety” as required under the law.
When EPA publishes the proposed MCLG by the end of May, we will learn whether EPA puts children’s health first.
http://blogs.edf.org/health/2019/05/07/epas-safety-standard-perchlorate-water-kids-health/
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The EPA Is Meant to Protect Us. The Monsanto Trials Suggest It Isn't Doing That
May 7, 2019 | The Guardian
By Nathan Donley and Carey Gillam
Ever since Monsanto introduced its line of Roundup weedkillers to the world in 1974, the products have been touted by the company and regulators as extremely safe. The EPA reiterated that stance last week.
But the emergence of long-held corporate secrets in three public trials has revealed a covert campaign to cover-up the pesticide’s risks and raised troubling questions about lax oversight of all pesticides by the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory agencies that are supposed to be protecting public health.
Two recently concluded Roundup product liability trials in California have resulted in large damage awards against Monsanto, after juries found the company’s herbicides contributed to cancer and that it failed to warn of the risks. Closing arguments in a third trial under way now in Oakland, California, are expected this week. Revelations that have emerged from the trial testimony include:
* Monsanto never conductedepidemiology studies for Roundup and its other formulations made with the active ingredient glyphosate, to see if the products could lead to cancer in people who used them.
* At the same time as Monsanto was refusing to conduct long-term product safety studies, the company was spending millions of dollars on secretive PR campaigns – including$17m budgeted in a single year – to finance ghostwritten studies and op-eds aimed at discrediting independent scientists whose work found dangers with Monsanto’s herbicides.
* Several Monsanto scientists spent years putting together a sweeping paper that was published in a scientific journal in 2000, concluding Roundup posed no health risk to people. Internal emails show the team was applauded by corporate leaders for their hard work on the paper. But when the work was published in a scientific journal, no Monsanto employees were listed as authors. A company scientist referred to the paper internally as one the company had “ghost” written. Monsanto has denied that characterization. Regulators, including the EPA, have cited that paper as a reference in assuring consumers that Roundup is safe.
* Numerous other examples of Monsanto employee ghostwriting have surfaced. In one from 2013, a company scientist emailed co-workers about a manuscript he wrote that he hoped he could make appear to be authored from someone other than himself by finding a willing academic, then “turn it over to them and just be a ghost-writer”. The scientist said it would be best if the paper did not appear to have come from Monsanto. But he was concerned that faculty members “may not want to just take something they did not produce and slap their names on it”.
* When the US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry sought to evaluate glyphosate toxicity in 2015, Monsanto expressed concern about what the agency might find and engaged the assistance of EPA officials to delay that review. The efforts delayed the release of the public draft of the review – originally to be issued three years ago – until earlier this month. Just as Monsanto had feared, the agency’s review found links between cancer and glyphosate.
* Although Monsanto was aware of tests showing how easily the chemicals in Roundup are absorbed into human skin, neither the company nor the EPA have warned consumers of a need to wear protective clothing.
* In the 1980s EPA scientists saw that mice dosed with glyphosate developedrare kidney tumors, which they said demonstrated cancer risks for people. But after protests from Monsanto, the EPA’s top brass overruled its own scientists and assured Americans that glyphosate poses no cancer risk.
Precisely because the chemical has been treated as so much safer than other pesticides, over the past 45 years glyphosate has become virtually ubiquitous: residues of the chemical have been documented in food, air, water and soil samples, as well as within the bodies of people who have never used the pesticide. The chemical has even been detected in raindrops.
It all raises this troubling question: if what has been touted as perhaps our “safest” widely used pesticide actually causes cancer, what assurance do we have about the hundreds of other pesticides that the EPA has assured us are safe?
For years the EPA has been called upon to fully ban the brain-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos but has refused to do so, saying it is still evaluating the science. A federal appeals court recently ordered the EPA to make a final decision, noting the weighty scientific evidence showing the harm the insecticide does to children. The EPA has thus far refused to act but some states are not waiting. Hawaii passed a ban on chlorpyrifos last year. Now New York, Oregon and California are moving to do the same, trying to protect their residents if the EPA won’t.
Many European countries prohibit regulators from approving pesticides that are considered mutagens, carcinogens, reproductive toxicants or endocrine disruptors. But these same products in the US face little to no resistance from regulators.
Monsanto – which was purchased last year by Bayer AG – continues to assert glyphosate’s safety. But with more than 13,000 plaintiffs awaiting their own day in court, a California judge has ordered Monsanto/Bayer to enter into talks to consider settling the cases.
Meanwhile, the evidence revealed within the courtrooms has been resonating across the country as several cities, schools and neighborhoods are limiting or banning glyphosate and other pesticides. New York City council members have introduced legislation that would ban city agencies from spraying glyphosate-based herbicides and other toxic pesticides in parks and other public spaces. City commissioners in Miami voted in favor of a ban on glyphosate herbicides in February, and in March the Los Angeles county board of supervisors issued a moratorium on glyphosate applications on county property.
Harrell’s, a Florida-based turf, golf course and agricultural product supplier, stopped offering glyphosate products as of 1 March. And just as the spring planting season is getting under way, consumers are discovering that Roundup is no longer available at Costco, the retail giant that routinely ranks among the nation’s five largest.
It is heartening to see consumers and some cities and businesses stepping up to try to protect themselves from pesticides known to be harmful.
But until our elected leaders in Congress require the EPA to adopt more transparent, science-based practices that prioritize the health of Americans over industry profits, consumers should assume they’re on their own when it comes to protecting themselves and their families.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/07/epa-monsanto-round-up-trial
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Expert Focus: Using Chemical Substance Data for Global Compliance
May 7, 2019 | Chemical Watch
Samer Aburous, senior expert global notification Symrise AG, discusses how best to ensure acceptance of data in multiple jurisdictions.
Compliance with global chemical management regulations is crucial when it comes to the worldwide marketing of chemical materials. One of the major pillars of chemical compliance is the availability of data on the properties and effects of chemical substances. Hence, companies need to consider the global acceptability and permissibility of their data, to avoid undesirable business conditions caused by possible fines, delays and expensive remedies as a result of non-compliance through inadequate data.
Chemical substances are widely used in different areas of our daily life such as food, medicine, personal care, home care, pesticides and in many other personal, professional and industrial applications. This wide use and resulting exposure require ensuring production, use and disposal is safe by means of safety assessments based on the properties of the chemicals of concern.
Many jurisdictions demand testing data to comply with their legislation for managing and controlling the use of chemicals in different applications. There are variations in the types of data required under different laws; however, much of this is in common between many of the regulatory systems.
Data on chemicals can be obtained using different approaches, such as laboratory testing, quantitative structure activity relationship (Qsar) and read-across (RA). Existing testing data can also be purchased from other parties for use under different systems. To ensure the global acceptance of data and their optimal use, companies need to have a wide vision of the prospective data needs and the requirements applied in different regions and systems.
When considering laboratory testing, several points need to be taken into account depending on the planned use of the resulting data.
Accreditation and testing guidelines
Firstly, the testing lab needs not only to have the experience and knowledge to perform the study, but also should have the required accreditation, such as OECD good laboratory practice (GLP) or other local certifications. Some chemical control legislation requires certain studies to be performed in a domestic testing laboratory.
The selection of the testing guideline is also important. OECD testing guidelines are widely used and accepted but some systems may have specific requirements regarding the tested species and level of detail asked for in the study report. But also some of the new OECD testing guidelines may not be yet validated in some regions.It is strongly recommended to find out the specific requirements of the regulatory regime under which the data will be used and to communicate that in a timely fashion to the testing laboratory.
Examples of such requirements include: China requires biodegradation and some ecotoxicity studies to be performed in accredited testing labs in China, using Chinese species (where applicable); study of partition coefficient for the South Korean CCL (the Korean Act on the Registration and Evaluation of Chemical Substances) needs to be performed under GLP conditions; and Japan's chemical regulation requires a higher level of documented details in the testing reports of some studies. The testing laboratory may need to use a different template to comply with this.
Furthermore, particular attention needs to be paid to the appropriate identification of the test subject, which is key in judging the reliability of the generated data. It is not advisable to only use the commercial name. The chemical identity (chemical name and Cas number), purity and impurity profile (for example, gas chromatogram) needs to be well documented and preferably included in the test report.
Sharing data
Existing testing data may be shared between companies and this holds benefits for both data holder and grantee. Purchasing existing data will normally reduce the time and cost of completing the data set for any specific registration. The following considerations are key in deciding whether to perform a new, or purchase an existing, study:
-availability and reliability of existing data: upon confirming that a specific study is available, it is essential to check that the documentation and details are adequate to judge its quality and reliability;
-type of data (for example, data on animals): all possible efforts need to be made to avoid performing, or even worse repeating, a study on animals. Maintaining animal welfare principles should be given highest priority;
-planned use of the purchased data: knowing that purchasing data for multiple-use (multiple regions and/or multiple legislations) will cost as much as a new study, it may be wise in this case (with the exception of animal studies) to perform a new study to have all the advantages of a data holder; and
-budget and time constraints: obtaining access to existing data is normally faster and cheaper, particularly for long-term and repeat-dose studies.
Finding existing data on a specific chemical may not be an easy task but rewards the effort, especially when it comes to animal studies. It is worth pointing out that all known names and identifiers of a chemical need to be used when searching for corresponding data. The following websites and services are useful for finding existing data: Echa; the AMBIT chemical safety prediction tool; databases such as Pubchem, ChemIDplus, eChemportal; the OECD QSAR toolbox; the US-EPA chemistry dashboard; and Australia’s Nicnas website.
Before purchasing access to an existing study, its quality and reliability needs to be carefully assessed. Give particular attention to the testing method used and laboratory qualifications, test item identity, documentation of testing conditions and results.
Additionally, any deviations from the standard testing guidelines should be evaluated critically. In some cases, the availability of an original study report in hard form may represent a determining factor because some systems (for example, cosmetic ingredient registration in China) require the submission of these.Agreements on data sharing are essential to regulate the conditions and terms under which access to data is given. Standard agreement templates, provided by industry associations, can be used to manage data sharing for different purposes and regions. However, companies need to properly adapt the template and use the correct terminology to reflect the conditions of sharing. In particular, special attention needs to be paid to adjust the clauses related to the specific purpose of sharing (registration, reporting, internal assessment), validity area, responsible authorities and the correct name of the legislation (when applicable).
Qsar and RA
Qsar and RA approaches can be also used to fill in some data gaps. However, such data may not be accepted in some regions. It is important to ask for advice from the responsible authority or a consultant before preparing and submitting data based on these approaches. Generally, Qsar and RA data are accepted in Europe, China, USA, Canada, Australia, Korea and the Philippines.
Different free and commercial models are available to generate reliable Qsar data on some physico-chemical and environmental toxicity and fate properties of mono constituent substances. For other more complex properties and substances, Qsar models may not be reliable but may provide data to support other approaches.
The scientific validity of the Qsar data is confirmed by following the five OECD principles. More than one valid model can be utilised for an endpoint, taking the outcome of the most reliable as the key result supported by results from the other models. Good documentation of the model used and results obtained will help in the evaluation of the generated data and increases the likelihood of its acceptance.
Unlike the Qsar approach, the RA approach can generate data on many properties and be used with multi constituent substances and UVCBs, given that the constituents of both the target and source substances are well identified. Availability of testing data is an essential element in selecting source substances; however, special attention needs to be given to the similarity to the target substance, bearing in mind also the involved chemical functional groups and their relevance to the addressed endpoint.
Again, the importance of good documentation of RA data should not be underestimated, and the report needs to account for the following points: RA hypothesis; identity of source and target chemicals, including their purity and impurity profiles; data matrix for source and target chemicals; justification of RA approach; and conclusion.
The evolving nature of chemical management regulations requires careful and continual monitoring of changing data requirements and use possibilities. Additionally, available tools and search engines need to be utilised well to generate alternative, or look for existing, data on chemicals.
Dedicated training is required for some tools (for example, the OECD QSAR Toolbox) but this is worth the time. Comprehensive and long-term compliance plans make decisions on data collection simpler and more efficient.https://chemicalwatch.com/77002/expert-focus-using-chemical-substance-data-for-global-compliance
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N.J. Home to 35 Sites Where Two PFAs Chemicals Top New State Limits
May 7, 2019 | WHYY
By Jon Hurdle
Researchers have identified 35 New Jersey sites where drinking-water tests in recent years reveal contamination with two toxic PFAS chemicals exceed limits now being implemented by state officials.
Environmental Working Group, a national advocate for stricter limits on the chemicals, compiled PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) testing data from local water systems, an academic survey, and military authorities throughout the country, and presented it in a national map that was first published in July 2018.
An updated map, published on Monday, shows 23 New Jersey sites where PFOA, a type of PFAS chemical, topped a new health limit of 14 parts per trillion (ppt) that’s due to be set by the Department of Environmental Protection. The data shows another 12 sites where contamination with the chemical PFOS was higher than a new state health limit of 13 ppt.
Search an interactive database of water systems and locations with PFAS contamination.Keeping drinking water safe
State scientists have determined that human health can be protected by setting those limits for drinking water.
While contamination levels may have declined following treatment by water utilities, it is likely that some level of the chemicals remain because they don’t degrade in the environment. That represents a continuing health concern, said Bill Walker, vice president for EWG.
“When a water system is contaminated with PFAS, treatment will lower the concentration but not completely remove it. So the contamination is still there, just being treated at a cost to the water district and its customers,” he said.
EWG isn’t saying that every site on the map has water that’s unsafe to drink but it does endorse research showing that PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) and PFOS (perfluorooctanesulfonic acid) can harm human health at levels as low as 1 ppt, Walker said.
Elsewhere in New Jersey, PFOA or PFOS in two places exceeded a much higher health-advisory limit of 70 ppt, as recommended — but not required — by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to the data.
Getting tough on setting limits
Officials in some states including New Jersey are setting tough health limits on PFAS chemicals in drinking water and ground water in response to growing evidence of their links to cancer and other health conditions including thyroid problems, low birth weights, and elevated cholesterol.
The chemicals, whose uses once included nonstick cookware and flame-retardant fabrics, are more widespread in New Jersey than in many other places because of the state’s industrial heritage. While the better-known PFAS chemicals have been phased out by U.S. manufacturers, they persist in waterways and soil because they don’t break down in the environment.
Some are being replaced by substitute chemicals such as GenX, which scientists say may be just as toxic as the originals.
In 2014, the DEP published its own PFAS study from data gathered in 2009 and 2010, finding that two-thirds of samples taken from 31 municipal water systems contained the chemicals.
The new map shows New Jersey with 43 sites where the chemicals have been found at various levels. That’s the third-highest in the country after California and top-ranked Michigan, and is 36 more in New Jersey than when the map was first published.
Growing understanding of scope of problem
Nationally, there are now 610 sites in 43 states with PFAS contamination, up from 172 contaminated sites in 40 states the last time the map was published. The two maps are not directly comparable because new data sources were added this time, but they show growing knowledge about a widespread national problem, EWG said.
The additional sites probably indicate new data sources rather than the spread of contamination, EWG said. But it warned that the overall results are still likely to understate the true scale of the problem.
The EPA requires reports from utilities only at a relatively high level of contamination, so the data is likely to exclude many lower-level results that still represent a threat to public health, EWG officials said.
Walker said there is “ample reason to believe” that PFAS contamination is more widespread than indicated by the EPA data because of the agency’s high reporting levels, and because many states have not done the extensive testing that is currently being done, for example, in Michigan.
The EPA required national testing for PFAS in public water systems from 2013 to 2015 but did not release the results of PFAS below 90 ppt, according to EWG. Later testing by a private company found 28 percent of public water systems had PFAS chemicals at or above 5 ppt, and the number almost doubled when the limit was reduced to 2.5 ppt — which some scientists believe is still a threat to human health.
On that basis, EWG calculated in May 2018 that 110 million Americans, or more than five times the previous estimate, could have PFAS in their tap water.
EPA issues ‘Action Plan’
In February, the EPA released an “Action Plan” on PFAS but declined to commit to setting a national maximum contaminant limit (MCL) that advocates say is essential to curbing the chemicals.
In New Jersey, the new data compilation found by far the highest contamination at the McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst Joint Base, where testing in 2015 found ground water as high as 264,300 ppt or 3,775 times higher than the EPA’s limit, the data shows.
At the former Naval Air Warfare Center Trenton, now Trenton Mercer airport, DOD officials testing in 2018 found 23 out of 38 monitoring wells contained PFOA and PFOS combined as high as 27,800 ppt, or almost 400 times the EPA’s limit.
At both bases, as in many other military sites across the country, high levels of PFAS are attributed to the use of fire-fighting foam containing the chemicals.
Most of the New Jersey data comes from reports to the EPA by 38 local utilities, under a program called the Safe Drinking Water Information System. The highest level was at a United Water location where officials found up to 3.12 million ppt of six PFAS chemicals in drinking water in January 2018, or almost 45,000 times higher than the EPA’s health limit for PFOA and PFOS in drinking water.
Tracy Carluccio of Delaware Riverkeeper Network, a longtime campaigner for stricter PFAS limits, said the EWG data compilation offers a helpful guide to the extent of contamination in New Jersey, and should spur officials to finalize the proposed regulation of PFOA and PFOS.
“We have a huge problem in New Jersey with widespread PFAS contamination that begs for immediate and comprehensive action by the state,” she said. “This information will help make it clear that New Jersey must finalize the regulatory package that DEP has proposed.”
https://whyy.org/articles/386766/
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Toxic Stream of ‘Mystery Foam’ Near Detroit Was PFAs – but From Where?
May 7, 2019 | MLive
By Paula Gardner
The thick white foam pouring through a ravine and rolling over a roadway near an I-75 interchange in southwest Detroit seemed scary and mysterious in summer 2018.
Police were called, Hazmat crews wore gloves and boots to get samples, and Schaefer Highway was closed for the so-called “foam events” over several days in early August.
By the time the foam dwindled to a trickle then stopped, the public was told it wasn’t harmful. Officials said the oozing river of foam it may have resulted from construction of a parking lot near Schaefer Highway and I-75 in Melvindale.
Neither was true, investigators now say.
Laboratory tests confirm extremely high concentrations of PFAS in that foam – and officials still are considering “several possible enforcement actions” against more than one “unnamed parties” believed to be responsible for foam so copious it stopped traffic on the industrial thoroughfare on the edge of Detroit, just south of Ford Motor Company’s Rouge complex in Dearborn.
The investigation trail started with Norfolk Southern Railroad, then went to Marathon Petroleum, which operates the state’s only refinery. Both received violation notices at year-end, but neither appears to be the source.
The mystery may be publicly solved this month.
“We think we’ve got a line on it,” said Stephen Kuplicki of the industrial waste control division of the Great Lakes Water Authority. “We’ve laid out several possible enforcement actions.”
Clues point to the use of AFFF, or aqueous fire-fighting foam.
That conclusion is the result of an environmental “whodunit” investigation by the state’s largest water authority.
The situation attracted local attention, but it also reflects growing concerns about PFAS contamination and the chemicals’ health effects on state residents.
Consider:Michigan continues to explore the role of AFFF in PFAS contamination, and it awaits the results of a year-long study by the state fire marshal. Thousands of containers of AFFF made with PFOS, one type of PFAS and called C8, are on the shelves of Michigan fire departments.The dangers of PFAS foam – which results when PFAS combine with both water and a agitating motion - are being elevated in Michigan, with some state health officials already upgrading warnings to “do not touch.” The foam had been accompanied by “do not eat” warnings when was found last year in Michigan rivers, including the Huron and Rogue, and on lakes, like Van Etten near Oscoda.
Skin contact a greater risk than previously thought, state says.
Three bills to set limits on AFFF in Michigan were introduced into the state House of Representatives in March, and they’ll be discussed on Tuesday, May 7, during the meeting of the Natural Resources and Outdoor Recreation Committee.
The bills would set new reporting standards for departments that use AFFF containing PFAS, along with prohibiting its use in training exercises and setting regulations to protect firefighters exposed to the chemicals.
The proposed AFFF legislation is just one among several initiatives in Michigan to change PFAS-related policy based on findings that the chemicals appear more harmful than previously believed.
Gov. Whitmer orders expedited draft rules to limit toxic fluorochemicals called PFAS in public drinking water.
While the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy oversees statewide PFAS detection and enforcement, GLWA is investigating the Melvindale mystery foam because it discharged into its storm sewer system. Water moves from the storm sewers to the waste water treatment plant that the water authority runs for communities across southeast Michigan. That wastewater treatment plant, in turn, discharges to the Detroit River, which is both a drinking water source for Metro Detroit and connected to the Great Lakes.
Wastewater processes target biological waste, but they don’t filter for PFAS – the per- and poly-fluorinated chemicals linked to cancer and other adverse health effects.
MLive investigation shows high levels of toxic chemicals are flowing through wastewater treatment plants, violating state law while threatening the environment and public health.
The state regulates the presence of two types of PFAS in surface water used for drinking water, keeping PFOS below 11-parts per trillion and PFOA below 420-ppt. Because the PFAS foam was moving through the wastewater plant, it became responsible to investigate the source – and halt it.
Within a week of the so-called “foam event,” state officials said it appeared to be the result of a solvent put onto Norfolk Southern property where the railroad had just established a 25-acre asphalt parking lot and foam was found churning in a catch basin.
They took tests, and reports indicated they didn’t expect it to be hazardous. But in the meantime, it prompted the railroad to bring a vacuum truck to the property during rain storms “to intercept the foam leaving the sewer and entering Schaefer Highway,” according to the state.
But while the railroad was forming a mitigation plan to bring an end to the foam, officials determined that no asphalt mixture would contain PFAS.
And the railroad traced the foam to “a previously unknown storm sewer pipe from the property to the west owned by Marathon Petroleum.”
So the trail turned to the state’s only oil refinery, which operates in southwest Detroit.
Marathon already had been working with GLWA on reducing the PFOS it was sending into the wastewater treatment plant, with the concentration ranging from 210-ppt to 800-ppt through July 2018 – and as low as 100-ppt since then. That PFAS comes from AFFF chemicals used by Marathon’s on-site firefighters, the company says.
In the meantime, the PFAS tests came back on the foam: It tested at a highly concentrated 729,000-ppt of PFOS and 9,000-ppt of PFOA. The numbers were far higher than what previous was found at Marathon.
Both Norfolk Southern and Marathon Petroleum received violation notices from GLWA due to the mystery foam and they continue to work on decontaminating the area, officials said.
“That enforcement with both of them is still open and active,” Kuplicki said.
But neither now is believed to be the cause of the foam. Now GLWA is looking at fire-fighting foam as the cause and it may be from a municipal source.
Michigan residents may be in line to pay for the fixes to PFAS contamination for years to come.
Marathon said its investigation also points to AFFF from off-site, with a company representative the foam was used by a municipality at a scrap yard fire in June 2018, and it and traveled through a storm water ditch, eventually reaching Schaefer Highway.
Chief Joseph Murray, who runs the consolidated Dearborn and Melvindale Fire Departments, said his department does not stock AFFF that contains PFAS.
GLWA’s Kuplicki said he expects more information later this month as officials there determine who else may be involved.
“Everybody’s on the table,” he said.
Meanwhile, the state is still waiting for its comprehensive plan on how to deal with AFFF. The state fire marshal toured several Michigan departments in fall 2018 as officials inventoried how much foam containing PFOS still could be in use. State officials provided no information on where that effort stands today.
And the situation on Schaefer Highway elevated the AFFF issue with PFOS across Marathon Petroleum. While the foam may be essential for certain times of fires, the company is changing its policy in Detroit – and maybe elsewhere.
“Marathon has stopped using C8 firefighting foam in Detroit’s emergency response vehicles and in any fire training exercises, said spokesman Jamal Kheiry. “We are evaluating our emergency response activities company-wide.”
https://www.mlive.com/news/2019/05/toxic-piles-of-mystery-foam-near-detroit-was-pfas-but-from-where.html
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New Prop 65 Safe Harbor Warnings for Residential Rental Properties
May 6, 2019 | Environmental Leader
By William M. Sloan, Tyler G. Welti and Gregory S. Berlin
On March 21, 2019, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) adopted amendments to California’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986 (known as Proposition 65 or Prop 65) that add sections on safe harbor warnings for exposures to listed chemicals at residential rental properties.
The purpose of the new regulations is to provide more specificity regarding the content of safe harbor warnings for exposures to listed chemicals that may occur at residential rental properties, and the corresponding methods for providing warnings for those exposures. The new regulations become effective on July 1, 2019.
Prop 65 Background
Under Prop 65 and the implementing regulations, businesses with 10 or more employees must provide “clear and reasonable” warnings to Californians before exposing them to a chemical listed by OEHHA as a carcinogen or reproductive toxicant (more than 900 chemicals are now on the list). The regulations establish criteria for what OEHHA considers to be a “clear and reasonable” warning, including specific language that, if used, is deemed compliant with the regulations (known as “safe harbor” warning language). Compliance with safe harbor warnings enables businesses to avoid litigation concerning the sufficiency of their warnings.
In 2016, OEHAA adopted new Prop 65 safe harbor warning regulations that became effective on August 30, 2018. The new regulations include generic safe harbor warning language, as well as safe harbor warnings for specific businesses, such as hotels, restaurants, and dentists. The California Apartment Association requested that OEHHA include in the new regulations a “tailored warning” for exposures to chemicals that may occur at apartments. However, OEHHA did not include a tailored warning in the rulemaking at that time, but agreed to consider the possibility of a future rulemaking for residential rental properties.
OEHHA Adopts Safe Harbor Warnings for Residential Rental Properties
Over the years, the apartment industry has been the subject of numerous 60-day notice of violation letters. The industry has also long expressed concern about what a clear and reasonable warning would entail for the types of exposures they expect to encounter within their business operations. Given these concerns, in 2016, the apartment industry asked OEHHA to clarify the acceptable warning method and content to use to comply with Prop 65 warning requirements, and requested that OEHHA adopt a specific tailored warning regulation for the industry.
In response to these concerns, on February 23, 2018, OEHHA proposed new tailored safe harbor warnings for residential rental properties. OEHHA concluded that tailored warnings for residential rental properties were necessary to reduce the number of vague or over-inclusive warnings being given for exposures that may or may not occur at rental properties at a level that requires a warning. In addition, OEHHA concluded the regulations were necessary to make warnings clearer and more informative for the public, and to provide certainty for landlords that must comply with Prop 65 warning requirements.
OEHHA subsequently received three comment letters in response to its proposed rulemaking from the California Apartment Association, the California Association of Realtors, and one individual. OEHHA then modified the proposed regulation to increase clarity and again invited public comments. OEHHA made no further changes to the proposed regulation and adopted the amendments on March 21, 2019.
Methods for Transmitting Warnings
The new regulation applies to “residential rental properties,” which are defined to include “an apartment, house, duplex, triplex, condominium or other dwelling that a landlord rents to a tenant to live in, including common areas.” See 27 C.C.R. § 25607.34(a). It does not apply to “hotels,” which are covered under 27 C.C.R. §§ 25607.32, 25607.33.
The regulation requires warnings to be provided to each known adult occupant of the rental property at the time of renting, leasing, or “hiring out” the property. Warnings may be transmitted in hardcopy or electronic format by any of the following means: (1) delivering a letter to each known adult tenant; (2) sending an electronic message to each known adult tenant’s email address; or (3) including the warning in a lease or rental agreement. The warning must be renewed each year by one of these same methods.
If the lease, rental agreement, renewal, or any other disclosures or required notices from the landlord to the tenant are provided to the tenant in any language other than English, the warning must also be provided in those languages. For instance, many cities in California have standard notices prepared by the municipality that must be distributed by landlords or posted on residential rental properties that explain tenant rights under local ordinances. Many cities require that these notices be displayed in various languages, and, therefore, any Prop 65 warning would have to be displayed in that language as well.
Content of Warnings
The new regulation also requires the warnings to have certain content, including: (1) a warning symbol consisting of a triangle with an exclamation point; (2) the name of at least one chemical that is a carcinogen and/or reproductive toxicant that is present at the property; and (3) the URL for the new OEHHA Prop 65 warning website. Below is an example of the full warning statement for exposures to both listed carcinogens and reproductive toxicants:
WARNING: {Name of one or more exposure source(s)} on this property can expose you to chemicals including {name of one or more chemicals} which is {are} known to the State of California to cause cancer and {name of one or more chemicals} which is {are} known to the State of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm. Talk to you landlord or the building owner about how and when you could be exposed to these chemicals in your building. For additional information go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.
There are also modifications to the language for properties that contain either a carcinogen or a reproductive toxicant (but not both), and for properties that contain chemicals listed as both a carcinogen and a reproductive toxicant.
Potential Chemicals of Concern in Residential Rental Properties
Exposures to listed chemicals at residential rental properties can occur because of the installation, presence, maintenance, or age of certain building materials, components, or fixtures, and activities of residents and their guests (such as smoking tobacco or cannabis, or driving motor vehicles). Of course, exposure scenarios will vary among rental properties. Each property, area of the property, and even unit may have unique features and chemicals that could result in exposures that trigger Prop 65’s warning requirements.
Examples of Prop 65-listed chemicals that tenants may be exposed to include:
• Formaldehyde in some building materials, including some insulation, composite-wood cabinetry, and wall and flooring materials;
• Carbon monoxide from any fireplaces or unvented gas space heaters;
• Lead from imported pre-1997 vinyl mini-blinds, or plumbing materials or paint chips in older buildings;
• Crystalline silica in certain paints and painted surfaces;
• Asbestos in ceiling materials, if disturbed, in older buildings; and
• Some pesticides that are on the Prop 65 list, for indoor or outdoor use.Other chemical exposures that can occur at apartments or other residential rental properties include: (1) carbon monoxide and motor vehicle exhaust in enclosed parking structures; and (2) tobacco smoke and nicotine in designated smoking areas.
In addition, construction materials used in walls, floors, ceilings, and outside cladding contain chemicals, such as formaldehyde resin, asbestos, arsenic, cadmium, and creosote, which are released as gases or vapors during normal degradation or deterioration, and as dust or particulate when disturbed during repairs, maintenance, or renovation, all of which can lead to exposures.
Should You Display a Safe Harbor Warning?
Landlords are not required to use OEHHA’s safe harbor warnings. However, declining to do so poses a risk of enforcement action, and landlords will need to defend their warnings as being “clear and reasonable.” Landlords that fail to provide adequate warnings are subject to penalties as high as $2,500 per violation per day.
https://www.environmentalleader.com/2019/05/new-proposition-65-safe-harbor-warnings-for-residential-rental-properties/
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Environmentalists Press for Upstream GHG Review in FERC Suit
May 7, 2019 | Inside EPA
Environmental groups in their final reply brief in a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) challenge to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) approval of a natural gas pipeline are arguing that the panel unlawfully failed to consider the upstream climate change impacts of the new infrastructure.
The petitioners -- which include Delaware Riverkeeper, the New Jersey Conservation Foundation and the Watershed Institute along with a township and a homeowner group -- say in a May 2 filing in Delaware Riverkeeper, et al. v. FERC, et al., in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the court must protect them from FERC’s “dereliction of duty” that includes “myriad failures in issuing PennEast’s Certificate, which depicts a regulator beholden neither to statutory nor Constitutional requirements.”
Regarding NEPA issues, the groups ask the court to “correct the Commissions’ abdication of responsibility for analyzing the upstream and downstream environmental impacts from natural gas production as well as from the pipeline itself.”
They seek vacatur of FERC’s 2018 certificates to build the 115-mile PennEast gas pipeline from the Marcellus Shale region in Pennsylvania to New Jersey.
The challenge is part of the slew of lawsuits over FERC’s lack of GHG considerations in pipeline reviews, though the instant case is one of the few to directly address upstream emissions.
FERC in a March 21 brief defended its exclusion of those emissions. “The Commission considered [GHG] emissions and reasonably concluded the environmental effects from natural gas production are generally neither caused by a proposed infrastructure project nor reasonably foreseeable consequences of a project’s approval.”
The petitioners’ reply says that FERC “makes no attempt to rehabilitate its false statement” that the project does not depend on additional shale gas production and that it will not cause development of gas reserves. FERC “now contends that it satisfied [NEPA] by identifying the number of new wells induced by the Project. Not so.”
The environmentalists add that FERC also does not satisfy NEPA by stating the sum of acres that would be affected, which they say “is not a description of actual environmental effects.”
“Merely discussing outputs, such as acres to be developed or total wells to be developed, tells decisionmakers and the public nothing about the actual environmental impacts on particular resources, which is what [NEPA] demands,” they argue.
The case also seeks a court order forcing FERC to monetize the project’s climate damages and says the commission “wrongly implies” that the D.C. Circuit resolved the social cost of carbon (SCC) issue when it cited its Feb. 19 unpublished opinion in Appalachian Voices v. FERC. That ruling, the groups say, “held only that petitioners insufficiently raised the issue.”
“The commission argues that imperfect consensus on discount rates prevents using any [SCC] estimates. . . . But even using the most conservative value, the Project’s annual climate damages are minimally $250 million, and not, as the Commission’s analysis suggests, $0.”
The filing adds that FERC’s failure to assess the significance of the $250 million “is arbitrary.”
Briefing is slated to be complete in the case by June 6, and oral arguments have not yet been scheduled. When the D.C. Circuit does hear the case, it will consider FERC’s earlier efforts to dismiss the case on procedural grounds as part of the merits review.
https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/environmentalists-press-upstream-ghg-review-ferc-suit
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Pembina Jordan Cove LNG Denied Oregon Water Quality Certificate
May 7, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Christina Buurma
Oregon Department of Environmental Quality denied a permit for LNG export project without prejudice, meaning Pembina Pipeline Corp. can reapply.
The department planned to make the decision in September, but said in a statement May 6 that it accelerated the schedule to ensure “that it does not unintentionally waive Oregon’s authority to review the water quality impacts.”
The Army Corps of Engineers initially instructed the DEQ to complete its review by May 7, but the Corps extended the date to September last fall. “Recent federal court and agency decisions have raised significant questions about whether this extension was valid,” and so the department made the decision by the original deadline, the statement said.
The agency said it issued the denial because of “insufficient information to demonstrate compliance with water quality standards.”
Jordan Cove LNG project would export as much as 7.8 million tons of LNG per year from the Oregon coast. The project would include a 229-mile pipeline.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/pembina-jordan-cove-lng-denied-oregon-water-quality-certificate
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Eco-Friendly Fracking Patent Lawsuit Moves to South Carolina
May 7, 2019 | BNA Daily Environment Report
By Brian Flood
A lawsuit over patents for “environmentally friendly” fracking chemicals must change venues, a federal court ruled.
Green Source Holdings LLC develops methods of injecting compounds called “terpenes,” derived from natural materials like pine trees, into oil and gas formations to increase their productivity.
Green Source claims that Ingevity Corp. has infringed nine of its patents for this technology by making and selling the biodegradable solvent EnvaSolv.
Arkansas isn’t the proper venue for this case, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas said May 6.
The venue statute for patent disputes requires that the case be brought either in the district where the defendant resides, or “where the defendant has committed acts of infringement and has a regular and established place of business.”
Ingevity produced a declaration from its global commercial director for oilfield technologies averring that the company doesn’t manufacture EnvaSolv at its Crossett, Ark., plant and has never sold it to customers in Arkansas. Green Source failed to produce countering evidence, the court said.
The court rejected Ingevity’s motion to dismiss the case, however, and instead transferred it to South Carolina, where Ingevity is headquartered and where Green Source claims Ingevity sells EnvaSolv.
"[D]ismissing the case and requiring Plaintiff to immediately refile in another judicial district would serve only to delay the progress of justice,” the court reasoned.
Green Source is represented by Raley & Bowick LLP and PPGMR Law PLLC. Ingevity is represented by Friday, Eldredge & Clark LLP and Tucker Ellis LLP.
https://news.bloombergenvironment.com/environment-and-energy/eco-friendly-fracking-patent-lawsuit-moves-to-south-carolina
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Lessons From Deepwater Horizon are Particularly Relevant Today
May 7, 2019 | Real Clear Energy
By Nicholas Bahr & Alfonsius Ariawan
President Trump’s recent announcement that his administration will no longer waive sanctions on nations that import oil from Iran demonstrates the economic and diplomatic advantages provided by America’s surging oil and natural gas production. The U.S. produced 10.9 million barrels of oil each day last year, breaking a record dating back to 1970, according to the Energy Information Administration. Today, U.S. oil production is at an all-time high and is anticipated to increase another 2 million barrels per day by 2020.
As America leverages its vast domestic energy resources and puts the nation on a path toward eventual “energy independence,” it is vital that U.S. energy producers be mindful of the past and not let safety become an afterthought as we seek to meet our energy needs and pump more oil and gas.
It was nearly a decade ago on April 20, 2010 when the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling facility experienced a catastrophic failure resulting in significant loss of life and environmental consequences. Numerous investigations, both governmental and non-governmental, pointed to several technical issues as the cause of the Deepwater Horizon incident, including failure of a Blow-out Preventer, improper well design, and failure of redundant safety systems.
But underneath all those technical problems with Deepwater Horizon, and at the heart of many catastrophic incidents across high-hazard industries, were human and organizational problems. There are frequently consistent gaps in the balance between production and safety, a misalignment of short-term and long-term goals, and a lack of employee engagement that is essential to creating a safer organizational culture.
In our work advising high-risk industries, including oil and gas, we have found that many company board rooms tend to focus more on short-term concerns such as worker injury rates and company productivity than longer-term concerns such as asset reliability and process safety. In a 2018 survey of executives at more than 350 major corporations worldwide conducted by DuPont Sustainable Solutions, nearly 93 percent noted that productivity is extremely influential to investment decisions. But when asked how influential asset reliability and reducing catastrophic incidents are, the number dropped significantly, even though these are critical to ensuring long-term productivity. Increased productivity and improved safety cannot be considered mutually exclusive.
There also appears to be a significant gap between the focus on employee safety and that of process safety incidents. Roughly 72 percent of survey respondents report discussing employee safety regularly in board meetings. However, process safety is discussed by executives less than half the time. Of course, safety of employees is critical in any organization, and it tends to be more visible to the organization. Process safety incidents, however, while less frequent, tend to be catastrophic, and frequently bring with them significant reputational and financial consequences. Process safety should be equally important as employee safety.
Finally, there is lack of workforce engagement in safety management processes and activities among many high-hazard companies, which might be the most important determinant of operational safety success or failure. There is a belief across all industries that implementing more systems or processes can strengthen business performance, but this creates a dependent culture where success relies on procedures and oversights.
Instead, companies should better engage employees and empower them to raise concern should they observe risk and hazardous operational conditions. After all, the day-to-day workforce constitutes most of the company and is the first line of defense when an incident occurs. Leveraging employees’ everyday knowledge and experience, and empowering them to act to prevent risk, will help establish a strong safety culture within the company that can help prevent major incidents.
Leveraging America’s vast energy resources can greatly enhance our economic and national security, but it is important that in doing so we don’t make safety an afterthought. When incidents occur, it can be easy to play “whack-a-mole” by addressing the problem at hand and then returning to business as usual until the next incident occurs. Instead, we must learn from the past and be vigilant to ensure catastrophic accidents do not repeat themselves.
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2019/05/06/lessons_from_deepwater_horizon_are_particularly_relevant_today.html
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National Oilwell Varco to Test Technology to Develop Automated, Remote-Controlled Drillships
May 7, 2019 | Houston Chronicle
By Sergio Chapa
The auto industry is testing self-driving cars. Big deal. The oil and gas industry is working on self-driving drillships.
The Houston oil field services company National Oilwell Varco said it plans to begin testing technology this summer that would allow it to place self-guiding, remote-controlled and automated drillships, which drill offshore wells, on the world’s oceans in just a few years time.
The testing will begin onshore in Norway and then on a ship in the North Sea, said National Oilwell Varco Chief Technology Officer Hege Kverneland at the Offshore Technology Conference on Monday.
“A lot of the operations and support activities that you’re doing on a drillship, you can support them from shore,” Kverneland said. “You could support several operations at the same time instead of physically being on the rig.”
The pursuit of a drillship that would operate with minimal crew is another example of the oil and gas energy industry’s efforts to employ technology to improve efficiency, cut costs and enhance safety. The industry is increasingly turning to sensors to monitor operations and collect data, and to drones and other robotics to do inspections and dangerous jobs, shifting work from remote oil fields and offshore platforms to control rooms in Houston.
Such technological advancements are driving down costs, which has become increasingly critical for offshore developments, which contend not only with lower oil prices, but also competition from onshore shale oil fields.
National Oilwell Varco, which is working for the Norwegian energy company Equinor, is scheduled to begin its onshore tests of the drillship technology in the coastal town of Kristiansand in June. The equipment will be controlled remotely by operators at an NOV facility some 10 miles away in Søgne.
“The biggest challenge with a remote-controlled is the connectivity and that you can actually transfer that much data safely,” Kverneland said. “That’s probably what’s limiting us right now, but that’s also where the North Sea will be a very good playground because we probably have the best internet access there than anywhere else.”
NOV currently uses a crew of 200 people aboard a drillship, but Kverneland believes that if the tests are successful, the company can reduce a crew size down to 100 people, who will still be needed to operate other systems that for the moment still require manual operators.
“It’s the first step in eventually getting to remote operations,” Kverneland said. “I don’t necessarily think that we’ll get rid of all of the people but we will get rid of a lot of the people. It’ll be much fewer people on our drillship that we have today.”
During a companion presentation, Anders Opedal, Equinor’s executive vice president for technology, projects and drilling, said the Norwegian oil and natural gas company wants to take the technology one step further. The company’s long-term plans, Opedal said, include developing unmanned, automated and remote-controlled production platforms.
“We believe that this is not only a solution for the Norwegian Continental Shelf but also we believe it can be a successful concept elsewhere - in ultradeep water in the Gulf of Mexico and Brazil, maybe within the next decade,” Opedal said.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/National-Oilwell-Varco-to-test-technology-to-13823985.php?t=1c68df07b2&cmpid=ffcp
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Enviros File FOIA Suits for Pesticide Docs
May 7, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Michael Doyle
Environmentalists went to court today in hopes of squeezing myriad pesticides-related documents out from several allegedly unresponsive federal agencies.
In a flurry of four Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, the Center for Biological Diversity seeks to compel disclosures from EPA, the Interior Department, the Department of Agriculture, NOAA Fisheries and others.
All told, the lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, revolve around 20 different FOIA requests for which meaningful responses have not yet been forthcoming.
"Federal agencies that are supposed to be protecting human health, wildlife and our environment from dangerous pesticides have fallen into a terrible pattern of withholding critical information from the American people," Lori Ann Burd, director of the center's environmental health program, said in a statement.
One lawsuit concerns documents involving the harm certain pesticides cause to endangered species. Another seeks records of meetings between agency staff, including political appointees, and CropLife America, a pesticide industry trade group.
A third lawsuit involves an interagency working group on pesticides, and a fourth centers on what steps EPA has taken to prevent the pesticide chlorpyrifos from jeopardizing 37 endangered species.
"Failure to comply with FOIA harms the Center's ability to provide full, accurate, and current information to the public on a matter of public interest," the lawsuits state, citing the group's "mission to protect native species and their habitat."
In the case of chlorpyrifos, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a comprehensive FOIA request with EPA on Jan. 30. So far, according to the lawsuit, EPA has not provided anything other than an automated and unhelpful response.
In fiscal 2018, EPA reported receiving 11,364 FOIA requests. During the Trump administration, its backlog has grown along with the number of requests. At the end of fiscal 2018, the agency had 3,730 pending requests, up markedly from 2,054 at the end of 2016.
Interior has been crushed and slowed as well. In fiscal 2018, the department received 8,402 FOIA requests and had 3,707 pending at year's end. In fiscal 2016, Interior received 6,428 requests and had 1,048 pending at the end.
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/05/07/stories/1060291185
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Explosion at Illinois Silicones Plant
May 7, 2019 | Chemical Engineer
By Amanda Doyle
An explosion and fire at a US silicones manufacturing plant has killed three people with one other still missing.
The explosion occurred at around 21:30 local time on 3 May at the AB Speciality Silicones plant in Waukegan, Illinois. Of the nine people at the plant at the time of the explosion, two didn’t require treatment, and four were taken to hospital with moderate to serious injuries, where one later died. Two bodies have been recovered from the rubble, and one person is still missing. The search is currently ongoing but the remains of the building is not structurally sound, making search and recovery difficult.
The cause of the explosion is still unknown, and is being investigated by the state fire marshal, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the US Chemical Safety Board (CSB).
"Most of the processes that they do are very non-hazardous,” said Waukegan Fire Marshal Steven Lenzi at a news conference. “Silicone itself is not a hazardous substance. Something this weekend went horrifically wrong." He also said that the they have a good idea of where exactly the incident occurred in the building but couldn’t release the information as it is part of an ongoing investigation.
According to Lenzi, some of the plant workers alerted the others that something was wrong shortly before the incident and helped others get out of the building.
Mac Penman, AB Speciality Silicones’ General Manager, said: “We are shocked and heartbroken by the tragedy that occurred in our plant on May 3rd. We are trying our best to support all of the members of our AB family as we attempt to process this terrible loss together. We want to express our extreme gratitude to all of the first responders who arrived at the scene. We continue to work closely with the Waukegan Fire Department and the Illinois Fire Marshal as they secure the scene and complete their investigation.”
AB manufactures a variety of vinyl, hydride, phenyl, and fluro-functional silicones which are used for a range of applications from personal care to electronic products.
https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/explosion-at-illinois-silicones-plant/
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Pipeline Spills 80k Gallons of Saltwater and Oil on Farmland
May 7, 2019 | AP (In E&E - Greenwire)
A pipeline spill in Dunn County, N.D., released nearly 80,000 gallons of produced water and affected pastureland.
North Dakota's Department of Environmental Quality said the spill is believed to have been caused by workers installing an electrical line.
Produced water is a mixture of salt water and oil that can contain drilling chemicals. Pipeline operator XTO Energy Inc. reported the spill 27 miles southwest of Mandaree in late April and yesterday updated the spilled volume to 1,900 barrels. A barrel holds 42 gallons.
State officials have inspected the site and are monitoring remediation.
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/05/07/stories/1060290763
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(ACC Mentioned) Air Pollution Crisis Exposes More Environmental Racism in Illinois
May 7, 2019 | The Intercept
By Sharon Lerner
Wendy Abrams has used her wealth to help protect the environment and public health. She’s the founder of a public art exhibit meant to raise awareness on climate change, and she serves on the boards of NRDC Action Fund and the Waterkeeper Alliance, and has been on the Environmental Defense Fund’s National Council. She helped found the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago, which trains students to address environmental injustices. Abrams was a major donor to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Rahm Emanuel, and she has railed against the Keystone Pipeline and air-polluting coal plants.
Abrams’s wealth comes from Medline, a company her great-grandfather founded in 1910. Today Medline is the largest privately held manufacturer and supplier of medical supplies in the United States, with over $10 billion in sales in 2018. Abrams is a principal shareholder in Medline and formerly served as the company’s director of corporate communications; her brothers and husband are now, respectively, Medline’s CEO, president, and chief operating officer.
But now, in an uncomfortable turn of events, Abrams finds herself on the other side of an environmental crisis — affiliated with the polluter, rather than fighting on behalf of the polluted.
The Clear Killer
In 2016, a division of the Environmental Protection Agency found that the air pollutant ethylene oxide, or EtO, was more dangerous than previously thought. The clear gas was already known to cause tumors of the brain, lung, breast, uterus, and lymph system as well as neurological effects, respiratory effects, and numbness of the extremities. But the report changed EtO’s classification from probable human carcinogen to officially “carcinogenic to humans” and found that cancer risk from EtO exposure was 30 times worse than previous estimates.
Because the EPA has yet to set limits on the chemical that reflect this latest science, more than 100 census tracts around the country have elevated cancer risks due in part to ethylene oxide pollution. A 2018 EPA report, which was based on industrial facilities’ tally of their own emissions, clearly tied specific sites emitting the chemical to the cancer risk in each place. And in Waukegan, Illinois, a small city about halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee, the biggest source of ethylene oxide pollution is a Medline plant owned and operated by Wendy Abrams’s family.
Diana Burdette and her husband moved to Waukegan from Chicago in 2010. The former industrial hub on the shores of Lake Michigan offered affordable housing and proximity to the college and graduate schools they were attending. Even while both were in school, Burdette and her husband were able to rent a charming two-bedroom, brick duplex near a wooded area. Though they didn’t know it at the time, the home where they would live for nine years and have two children was being inundated with ethylene oxide from Medline, which was just one mile away, and from another factory three miles away run by a company called Vantage Specialty Chemicals.
Not long after moving to Waukegan, both Burdette and her husband began to develop respiratory problems. Burdette also began to have difficulty digesting food and lost 80 pounds. She also began to get a tingly numbness in her face and fingertips that would come and go but stayed during most of her winters there. Both her children, now three and five, also had breathing difficulties. When they got colds, the entire family relied on nebulizers. And her older son developed severe eczema.
“They kept saying it would clear up, but it never did,” said Burdette. “Until we moved.”
Shortly after the family moved to another home several miles further from the Medline plant last October, her son’s rash finally went away. Burdette’s digestion problems also disappeared, and the numbness in her face and fingertips went away, as did her entire family’s respiratory problems.
The next month, Burdette learned from an article in the Chicago Tribune that the Medline plant had been emitting dangerous amounts of ethylene oxide — the same air pollutant that was also plaguing a community about an hour south in Willowbrook, Illinois. In 2017, the Medline facility released 2,863 pounds of the chemical into the air and the Vantage Specialty Chemicals in nearby Gurnee plant released 2,160 pounds of the chemical, according to reports the companies filed with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. Together, the emissions caused the census tract where Burdette and her family lived to have a cancer risk of 157 per million in 2014, according to the most recent EPA air toxics report. That’s about 5 times the national average.
Like the residents of Willowbrook, who formed a community group called Stop Sterigenics to fight the pollution emitted from the nearby Sterigenics plant, people living close to the Medline and Vantage plants, both of which are in Lake County, sprang into action. Burdette began working with Clean Power Lake County, an organization that was already focusing on some of Waukegan’s other serious environmental problems, including a local coal-fired power plant, a coal ash pond, several Superfund sites, and a number of chemical facilities (one of which was the site of a deadly explosion this past weekend). Other residents created a new group, Stop EtO Lake County.
Diana Burdette, who moved with her husband from Chicago to Waukegan in 2010.
Photo: Courtesy of Diana BurdetteBut the environmental activists in the two suburban areas of Chicago have met with different responses. In Willowbrook, where the census tract most affected by ethylene oxide is 77 percent white and has an average per capita income of more than $71,000 a year, the EPA sent high-level officials last August to explain the risk locals faced from the chemical as soon as the federal report identifying it was made public. On the same day, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, or ATSDR, also released a report the EPA had requested about ethylene oxide in Willowbrook. In November, the EPA began monitoring the air there. And by February, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency closed the plant. The governor sent out a tweet celebrating the closure and committing to protect “the health and well-being of every Illinoisan.”
But in Waukegan, where the census tract most affected by the chemical is only 25 percent white and has a per capita income of just over $14,000, the same dangerous chemical is still in the air. Although the EPA and the state have known about the ethylene oxide in Lake County and other hotspots around the country since at least August, Burdette and the others residents learned of its presence in their air from the newspaper six months after Willowbrook residents were briefed about it. No high-level officials came to Waukegan or Gurnee to address the local risk.
And while Sterigenics was stopped from releasing ethylene oxide in Willowbrook, the Medline plant in Waukegan and the Vantage facility in Gurnee continue to emit the chemical. So far, the EPA has not done any air monitoring for ethylene oxide near either plant. Meanwhile, the federal agency has continued collecting air samples in Willowbrook even after that plant closed in February.
Lake County’s health department recently announced that it will hire a company to begin monitoring for ethylene oxide near both plants in June. While they welcome the move, local environmental groups have pointed out that the decision leaves their already strapped local governments to shoulder an expense that the federal government has paid for elsewhere. The county and the Illinois Congressional delegation have also requestedthat the ATSDR do an assessment of the health risk presented by ethylene oxide in Lake County, as it did in Willowbrook.
Asked about the discrepancy in its treatment of the two cases of pollution, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency provided a written response that noted that since the release by U.S. EPA of the monitoring data for Willowbrook, “the Illinois EPA has been evaluating other sources of emissions including those in Lake County.” The statement also said that the state agency has been working with both the Medline and Vantage facilities on measures to reduce emissions and that, in the coming weeks, “Illinois EPA will invite the public to participate in a meeting to discuss these noted and other measures at the source. Vantage will also begin air monitoring in the Gurnee community this quarter. Also in the coming weeks, the Illinois EPA will invite the public to participate in a meeting to discuss a draft construction permit that will detail emissions reducing measures that Medline will undertake very soon.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also provided a written statement in response to questions for this story. While the federal environmental agency acknowledged that it was not conducting air monitoring in Lake County, it said that, along with the IEPA, it is “coordinating with the facilities in Lake County, Illinois, to achieve additional emission reductions. The Agencies are also using a variety of tools, such as air dispersion modeling, to better characterize potential risks near the Lake County facilities, as well as other facilities and areas that NATA, which is EPA’s screening tool, identified as potentially having elevated risks.” The U.S. EPA is also providing technical assistance to the Lake County Health Department on the monitoring it is planning to do, according to the statement.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Vantage said that the company has installed an additional scrubber to reduce emissions and is currently doing testing to verify that it’s functioning properly. Vantage then plans to conduct ambient air monitoring.
The lag in the federal and state response to their problem has left some Lake County residents feeling like second-class citizens. “We want what Willowbrook got,” Jolanta Pomiotlo, a Gurnee resident of 18 years and founding member of Stop EtO in Lake County, told me recently. “We’re being told by our government agencies that all of the resources are being dedicated to Sterigenics, and they can’t afford to pay for testing in Lake County. Apparently only wealthy communities are entitled to resources from the state.”
Members of Clean Power Lake County have also been calling attention to the racial inequity in the state. “They take care of the white communities,” said Burdette, a first generation Guatemalan American. “But what about our black and brown communities? What about us?”
Medline Disputes EPA Assessment
For its part, Medline said that it is trying to limit how much ethylene oxide its Waukegan plant releases. A spokesperson referred The Intercept to a statement on the company’s website that said, “We are proactively working to install best-available abatement technology that will control all sources of emissions and will increase the efficiency of current controls to the highest level possible.” The company has also defended ethylene as lifesaving because it sterilizes equipment needed for surgeries and other medical procedures. Environmental advocates have argued that there are other ways to sterilize medical equipment that don’t cause cancer.
But the company is also questioning the EPA’s assessment of the dangers of ethylene oxide, which was conducted by a division of the agency known as IRIS. A FAQ on the Medline site notes, “The IRIS report has come under very heavy criticism from the scientific community.” It goes on to say, “The IRIS report has been formally challenged under the Information Quality Act (IQA), which requires federal agencies to employ sound science in making regulations and disseminating information and provides a mechanism to challenge government information believed to be inaccurate.”
What Medline doesn’t mention on its site is that the heavy criticism and challenges of the IRIS assessment of ethylene oxide have come from companies that use the chemical and stand to lose money if it is more strictly regulated — including Medline. In particular, the formal challengeto the ethylene oxide assessment was filed by the American Chemistry Council, a trade group to which Medline belongs.
The company’s site also describes the IRIS assessment as a “document with no legal binding effect,” a point on which Lake County residents fighting ethylene oxide agree. Although EPA scientists spent years poring over independent studies before coming to a conclusion about the dangers of ethylene oxide, their findings have not translated into federal, state, or local regulations that people here can use to stop the emissions. Both Medline’s Waukegan facility and the Vantage Specialty Chemicals plant have permits from the state allowing the release of levels of the chemical that the EPA has deemed unsafe.
“Even though it’s technically legal because it was in their permits, it’s immoral,” said Pomiotlo of Stop EtO in Lake County, which is working with elected officials to pass state legislation to ban the release of the ethylene oxide. The group has been advocating for air testing in Lake County and is one of several pushing back against an industry effort to undermine the IRIS assessment of ethylene oxide.
Clean Power Lake County is also fighting for legislation targeting ethylene oxide on the state level and working to ensure that community members have a say in any government action to address the chemical.
And the group is taking one additional step to try to rid their air of the toxic pollution by reaching out directly to the individual they think might best be able to stop it: Wendy Abrams.
Although Abrams did not respond to my questions or an interview request, members of the Clean Power Lake County are hoping she will agree to meet with them. If she does, Burdette could present her with an impassioned case. She could tell Abrams that she worries constantly about her children, who have spent their first years breathing in ethylene oxide. Abrams has brought up her own children when she argued against air pollution from coal-fired power plants, noting that “[i]n every instance, it is cheaper to prevent pollution than to clean it up.”
Or Burdette could talk about the evidence that her community is still being exposed to the pollution because it’s mostly people of color. Abrams has called on the privileged class to focus on the public health problems facing the poor.
Instead, if Abrams does grant her and the other members of Clean Power Lake County an audience, Burdette plans to simply tell her about the chemical that her family breathed for nine years while living near Abrams’s family’s plant. “I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt. I’m going to say she’s not aware of the science,” said Burdette. “If we can just sit down with her and present the honest truth, I’m hopeful she’ll make the right choice.”
https://theintercept.com/2019/05/07/medline-wendy-abrams-air-pollution/
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Judge Rules EPA Must Enforce Obama-Era Landfill Pollution Regs
May 7, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Rebecca Beitsch
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must begin enforcing pollution regulations that were set for landfills under the Obama administration.
Haywood Gilliam Jr., a U.S. district judge in Northern California, sided with California and seven other states late Monday, ordering the EPA to begin reviewing state plans for reducing pollution from landfills.
Landfills are the third-largest source of methane pollution in the U.S., releasing the highly heat-trapping gas into the air as landfill contents decompose.
Gilliam said the EPA was long overdue in meeting its obligations and ordered the agency to review state proposals and begin promulgating regulations by fall.
“Once again, we’ve held the EPA accountable for its failure to perform its mandatory duties under the Clean Air Act, and for its unwillingness to protect public health,” California Attorney General Javier Becerra said in a statement. “We celebrate this ruling requiring EPA to fulfill its long-overdue mandatory duties to control emissions from landfills.”
An EPA spokesman said they would review the decision.
The agency quickly began reconsidering the Obama-era landfill guidelines shortly after President Trump took office, announcing in May of 2017 that they would hold off on implementation while reviewing the rule.
In October of 2018, the agency again announced a delay, giving states until August of this year to submit their methane reduction plans.
Becerra argued the EPA had no legal basis for delaying implementation and enforcement of the regulation.
Gilliam, an Obama appointee, has sided against the Trump administration a number of times over the past two years, including Trump’s emergency declaration for the border wall and rollback of contraception requirements under the Affordable Care Act.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/442444-judge-rules-epa-must-enforce-obama-era-landfill-pollution-regs
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US Refused to Sign Arctic Agreement Over Climate Change Wording: Report
May 7, 2019 | The Hill - E2 Wire
By Rebecca Beitsch
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left a Tuesday meeting of the Arctic Council without signing an agreement to manage resources due to a disagreement over how to describe climate change, Reuters reported.
The council brings together the eight nations that border the Arctic, tasking them with crafting a two-year agreement for sustainably developing oil and gas in the region in light of the challenges posed by global warming.
But the U.S. chose not to sign on to the agreement because of misgivings over describing climate change as a serious threat to the Arctic, sources told Reuters.
Representatives left the meeting without a signed agreement for the first time since the council was formed in 1996.
“A majority of us regarded climate change as a fundamental challenge facing the Arctic and acknowledged the urgent need to take mitigation and adaptation actions and to strengthen resilience,” Finnish Foreign Minister Timo Soini said in a statement.
Instead of an agreement, representatives from the eight countries signed a statement committing each to sustainable development and protection of the Arctic.
Global warming is rapidly changing the region, as melting ice opens up new shipping pathways and makes it easier to explore oil and gas reserves as well as mining of zinc, iron and other metals.
U.S. officials told Reuters they were hesitant to sign the final version of the agreement given actions by China and Russia to assert rights over resources and trade routes.
“Collective goals ... are rendered meaningless, even counterproductive as soon as one nation fails to comply,” Pompeo told the council.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/442448-us-refused-to-sign-arctic-agreement-over-climate-change-wording
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Here’s How Climate Voters Will Drive the 2020 Race
May 7, 2019 | Politico
By Bill Mckibben
For three decades in American politics, climate change has been the issue that wasn’t. Even as the temperature steadily rose, and evidence mounted that it was human behavior—and human policies—that were driving this change, candidates mostly deflected. And it wasn’t hard: During the 2016 general election, no journalist even asked the presidential candidates a debate question on the topic.
But that’s not the case this time. Climate change matters for Democratic voters: A Monmouth University poll last month showed the issue as the second most important to Iowa caucus-goers after health care, and a CNN national poll found that 82 percent of Democratic respondents said it’s “very important” that their party’s nominee for president supports taking “aggressive action” to slow the effects of climate change, the highest support among several items on the progressive wish list. Most of the candidates seem convinced it’s a key weakness for Trump, and the front-runners have all embraced the issue. (The latest to weigh in, Beto O’Rourke, chose climate as the subject of his first comprehensive policy plan: a $5 trillion proposal for clean-energy infrastructure.) The question is not whether the candidates are going to talk about global warming, but how.
As the race takes shape, two key questions are materializing: What do climate-motivated voters really want? And how is the issue likely to change the race?
To review the sad history briefly: The high point of presidential climate campaigning to date probably came in 1988, when George H.W. Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” (He didn’t.) In the years that followed, candidates routinely avoided the issue. Al Gore strategically avoided it in 2000, and then, even in the wake of Gore’s magnificent Oscar-winning 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Barack Obama barely mentioned it in his 2008 run, aside from a throwaway pledge that “the rise of the seas” would begin to slow in his administration and unfulfilled plans made in a campaign speech on energy independence to implement cap and trade and create 5 million “green jobs.” In 2012, it took Hurricane Sandy, in the final days of the campaign, to shake a few pro forma words out of Obama and Romney. Donald Trump owned the issue in 2016: It was hard for anyone to top his insistence that the whole thing was a “hoax manufactured by the Chinese.”
But if you look a little more closely, climate has been breaking through despite the candidates’ attempts to avoid it. Bernie Sanders began making a big issue of climate during his insurgent run for the Democratic nomination last time around. It was one of the most reliable applause lines in his stump speech, and in one face-off with Hillary Clinton (who also had comprehensive and useful climate plans), he declared it the most important issue of all. As with his "Medicare for All" proposal, that has helped pull the Democratic field leftward for 2020. Climate was edging its way into the presidential discussion, and now the edging is over.
In part, this is because climate has made such strong incursions into national politics outside the race. Last November, young people staged a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office demanding a "Green New Deal"—turning a policy proposal into a national touchstone when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined in. Fox and conservatives railed against the Green New Deal, but polling, at least among Democrats, has stayed strong, and so far the party’s candidates have mostly paid it homage: The standard response falls along the lines of “I support the concept.” Pete Buttigieg, as is his wont, framed it pretty well, saying, “It correctly situates this as a major national emergency. It identifies this as a problem whose destructive powers is comparable to a Great Depression or world war, except this time we see it coming. So shame on us if we don’t do something.”
However, even such strong endorsements likely won’t be enough for an increasingly confident climate movement; nor will status quo ante pledges like the recent House vote in favor of rejoining the Paris climate accords. Given the reality of the Republican Party’s grip on the White House and Senate, not to mention the accords’ limited ambition, that vote was a wishy-washy exercise in virtue signaling not much better than announcing you believe in climate science.
***
When it comes to what activists are looking for, the most important thing is moving beyond symbolism to on-the-line commitments that can be cashed in after Inauguration Day. The group 350 Action, for which I serve as a board member, has the most comprehensive climate scorecard, tracking three key issues.
The first thing to watch as the race evolves is support for the Green New Deal—as an actual policy, not as a political slogan. Since the plan isn’t fully fleshed out, it’s hard to hold candidates completely accountable now, but the Sunrise Movement, the young people who launched the initiative, are holding 100 town halls across the country that began in April. Expect candidates to try to grab those crowds, and in the process commit themselves more fully to the emerging plan.
The second is what’s become known as “Keep It in the Ground”—a specific promise to stop new permits for drilling and mining on federal ground, and to apply a climate test to all new proposed infrastructure. A version was first introduced as a bill in the Senate by Sanders and Sen. Jeff Merkley in 2015, but it’s important as we head into 2020 because a president could accomplish much of it by executive fiat, without waiting for Congress to come on board. With building trade unions in opposition, it takes a certain nerve to support it; Elizabeth Warren’s powerful stance on this in recent weeks will likely draw many others along.
The third test is easiest: a simple pledge not to take money from the fossil fuel industry. After years of statistics showing the powerful links between oil money and oily votes, there’s simply no patience left for taking cash from the companies now facing lawsuits for repeatedly lying about global warming.
So on these measures, how are the candidates doing? At least five—Sanders, Warren, O’Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand and self-proclaimed climate candidate Jay Inslee—have hit the trifecta so far (After lots and lots of questions on the subject, O’Rourke this week signed a pledge to stop taking fossil fuel money). A few have failed spectacularly: former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper is known as “Frackenlooper” in environmental circles because (and you can look it up on YouTube) he once proved his fealty to the state’s oil barons by drinking a glass of fracking fluid. Most other candidates are still a little watery.
It’s early days, however, and environmental groups have mastered the art of bird-dogging candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire, waiting along rope lines to get the comments that quickly spread across the net. Expect new issues to emerge. Trump, for instance, recently offered a new approval designed to spur construction of the Keystone Pipeline. If it looks like TransCanada is anywhere near breaking ground on the project, Democrats will be expected to fight back hard, backing up thousands of activists who are pledged to conduct civil disobedience.
***
Expect the issue to spill over into other areas too. As a powerful New Yorker piece recently made clear, climate change is causing much of the exodus from Central America that ends up on the southern border, and since the U.S. has poured more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that some of those children Trump stuck in cages were driven there by us. Just as Syria’s drought helped trigger the refugee crisis that reshaped European politics, Guatemala’s might do the equivalent here, and it’s hard to predict in which direction.
Increasingly, climate change is the classic intersectional issue, one where many types of injustice converge, the fight led by people who live on the front lines of devastation. Connecting climate with health, with jobs, with justice hasn’t watered down the issue: It’s made it a priority for many more Americans who can see how the crisis touches their everyday lives.
And not just the crisis, but also the opportunity it presents, which is why the economic discussion during the campaign is likely to turn in some measure on climate as well. The transition to renewable energy at scale is the most obvious big source for new jobs, and in one state after another, solar and wind entrepreneurs have begun to rival or surpass their fossil fuel counterparts as job creators. Even Trump’s commitment to the coal industry has been insufficient to turn the economic tide: Coal-fired power plants have closed more quickly in his first term than in both of Obama’s.
Environmentalists are pushing for a presidential debate sometime during primary season that focuses exclusively on climate change. If they get it, expect a chance for some to prove their mastery of climate wonkery. (Inslee really does know the issue inside and out.)
And there could be other surprises, too. Trump actually used to believe in climate action, signing on to calls for carbon cuts barely five years ago. He said recently that he might run on his environmental record — a silly idea, unless the oil industry decides it’s scared enough of ongoing litigation (and the Green New Deal) that it would accept a modest carbon tax, in which case Trump might be the guy they chose to push it forward. And if he did, the Democrats would be caught between wanting the right deal and wanting any deal.
For climate activists, as for all progressive groups, the Democratic primary offers a hard choice. We’re eager to make sure that the next president finally does something truly serious about climate change. But like all progressives, we’re terrified of another Trump term and worried just a tad about pushing too hard, about setting up the candidate for defeat by getting them too far out on a limb. It would all be easier if we hadn’t wasted the past 30 years, but that inaction has left us at a moment when physics demands enormous change. And so, in the end, we will push. On a planet where the poles are rapidly melting, what choice do we have?
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/05/07/climate-change-election-2020-226797
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Sunrise Movement Gets Boost Ahead of Election Push
May 7, 2019 | E&E - Greenwire
By Nick Sobczyk
The Sunrise Movement is getting a $250,000 cash infusion from the Wallace Global Fund as the group ramps up its push to make the progressive Green New Deal a centerpiece of the 2020 presidential election.
The fund yesterday also announced $750,000 to other groups partnering with Sunrise to support the Green New Deal — the economywide policy outline to address climate change from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.).
Sunrise's goal since it burst into Washington, D.C., with the new class of House Democrats last year was always to make the Green New Deal a national presidential debate, and the new cash will only serve to deepen its efforts.
Six Democratic 2020 hopefuls are Senate co-sponsors, and more have offered their support on the campaign trail, including moderates like Beto O'Rourke.
Sunrise said it plans to use the money for leadership training and to build a wider network of support for the Green New Deal.
"The Green New Deal is as ambitious as the scale of the problems we face, and we won't accept anything short of that," Varshini Prakash, the Sunrise Movement's executive director, said in a statement. "This award is an incredible recognition that we're on the right track and can count on the support of organizations like Wallace Global Fund to make the Green New Deal a top issue in 2020."
For the Wallace Global Fund, the Sunrise grant is just another effort to prop up a burgeoning progressive environmental movement that's pushing policies, such as "keep it in the ground," once considered far from the mainstream.
The fund has offered tens of thousands of dollars in the past to 350.org and As You Sow, a nonprofit that promotes responsible investing and shareholder advocacy on climate issues.
The grants announced yesterday came on the anniversary of Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt's executive order to create the Works Progress Administration, a pillar of the original New Deal.
"Just as laborers took to the streets in the 1930s calling out the elites and calling on government to step up, it is only fitting that we honor Sunrise's transformative role in organizing actions demanding that government address climate change as the biggest crisis of our time, and as an enormous opportunity to create millions of new high quality jobs," Scott Wallace, co-chair of the Wallace Global Fund board, said in a statement.
Wallace, whose grandfather, Henry A. Wallace, was for a time Roosevelt's vice president, ran an unsuccessful bid for Congress in Pennsylvania last year against GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick.
Despite the new infusion of cash, it remains to be seen whether Sunrise and its cohort can stay influential on the left as 2020 moves along.
For one thing, former Vice President Joe Biden is now the front-runner and is currently topping off most 2020 Democratic primary polls. He appears unlikely to support the Green New Deal, given his moderate history and friendliness with unions that have backed off from the proposal.
And the centrist lawmakers who drove Democrats to victory in the 2018 midterms are sometimes frustrated by what they see as an overly ambitious resolution that has become a Republican punching bag.
Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) today lamented the "counterproductive" publicity that surrounded the resolution's release, as well as the relentless Republican attacks that culminated in a Senate floor vote orchestrated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), he added, doesn't appear to want to give the Green New Deal much attention, either. Instead, Peters said the House should "move to real solutions" that have a shot at passing both chambers.
"I think it's become a little bit of a distraction, frankly," Peters said this morning at a panel discussion hosted by Bloomberg Government. "It's an aspirational document."
https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/2019/05/07/stories/1060291205
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