EDF biochemist Dr. Richard Denison told that story to members of Congress in a February hearing about reforming America’s 33-year-old chemicals law. The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) is considered among the weakest of all major U.S. environmental laws. The law is so weak, in fact, that EPA was unable to use it to ban asbestos, a known human carcinogen barred in more than 30 countries.

Of the 82,000 chemicals available for use in the U.S., only about 200 have been required to be tested for safety.

Environmental Defense Fund has been pressing for reform since 1997, when we published Toxic Ignorance, our seminal report that exposed the lack of basic health data for even the most widely used chemicals on the U.S. market. Chemicals that we know too little about are in baby bottles, pet food, toys, even our bodies.

Troubled by the low priority EPA has given to chemical safety, Denison upped the pressure, not by publishing another dense report, but by posting detailed critiques of EPA’s program on our blog. The critiques, written in collaboration with EDF toxicologist Dr. Cal Baier-Anderson, were widely read inside and outside EPA. "Using the blog enabled us to keep the message coming, in weekly dollops," Denison says.

Soon after the blog began to appear, EPA announced new principles and initiatives for advancing chemical safety that closely mirror our recommendations. Many observers in the health community say Denison and his blog were key catalysts. Attention is now shifting to Congress. More stringent laws in Europe, coupled with a wave of state initiatives and reports of lead paint in toys from China, are fueling the demand for reform. Even the industry now acknowledges that current law fails to ensure the safety of consumer products.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) plan to introduce bills that would overhaul U.S. chemical regulation. The legislation is expected to require chemical manufacturers to provide health and safety information on chemicals and prove they’re safe in order to use them in products.

"Reform is finally within our grasp," says Denison, "but there’s still a lot of work to be done." A leader in the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition, EDF is pushing for passage of strong legislation, working with scientists from companies like Staples and with health groups like the American Nurses Association.

We’re also engaging directly with Walmart and other corporate partners to improve screening for toxic chemicals in the products they buy from suppliers. Reform can’t come too soon. America’s children shouldn’t have to wait for the next revelation of tainted toys for the nation to act.

From the 2009 Fall Solutions [PDF] newsletter.

Contact:
John Bianchi, 212-576-2700, ext 228, jbianchi@goodmanmedia.com

(New York – September 17, 2009) Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) praised the New York City Council today for passing landmark legislation that will dramatically reduce toxic engine emissions from public school buses.

The new law was shaped in part by a groundbreaking report EDF issued last year, A Healthier Ride to School: Cleaning up New York City's Dirty Diesel School Buses, which showed the air quality of New York City public school bus cabins to be as much as five times worse than outside air. The new law will require that all public school buses in current service undergo engine emission retrofits and that older school buses be retired three years earlier than currently required, at 16 years old instead of 19 years old. Retired buses will be replaced with brand-new vehicles meeting the highest emission standards possible.

"New York City's school children are getting a back-to-school gift with today's City Council vote," says Isabelle Silverman, attorney for Environmental Defense Fund, who coauthored the EDF report. "Our children will enjoy a healthier ride to school and all New Yorkers will breathe a little bit easier."

A Healthier Ride to School also laid out a set of recommendations for the New York City Department of Education to maximize clean air benefits, minimize costs, and utilize newly available diesel retrofit technologies.

New York City uses more than 7,000 public school buses to transport approximately 138,000 schoolchildren every day. Although the buses represent a safe and effective way of ferrying children to their schools, young riders are at particular risk from harmful, polluted air both inside and outside of their vehicles. The EDF study found that diesel-powered buses emit more than 40 toxic substances, soot, unburned hydrocarbons and other harmful byproducts, many of which are known carcinogens.

Once the mayor signs the bill into law, it will improve bus cabin air quality with the help of engine emission retrofits—also known as crankcase ventilation systems—and go beyond a previous local law (LL42-2005) that required retrofits, but excluded buses used for transporting children in special education programs. The retrofits are considered of extreme importance. Since engines typically are right next to the bus doors, engine pollution enters the vehicle cabin each time the door opens, trapping children in a closed area filled with toxic pollution.

In addition, the dirtiest vehicles will be sent into retirement in favor of new buses meeting the highest emission standards. Accelerated bus turnover will ensure cleaner air because federal engine emission standards have improved dramatically over the last decade.

"This bill ensures that the city will replace its old, dirty public school buses sooner with brand-new buses that are 10 to 60 times cleaner, depending upon the model year they replace," concludes Silverman. "Our children deserve nothing less than the cleanest air we can provide as they ride on their way to school."

The executive summary and full report of A Healthier Ride to School can be found online at the EDF website: http://www.cleanbuses.org.

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Contact: Cal Baier-Anderson, (202) 572-3306-w, canderson@edf.org
Media Contact: Dan Cronin, (202) 572-3354-w, dcronin@edf.org 

(Washington, DC – September 16, 2009) Environmental Defense Fund applauded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) decision to review the adequacy of the controversial ozone national air quality standard issued under the Bush administration in 2008. Today, EPA committed to issue a new proposal by December 21, 2009 and to complete its review by August 2010.

In March 2008, the Bush EPA established an ozone health standard of 75 parts per billion (ppb), at a level substantially less protective than unanimously recommended by EPA's panel of expert science advisors on the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC). CASAC recommended the standard be set between 60-70 ppb. Further, in an unprecedented move, the Bush Administration's regulatory czar ordered EPA scientists to scrap a separate science-based ozone standard to protect crops, forests, and other plants hard hit by ground-level ozone. 

"EPA's commitment to protect human health from dangerous smog is a breath of fresh air," said Cal Baier-Anderson, Ph.D., a toxicologist with Environmental Defense Fund. "For millions of kids, smog can make it difficult to attend school, to play outside and to breathe on polluted day."

The Clean Air Act requires that the EPA protect public health "with an adequate margin of safety" in establishing the nation's air quality standards. In 2001, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that EPA was required to establish these standards based exclusively on the protection of public health.

EPA estimates that the suite of innovative technologies, processes and products that have been developed to meet the nation's air quality standards and other Clean Air Act programs have not only delivered extraordinary results, but that the nation's pollution control industry has thrived, generating over $200 billion in revenues and supporting more than 3 million jobs. The monetary benefits to society have outweighed the costs by a factor of more than 40 to 1.

The EPA's notice to reconsider can be viewed at http://www.edf.org/documents/10412_EPA_Report_To_Court.pdf

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• Provide technical support to state, local, and tribal health departments in forecasting local effects, developing preparedness plans, and communicating with the public about the health effects of climate change;
• Develop training programs for public health professionals on the health risks and interventions related to climate change;
• Enhance domestic and international tracking capacity for infectious diseases and environmental health indicators;
• Contract with the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine to prepare a report that assesses the needs for health professionals to prepare for and respond to climate change impacts on public health and recommends programs to meet those needs. The report would be due within 18 months after the bill becomes law.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

• Fails to provide EPA with adequate authority to require companies to test their chemicals so that unsafe – as well as safer – chemicals can be identified;
• Forbids EPA from sharing much of the limited chemical information it does obtain; and
• Imposes an essentially impossible burden on EPA to prove actual harm before it can initiate any action to control or replace a dangerous chemical.
  

1. Explicitly state that one of the core goals of CCSP is the prevention of harm to human health due to climate change. Climate change poses a risk for U.S. populations, with uncertainties limiting the ability to quantify the projected number of increased injuries, illnesses, and deaths attributable to climate change. The extent of these uncertainties can be reduced with additional research.
2. Describe baseline conditions with respect to climate-sensitive risk factors, health outcomes, and current and planned public health interventions. Robust environmental monitoring and health surveillance data from across the United States are essential to analyze and track climate-sensitive health problems, such as asthma, infectious gastroenteritis, and vector-borne diseases.
3. Prioritize understanding and ameliorating the contribution of health disparities among subpopulations in the US to climate change vulnerability. While there are studies that provide assessments of population and individual risk factors for specific health outcomes, very few associate these health risk factors with local socioeconomic, geographic, and climate change-related risk factors.
4. Develop and promote the implementation of standard methods for national, regional, and local health impact assessments for climate change. The current practice of using multiple units (e.g., use of different temperature scales), time frames, and baseline measures (e.g., underlying health status) among different assessments prevents easy comparisons. 
5. Develop a research program and set of standard methods for assessing the health impacts (both co-benefits and unintended harms) of interventions in energy, transportation, agriculture, and housing intended to mitigate or adapt to climate change.  The disease burden affected to some degree by decisions in the energy and transport sectors is very large. Decisions made by water and agriculture agencies, including those made in response to climate change, also have the capacity to increase or decrease risks from a range of infectious diseases, undernutrition, and other health risks.
6. Improve training of federal, state, and local health department personnel in the human health risks of and public health responses to climate change. The current public health system is greatly challenged to keep up with existing levels of health threats, including climate-sensitive ones. Additional training and capacity building are necessary to prepare public health professionals to deal with the urgent threats of climate change.

• The submissions encompassed only 1/7 of the unique chemical structures on which nanomaterials in use or development are based.
• Toxicity and environmental fate data were provided for at most a few percent of these nanomaterials, confirming that only a small fraction of all nanomaterials have been sufficiently studied despite their rapid commercialization.
• EPA acknowledged it cannot determine whether participants submitted information on all or only a subset of nanomaterials they produce, and whether information submitted for a given nanomaterial was complete or selective.  EDF had predicted precisely this problem because of EPA's failure to include these metrics in the design of the Nanoscale Materials Stewardship Program.
• Only four companies have agreed to consider conducting any testing, leading EPA to conclude that "most companies are not inclined to voluntarily test their nanoscale materials."

Jennifer Witherspoon, (415) 293-6067, jwitherspoon@edf.org

(Sacramento – December 16, 2008) The Final Report of the California Green Chemistry Initiative today was praised by one of the initiative’s scientific advisers for providing six key recommendations for advancing chemicals policy reform and the development of a safer, more sustainable chemicals economy in the state.

“This report usefully recommends a number of the key building blocks that can move us toward the kind of fundamental reform we need in how we design, make, use and manage chemicals across their lifecycles,” said Dr. Richard Denison, Environmental Defense Fund senior scientist and a member of the Green Chemistry Initiative's Science Advisory Panel. “While many critical aspects remain to be worked out through implementation, the report provides much of the needed framework.”

In particular, Denison applauded several key provisions aimed at increasing the amount of information about chemicals accessible to the public and the marketplace, including:

• A requirement that manufacturers disclose the chemical ingredients, including nanomaterials, present in their products through a publicly accessible online data network.

• Development of a toxics clearinghouse intended both to compile existing information and to serve as a basis for identifying key data gaps on chemicals of concern for which data need to be generated.

• Establishment of agreements with other governments to gain access to chemical information they possess.

• Development of a framework and practical tools that can be used to expeditiously assess and spur the adoption of alternatives to chemicals of concern, with an emphasis on avoiding overly cumbersome and data-intensive analyses that could impede prompt action to address chemicals of concern.