[CPEO-BIF] Industry again challenges EPA findings on TCE toxicity

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

On March 31, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) - the voice of America’s leading chemical manufacturers - sent a letter to the U.S. Commerce Department urging that it review EPA memos, from the U.S. EPA’s  Office of Land and Emergency Management as well as the western regions (Region 9 and Region 10), explaining how to incorporate EPA’s toxicity assessment for trichloroethylene (TCE) into vapor intrusion responses. In essence, industry is again contesting EPA’s finding that short-term, low-level TCE exposure - among pregnant women - causes fetal heart malformations. The ACC suggests further that protecting the public against this risk is costing responsible parties (polluters and their financial descendants) tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars extra in cleanup expenses.

The ACC is taking advantage of President Trump’s January 24, 2017 Memorandum , “Streamlining Permitting and Reducing Regulatory Burdens for Domestic Manufacturing."
Ostensibly, the resulting inter-agency “information collection” exercise is designed to determine how environmental and other regulations place a burden on domestic manufacturers. While I believe the negative impact of regulations on domestic manufacturing is grossly overstated, the ACC petition is a bad fit. The EPA memos address the investigation, mitigation, and remediation of contamination that has been in the subsurface for decades. Few domestic manufacturers use TCE any more.

Yet given the political winds in our nation’s capital, the mere highlighting of this instance of EPA protecting public health may undermine cleanup activity across the country.

I have attached the ACC letter as a PDF.

Lenny

Attachment: ACC TCE letter.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

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Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650/961-8918 
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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