Lecture 8C: After 40 Years, a New Toxic Substances Control Act

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Do curso por Johns Hopkins University

Chemicals and Health

105 classificações

Johns Hopkins University

Chemicals and Health

105 classificações

This course covers chemicals in our environment and in our bodies and how they impact our health. It addresses policies and practices related to chemicals, particularly related to how they get into our bodies (exposures), what they do when they get there (toxicology), how we measure them (biomonitoring) and their impact on our health.

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Week 5 - Chemicals Policy: What do we do about chemicals & health?

So far we’ve covered: how chemicals get into our bodies and how we measure them, what our bodies do with them and what they do to our bodies, and how that ultimately impacts our health. Now we turn to policy and how society addresses the impact of chemicals on health. We will hear from a non-profit group that works to change policies such as laws & regulations related to this area. Then we’ll hear how such changes have impacted our health and environment historically, looking specifically at air quality regulation in the US. After you view the lectures in Module 5, there is a second peer-reviewed writing assessment that aims to gauge your shift in understanding the complex relationship between chemicals and health (again grade each other generously).

Lecture 8A: After 40 Years, a New Toxic Substances Control Act4:26

Lecture 8B: After 40 Years, a New Toxic Substances Control Act9:14

Lecture 8C: After 40 Years, a New Toxic Substances Control Act10:00

Lecture 8D: After 40 Years, a New Toxic Substances Control Act11:27

Lecture 8E: After 40 Years, a New Toxic Substances Control Act3:54

Conheça os instrutores

Dr. Megan Weil Latshaw, PhD
Co-Director of the Masters Programs in Environmental Health
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Beth A. Resnick, MPH
Associate Scientist
Health Policy and Management

So why did we finally begin to talk about legislative reform?

And what was it that led people to decide that we needed

to update this 40-year-old law?

Well, there were many problems with the old law that I think gradually became

almost a point of consensus among different stakeholders.

The chemicals that were on the market when TSCA passed, essentially,

were grandfathered in.

Remember, that was about 62,000 chemicals.

And they were simply presumed to be safe.

Congress gave EPA no mandate to review those chemicals and

very limited authority to actually even test them.

And in the absence of that test data,

what that meant was that no data led to no action.

In other words, those chemicals were presumed safe until and

unless such mounting evidence became overwhelming of their harm.

And then, even then,

EPA faced further hurdles to actually regulate those chemicals.

And I'll have an example of that in a moment.

This system, under TSCA, where the government has to prove

beyond a shadow of a doubt that a chemical is causing harm,

is in marked contrast to the way we deal with pharmaceuticals and pesticides.

Where the burden is on the companies that produce those chemicals

to show they're safe.

And that discrepancy, I think, began to motivate people to

see that we needed to bring TSCA more in line with those other laws.

Finally, TSCA allowed broad claims for

trade secret protection of almost everything that the chemical industry and

other companies were submitting to EPA.

And the result of that meant that no one else could see that information.

Not even state governments or local governments, not health professionals, and

certainly not the general public.

And that frustrated one of what was supposed to be the aims of TSCA.

Which was to make much more information available.

So in sum, the old TSCA was the dog that didn't bark.

I mentioned those 62,000 chemicals that were grandfathered in.

EPA, in the last 40 years, was able to require testing of only about 300 of them.

And only five of them had been regulated, and even those in only limited ways.

And the last time that EPA tried and failed to regulate a chemical was in 1991.

When its asbestos regulation was overturned by the courts,

arguing that EPA had not been able to meet its

burden of proving that asbestos presented an unreasonable risk under TSCA.

And if you can't prove that for asbestos, a chemical that still kills 10 to 15,000

Americans every year, you're going to have a hard time proving it for anything else.

Now, there were a few other motivators for getting TSCA on the national agenda.

The first was, in the absence of federal legislation and

federal regulation, states began to step in.

And they were regulating chemicals in a way that drove the chemical

industry crazy.

That patchwork of different state requirements was one of the major drivers

for federal reform.

The two administrators, under the Obama administration, at EPA,

Lisa Jackson and now Gina McCarthy, both of them made TSCA reform a top priority.

The market, itself, was beginning to demand more evidence of safety.

Companies that used chemicals in their products,

everything from furniture manufacturers to electronic makers,

to automobile producers, all were demanding more evidence from their

suppliers that the chemicals they were using in their products are safe.

And in particular, retailers got involved.

Wal Mart, and Target, and other companies like that began to demand more

evidence of safety of the suppliers of products that were sat on their shelves.

This so-called retail regulation was another factor that

was driving the industry pretty crazy.

Finally, the rest of the world was moving on, even as we did not.

The European Union's REACH Regulation was a sweeping regulation that came into

play in the mid 2000s.

And Canada, actually, was the first major environmental law

that was passed to deal some of these same problems in 1999.

So this all led to a significant shift in how the industry was

thinking about TSCA and beginning to feel about its reform.

And I quote here just a couple of excerpts from

major leaders in the chemical industry.

Who pointed to the concern that they had with the public's confidence

was being undermined by a weak law.

And that in the absence of a strong law, states were acting.

And that was beginning to create enormous uncertainty in the markets.

So these factors led the industry, in about 2009-2010,

to begin to call for TSCA reform.

Not because they believed the chemicals were unsafe.

But because they believed the public, and state governments, and

the rest of the market believed they might be unsafe.

And they decided they would be better off with a stronger law.

So the legislative path to TSCA reform really covers the last five Congresses.

Goes all the way back to a very short bill that was introduced in the Senate

in 2005 called the Kid-Safe Chemicals Act, by the late Senator Lautenberg.

And I've just laid out here the history of various bills that got introduced

in the subsequent Congresses, in both the Senate and the House,

representing an increase of activity and thinking about reforming the law.

All of that culminated, or really, the breakthrough came in 2013

when Senator Lautenberg, just before his death, introduced

the first bipartisan legislation with Senator David Vitter from Louisiana,

probably the staunchest ally of the chemical industry in the US Congress.

And that bipartisan breakthrough began us on a path toward

the passage of TSCA reform in 2016, in the 114th Congress.

And I've laid out on this slide, some milestones in that.

I'm not going to go through these in detail.

But I just wanted to point to the fact that the Senate and

House both initially passed their own bills.

And those bills were very different.

And they spent much of the first half, from January to May of 2016,

resolving the differences in bicameral negotiations

between staff on the Senate and the House side.

That lead, finally, to a breakthrough that resolved the differences.

And then that bill had to go back to the House, was passed in May of 2016,

and back to the Senate, where it passed in June.

And then signed by the President on June 22nd of 2016.

And that was the Frank R Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act.

So let me, now, turn to what this law does, how it actually is going to work.

And in particular, how it's going to address the existing chemicals,

that body of tens of 1000s of chemicals that are already in use.

The first step in that process is to identify which of those chemicals on that

large inventory of 85,000 are actually in use today.

And this is what's termed the inventory reset,

where EPA will require companies to identify any chemicals they are making

on that list that they have made now or in the past ten years.

Those will become the so-called active chemicals.

And those are the focus of most of the effort after that.

So for those active chemicals, EPA is to undertake what is called prioritization.

They are to look at the available information on those chemicals.

And decide whether they represent a high priority for further scrutiny, or

really can be set aside as low priority, based on sufficient information to

determine that they are unlikely to present any significant risk.

Now, that process doesn't happen all at once.

It happens in batches, where EPA brings chemicals into a pipeline.

First, deciding that they're active, then prioritizing them.

And for those that are deemed to be high priority,

those go through a full risk evaluation.

This is, essentially, a risk assessment that ends in

a determination as to whether that chemical does one of two things.

Either that it presents an unreasonable risk or it does not.

If the finding is that that chemical does not present the risk,

that's really the end of the road for this pipeline.

Unless someone disagrees with that, and

decides to challenge EPA's decision in court.

If that determination by the agency is that a chemical does present

an unreasonable risk, then there is now a mandatory duty for

EPA to regulate that chemical.

And either ban it or

restrict it sufficiently to eliminate the risk that it identified.

Now, these are all new features of the law.

And I'll describe how they stack up against the old law in just a moment.

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