James Bruggers - Watchdog Earth

Moms press for better toxics law

Posted on August 8, 2011 by James Bruggers

Lexington mothers will be participating in a national "stroller brigade" on Wednesday, urging Congress to reform the outdated Toxic Substances Control Act.

There doesn't appear to be any such event in Louisville.

But in a story I wrote last year for The Courier-Journal, I reported that the law offers very little control over the more than 80,000 chemicals used in industry and consumer goods, many of which are also making it into our bodies, according to the General Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

In the 34 years since Congress passed the toxic substances law, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has only been able to use it to control just five, GAO found. One reason is that the law requires the EPA to prove a chemical is unsafe.

The Kentucky Environment Foundation is urging Lexington-area mom's to participate, issuing a statement today about parents concerns about unregulated toxic chemicals and their effect on the health and safety of their kids. "Perhaps, then, legislators will start paying attention also, and work to reform the current ineffective Toxic Substances Control Act, which hasn't been changed since its enactment in 1976," according to the foundation..

Below are portions of an article I wrote about this issue back in 2001. Matters really haven't changed that much since then.

Federal laws governing toxic chemicals and hazardous working conditions give the impression that Congress has protected society.

But consider this:

- While the Environmental Protection Agency has nearly 79,000 industrial chemicals on file, the burden of environmental or health screening rests with the manufacturers themselves.

In essence, the chemicals are considered safe until proven otherwise by those who make and sell them.

- Regulatory agencies and the public remain deeply in the dark about the risks many chemicals pose to human health or the environment.

For example, an EPA study shows that fewer than 7 percent of the 2,800 most widely used chemicals have publicly available toxicity test results.

- The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has specific health regulations for just 500 industrial chemicals, and has set exposure limits for about 450.

Environmentalists, industry representatives and government officials agree that two federal agencies created to protect Americans from adverse chemical exposures have become paralyzed by court rulings and the intricacies of the laws themselves.

Further, the groups agree, OSHA and the EPA have been unable to keep pace with an industry that introduces 15 new chemicals a week - 8,000 in the last 10 years.

"We're allowing workers and sometimes children of workers to be human guinea pigs," said Charlotte Brody, an activist with the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, an environmental group founded by Love Canal organizer Lois Gibbs.

James O'Callaghan, who runs the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health neurotoxicology lab in Morgantown, W.Va., said people almost need to get sick before there can be the political and regulatory willpower to research and control the potential hazards.

"You need good old-fashioned poisonings," he said.

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Finding proof that a chemical harms people or the environment requires lengthy, complicated, expensive studies — and sometimes impossible studies, said Dr. Douglas H. Linz, an occupational and environmental medicine specialist in Cincinnati.

Take, for instance, the railroad workers who were exposed to solvents.

"We are talking about something that requires recurrent high levels of intoxication on a daily or near-daily basis extending over more than 10 years of work," Linz said. "You tell me what kind of toxicology studies I can do, preferably in humans, that will adequately address that kind of history?"

Like OSHA, the EPA has also been slapped back by the courts.

One of the most significant rulings was when the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the agency's 1989 phaseout of asbestos in many kinds of products.

Critics charge that, following the ruling in 1991, the agency has been toothless in regulating industrial chemicals despite the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.

The law gave the EPA authority over the manufacture, sale and distribution of industrial chemicals. But because of the way the law is worded, the EPA has found it difficult to force even basic testing of chemicals that may pose health or environmental threats.

A key TSCA provision calls on the EPA to prove a chemical presents an "unreasonable risk" to people or the environment before it can call on the chemical industry to conduct human health and environmental screenings.

Congress also ordered that any rules the agency adopts must be the "least burdensome" on industry.

EPA officials acknowledge the Catch-22. But they say they are finding other ways to get industry to conduct basic health screening and make the results available to the public.

The EPA acknowledges that the public has been given the results of basic health and environmental screenings for just 7 percent of these chemicals.

For nearly 45 percent, there's no screening information available to the public.

These tests attempt to answer questions such as: What are the chemical's physical properties? Does it have acute health affects? Does it cause reproductive harm? To what extent is it toxic to aquatic life?

"We basically all agreed that, yes, there was a problem," said Thomas Gilroy, a spokesman with the American Chemistry Council.

In many cases, the companies have already done the hazard screening but had not made the studies public, Gilroy said.

"There have been so many loopholes in the act," said Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, director of occupational and environmental medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and an EPA adviser during the Clinton administration.

"The toxicologists at EPA are good people, but they are overworked and understaffed."