![]() Or, in place of where the form should appear in the database, there’s a blank page with a single word: “sanitized. According to Bennett, even some safety data sheets - designed to inform workers and consumers of hazards-are now heavily redacted. ![]() ![]() Supervisors cycle from the agency to industry and back, and whistleblowers report that EPA managers change scientific conclusions, delete critical information and expedite approval of new chemicals to appease manufacturers.Ĭorporations are mandated to submit studies documenting safety risks, but in 2019 the agency stopped sharing those publicly and made the data difficult for their own staff to access, whistleblowers report. “The whole system is broken,” Bennett added, due to corporate capture of the regulatory process - a dynamic she said persists under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The metric for success is “how many of these they’ve gotten out in 90 days, not how well they’re protecting human health.” “EPA doesn’t have the money, the bodies and the right expertise,” she said, nor does it have adequate time for evaluating new chemicals given a tight, statutory cutoff. Greatly increasing the funding and staffing of EPA’s chemicals division would certainly improve chemical oversight, observed Kyla Bennett, an ecologist and lawyer who directs science policy for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a nonprofit that supports whistleblowers and is pushing the EPA to protect consumers from PFAS in fluorinated plastic containers. The workload of the agency’s chemical division grew markedly as it strove to undertake more chemical reviews, but its funding remained stagnant. Environmental Protection Agency to adopt those regulations “ least burdensome ” to industry, and it permitted continued use of roughly 60,000 chemicals (including the earliest ‘legacy’ PFAS) without review of their health risks.Īn effort to strengthen TSCA in 2016 encountered strong industry pushback and accomplished only minimal reform, according to a recent ProPublica report. Why should a poison dust or spray… enjoy immunity while there is any reason to suspect that it may endanger the public health or damage the natural scene?”Ĭongress had a chance to correct this fundamental injustice when it enacted the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976, but it let corporate priorities prevail. American justice holds the accused person innocent until proved guilty somehow this concept has crept over into industry, where it doesn’t belong, and has been applied to products of all kinds. White noted a “basic flaw in our regulatory machinery. Writing in The New Yorker shortly after Carson’s death in 1964, E.B. We are still subjected to what Carson aptly termed an “appalling deluge of chemical pollution.” Catering to corporations approach to chemical regulation remains largely unchanged. ĭespite subsequent advances in environmental legislation over the intervening decades, the U.S. Like pesticides, PFAS shot from laboratory to market without thorough safety testing, endangering public health and wildlife. Synthetic insecticides had “no counterparts in nature,” she observed, yet “we have allowed these chemicals to be used with little or no advance investigation of their effect” on ecosystems or ourselves. The pesticide industry was also “a child of the Second World War,” biologist Rachel Carson wrote in her magnum opus “Silent Spring,” published 60 years ago last fall. That was when the vast class of fluorinated compounds commonly dubbed “forever chemicals” first came into widespread use, morphing from wartime applications to a cluster bomb of consumer and industrial uses. In researching per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) for a recent article series, I found myself ricocheting between the present and the 1950s and 1960s. Going back in time can reveal how far we still have to progress.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |