By Peter Montague
Peter Montague is an old comrade of Planet Waves editors Eric Francis and Carol van Strum. This article originally appeared on Truthout.org. Republished with permission.
The environmental movement has been campaigning since 2005 to modernize US chemicals policy, an uphill battle. The greens have done everything by the book — written a model law, built a national grassroots coalition and dispatched lobbyists to Capitol Hill. Now, however, the chemical industry has executed a classic “divide-and-conquer” maneuver, casting the greens into disarray. If the present momentum continues, Congress could end up passing a chemical reform bill that’s far worse than what we’ve got now.
What we’ve got now is the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA, pronounced Tosca) enacted in 1976 and not revised since.
As the New York Times described it, “[TSCA] purports to regulate potentially harmful chemicals in industrial and consumer goods, like plastic bottles and children’s pajamas. But the law is better known for its failures than for its successes. Of roughly 85,000 chemicals registered for use in the United States, [since 1976] only 200 have been tested by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and fewer than a dozen – including polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin and hexavalent chromium — have been restricted.
“After a federal appeals court denied the EPA the authority to issue new limits on asbestos in 1991 (22 years ago), the agency all but abandoned its efforts to enforce the law, even as evidence of health problems from exposure to a range of chemicals in consumer products has piled up,” the Times wrote.
TSCA works like this: New industrial chemicals are presumed to be safe. Ninety days before selling a new chemical, a manufacturer must notify EPA. At that time, the manufacturer must divulge any toxicity data it has for the chemical. If there’s no toxicity data, there’s nothing to divulge — a powerful incentive to avoid safety testing. EPA then has 60 days to approve the new chemical or to demand more toxicity data. But EPA’s demand for more data must be supported by substantial evidence that new information is warranted by an “unreasonable risk” to public health or the environment.