Senate Panel Weighs Toxic Chemicals Law
At the first Senate hearing in more than a decade to review the nation's toxic chemicals law, the Bush administration on Wednesday agreed with chemical industry representatives that the 30-year-old statute was strong enough to protect public health.
James B. Gulliford, an assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, told the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works that the toxics law was "a very effective statute" that gave the agency "broad authorities" to ensure the public was safeguarded from industrial chemicals.
Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), committee chair, convened the hearing to consider revamping the Toxic Substances Control Act. Essentially unchanged since it was enacted in 1976, the law guides the EPA's regulation of 82,000 chemicals, including plastic ingredients in toys, flame retardants in computers, and compounds in cosmetics, cookware and plastic baby bottles.
Many political, legal, scientific and economic experts say the law needs to be overhauled because the U.S. trails the European Union and other developed countries in reviewing and restricting toxic substances.
"The EPA has slipped in its leadership in the international arena," said Dr. Lynn R. Goldman, a Johns Hopkins University scientist and pediatrician who headed the EPA's toxics program for the Clinton administration.
Several hundred industrial chemicals in use today are known to accumulate in human tissues and breast milk, and persist in the environment without breaking down. The health effects of many of them are largely unknown, though scientific studies have linked some to cancer, altered hormones, reproductive effects and neurological damage, particularly for fetuses exposed in the womb.
Under the toxics law, the EPA has had broad authority to ban or restrict chemical compounds developed after 1976. But the agency can regulate an older chemical only if proof is found that it poses an "unreasonable risk" to human health or the environment, which can require years, even decades, of costly and detailed risk assessments. The EPA must then compare costs and benefits and choose "the least burdensome" rules.
The U.S. government has not attempted to restrict an industrial chemical in use before the law was passed since 1989, when an EPA rule banning asbestos was struck down by a federal court, in part because the agency had not proven to a judge that the lung-damaging chemical posed an unreasonable risk.
