Lisa Jackson, EPA’s chief and the president’s point-person on environmental policy, began something that should have happened 33 years ago: drive a stake into the heart of the horrendous federal chemicals regulatory program that has left an entire population polluted, beginning in the womb.

EPA plans to modernize the nation’s chemicals policy

Jackson laid out EPA’s plan to overhaul the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) with more rigorous testing and safety standards and greater EPA authority to protect the public from the dangers of toxic chemical exposure.  The Obama administration’s “principles” for reform are:

• Chemicals should be reviewed against risk-based safety standards based on sound science and protective of human health and the environment.
• Manufacturers should provide EPA with the necessary information to conclude that new and existing chemicals are safe and do not endanger public health or the environment.
• EPA should have clear authority to take risk management actions when chemicals do not meet the safety standard, with flexibility to take into account sensitive subpopulations, costs, social benefits, equity and other relevant considerations.
• Manufacturers and EPA should assess and act on priority chemicals, both existing and new, in a timely manner.
• Green Chemistry should be encouraged and provisions assuring Transparency and Public Access to Information should be strengthened.
• EPA should be given a sustained source of funding for implementation.

The importance of bio-moniotoring

During a conference call this week with environmental and public health groups and industry representatives, Jackson spent considerable time discussing the importance of bio-monitoring as an effective tool to identify which chemicals should be reviewed first, since some are substantially more toxic to human health than others.

Later in the day, in a speech at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, Jackson cited an EWG study conducted in 2005 that found hundreds of industrial chemicals in the umbilical cord blood of 10 babies born in the United States. She noted:

A 2005 study found 287 different chemicals in the cord blood of 10 newborn babies – chemicals from pesticides, fast food packaging, coal and gasoline emissions, and trash incineration.

The Administration’s new “principles” embrace positions long advocated by environmentalists, including EWG, federal and state lawmakers who back TSCA reform, and for the first time ever, the chemical industry, which has laid out its own principles for modernizing TSCA.  Cal Dooley, President and CEO of the American Chemistry Council, said:

The chemical industry is committed to the safety of our products. Any effort to modernize our nation’s chemical management system must start with consumer safety as its highest priority.  Current law is more than 30-years old and the law must be updated to keep pace with science.

EPA calls for a changing burden of proof

Perhaps the most important element in the new Obama/Jackson vision for a modern chemical review process is the call to reverse the law’s assumption that a chemical is safe for human and environmental exposure unless proven otherwise.  Currently, the burden of proof falls on EPA to show that a chemical is unsafe, and it can do so only after the chemical has been introduced into use.

As a result, it has been been virtually impossible for the agency to ban or even restrict the use of any chemical. Even asbestos, the deadly material that causes serious disease in roughly 10,000 Americans every year, has escaped federal regulation.  Administrator Jackson described it well:

As with existing chemicals, the burden of proof falls on EPA. Manufacturers aren’t required to show that sufficient data exist to fully assess a chemical’s risks. If EPA has adequate data and wants to protect the public against known risks, the law creates obstacles to quick and effective action.

Since 1976, EPA has issued regulations to control only five existing chemicals determined to present an unreasonable risk. Five from a total universe of almost 80,000 existing chemicals.  In 1989, after years of study, EPA issued rules phasing out most uses of asbestos, an exhaustively studied substance that has taken an enormous toll on the health of Americans.  Yet, a court overturned EPA’s rules because it had failed to clear the many hurdles for action under TSCA.

The beginning of a new era

Jackson’s announcement signals the beginning of new era of toxics policy in America and will continue to build momentum for Congressional efforts to reform the federal toxics program.  For the past three Congresses, Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and Congressman Henry Waxman (D- CA, 30th) have been the champions of toxics reform with their legislation, “The Kid-Safe Chemicals Act.”  Congressman Bobby L. Rush (D- IL, 1st) is expected to lead the efforts on toxics reform in the House in this Congress.

What a difference new leadership at EPA has made. In April, 2008, a top EPA official testified on toxics reform before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.  This is what Jim Gulliford, then-Assistant EPA Administrator for the Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances, had to say:

Overall, I believe that TSCA provides broad authority for the Agency to adequately control new and existing chemicals and to address emerging chemical issues as they arise.

I believe that TSCA provides EPA with the statutory tools necessary to protect public health and environment.

Next week, as the effort to reform and modernize federal regulation of toxic chemicals gets underway, environmentalists, public health advocates, chemical industry leaders and Lisa Jackson will convene an historic conference to discuss what a new federal chemicals policy should look like.  It should be a lively, frank debate and one I’m looking forward to.

Jackson’s move, announced Wednesday, is being welcomed by the environmental community and children’s health advocates. Perchlorate, a major component of rocket and missile propellants and many explosives, is a potent thyroid toxin known to disrupt brain and neurological development. For that reason, scientists and medical experts strongly urge that fetal and neonatal exposures to the chemical be prevented.

Defense and aerospace contractors are certain to fight any federal effort to order up perchlorate clean-ups, whose costs could run into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. During the Cold War, tons of improperly stored rocket fuel seeped into ground waters around rocket and missile test sites and chemical manufacturing and storage facilities.

As David Corn, Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones reported last February, companies that make or use perchlorates have hired a “bevy of lobbyists,” among them Democrats such as former Nevada senator Richard Bryan, once a leading advocate for safe drinking water, to fend off stringent EPA measures.

MoJo updates its coverage this week by reporting that “lobbyists for perchlorate firms are well-funded and skilful—and those with Democratic ties, like Bryan, will arguably wield more influence in Obama’s Washington than they did during the era of Republican dominance. They’ll doubtless be working hard behind the scenes to head off the EPA’s new regulatory enthusiasm.”

Rocket fuel pollution in water and soil are bigger problems than you might think. In recent years, EPA has detected perchlorates in public water systems in 28 states and territories.
Environmental Working Group’s own tests have identified significant perchlorate contamination in nearly a fifth of lettuce samples grown in Southern California and Arizona.

During the Bush administration, EWG and other environmental health advocates, including the agency’s own Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, mounted futile efforts to persuade EPA leaders to crack down on perchlorate pollution.

Last November, EPA scientist Melanie A Marty, chair of the 28-member children’s health advisory panel, which works closely with the EPA Office of Children’s Health Protection, dispatched an unusually sharply-worded public letter to then EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson recommending a strict, legally-enforceable limit for perchlorate in drinking water.

Marty and her fellow panel members protested the agency’s assumption that perchlorate contamination of up to 15 micrograms per liter of water posed no threat to adults or even children. The agency’s failure to take into account differences between adult and children, she wrote, “does not recognize the science which supports the exquisite sensitivity of the developing brain to even small drops in thyroid hormone levels and the fact that neonates have much diminished stores of thyroid hormone relative to adults.” Without legal strictures and a much lower permissible perchlorate limit, she wrote, thousands of infants could be at risk for “life-long consequences of impaired brain development.”

Jackson’s announcement called for public comments over the next 30 days. She did not prejudge the outcome. But her carefully-worded statement sent a strong signal. It made clear that she and her aides had studied the Marty panel’s arguments closely and recognized their validity.

“It is critically important to protect sensitive populations, particularly infants and young children, from perchlorate in drinking water,” Jackson said.

She said she had ordered EPA staffers to place “special emphasis on evaluating the impact of perchlorate on infants and young children.” Moreover, she said, EPA calculations will “take…into account the fact that infants and children consume more water per body weight than do adults” and to consider “a broader range of alternatives for interpreting the available data on the level of health concern, the frequency of occurrence of perchlorate in drinking water, and the opportunity for health risk reduction through a national primary drinking water standard.”

If, as Jackson seems to be semaphoring, EPA is heading toward regulating perchlorate pollution, and presumably clean-up efforts, the effort will amount to a direct challenge to defense and aerospace contractors — who can be expected to make the EPA struggle for every inch of turf.

How fiercely and skillfully Jackson, and ultimately the Obama administration, counter the industries’ formidable legal and lobbying defenses will tell us a lot about the Obama presidency. The stakes are enormous. Is the administration willing to spend some of its political capital on this issue? Will it even have enough political capital left after the bruising health care and climate bill battles? There’s no way to answer these questions today. But very possibly, soon.

Last week, Lisa Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, signaled she will likely shelve ChAMP, set up by the regulation-averse Bush administration to meet the letter, if not the spirit, of U.S. obligations under a 2007 anti-pollution agreement with Canada and Mexico.

That’s bad news for the chemical industry, which stood to gain measurably (ker-ching!) as long as the federal government’s toxic chemical program was strictly voluntary.  Under that scheme, chemical manufacturers volunteered minimal, often poor-quality data and were under virtually zero pressure to do better.

Since 1989, when EPA failed to ban asbestos, industry has enjoyed a 20–year holiday.  Lobbyists and rental scientists have marshaled a parade of voluntary make-work programs devised, as an industry document makes clear, to “avert restrictive regulatory actions and legislative initiatives” and avoid “burdensome changes to TSCA.”

KERCHING is the latest and most audacious of industry-government collaborations.   While previous voluntary “challenges” catalogued mostly insignificant data, ChAMP purported to rank risks based on the same inadequate information.

To her credit, Jackson quickly realized that ChAMP was just a punch-drunk palooka taking a dive for the chemical lobby.

For twenty years, the agency’s toxic program has burned through tens of millions of dollars and thousands of years of staff time with precious little benefit for the public health.  Many dedicated EPA staffers left the agency or sought other duties rather than push paper and create databases full of industry studies they knew to be outdated, unreliable or just plain bogus.

The most successful, the High Production Volume Chemical Challenge yielded complete sets of screening studies on just 900 out of 2,750 chemicals in 12 years.    We still do not know if most of these 900 are a threat to human health.

What does Jackson have in mind now?

We hope it’s the sensible and straight-forward idea of focusing on a very short list of priority chemicals  already strongly suspected of causing harm.

Burying ChAMP is a great first step in reforming the nation’s toxic chemical safety system.