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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/opinion/congress-moves-finally-on-toxic-chemicals.html
Congress Moves, Finally, on Toxic Chemicals
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD MAY 24, 2016
Congress is finally getting serious about hazardous chemicals in household products and industrial goods. The House is expected to vote on Tuesday on a bill overhauling a 1976 chemical safety law that has made it hard for federal regulators to ban toxic substances, even known carcinogens like asbestos. The Senate is expected to follow later in the week.
The bipartisan legislation would direct the Environmental Protection Agency to review chemicals to determine whether they threaten human health or the environment. Regulators would be required to give priority to the riskiest chemicals, evaluate at least 20 substances at a time and finish each evaluation in no more than seven years.
The reviews would have to pay special attention to the harm the chemicals could cause to vulnerable groups like children, industrial workers, pregnant women and poor people. Substances commonly stored near drinking water sources would move to or near the top of the list.
These changes represent a big improvement over the 1976 law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, under which the E.P.A. has been able to ban or restrict the production or use of only five chemicals out of the roughly 85,000 in use today. The 1976 law is written in such a way that it can be almost impossible for the E.P.A. to do a satisfactory job, in part because it does not require manufacturers to provide safety data before a product hits the market.
And courts have often interpreted the 1976 law in the industry's favor. In 1989, the environmental agency banned most asbestos-containing products, but two years later the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned the ban for many products containing asbestos, some of which are still on the market. Asbestos-related diseases cause about 120,000 deaths a year globally.
The latest bill is the product of painful compromises on both sides and, as with any compromise, is not perfect. The biggest potential problem is that it would pre-empt states from imposing restrictions on chemicals that the E.P.A. has reviewed or is in the process of evaluating. State laws and regulations enacted before April 22 would be allowed to stand and states could ask for waivers from pre-emption for laws or regulations enacted after that date.
Industry pushed for pre-emption because it is easier to deal with one federal regulator than a patchwork of state laws. States like California have often been more willing to ban and regulate dangerous substances and have had stronger legal authority to do so than the E.P.A., which is why some public interest groups and some state regulators are unhappy with the pre-emption provision. That said, pre-emption is unlikely to be a major problem as long as the legislation empowers the E.P.A. to do its job and the agency acts with urgency.
Under the measure, the chemical industry would contribute $25 million a year to help pay for the agency's work. That's a good start, but it will cover only a portion of the money the agency needs to review thousands of chemicals; the rest will come from the federal budget. A lot will depend on whether Congress continues to provide sufficient resources to the E.P.A., long a favorite target of anti-regulatory legislators.