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TAKE ACTION BY NOVEMBER 7: Save the Toxic Substances Control Act

The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) is the only thing standing between us and harmful chemicals found in everyday items like cleaning products, electronics, furniture, construction materials, and plastic products–and the factories where these toxic substances are made.

Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is gutting the Toxic Substances Control Act, rolling back TSCA’s risk evaluation process for existing chemicals, ignoring the real-life ways people are exposed, and weakening protections that prevent exposure. Under his proposed rule, the EPA would require far less data from companies about chemicals under review, increasing the chances of chemicals being declared “safe” with inadequate information.

TAKE ACTION BY NOVEMBER 7: Save the Toxic Substances Control Act!

It’s the Environmental Protection Agency’s job to enforce TSCA, but with the government shutdown, the EPA is at 11 percent capacity, with only 1,734 employees deemed “essential” to protect life, property, or national security at work. If Trump has his way, the 89 percent of EPA employees currently out of work won’t have much reason to come back.

The attack on TSCA comes as the Senate is poised to confirm Douglas Troutman as director of the EPA’s office of chemicals safety and pollution prevention. Until August 28, Troutman was the chief lobbyist for the American Cleaning Institute, a trade group representing BASF, Dow, and Procter & Gamble. Troutman will join former American Chemistry Council lobbyist Nancy Beck, the EPA deputy administrator who’s leading the charge to deregulate PFAS “forever chemicals”, former DuPont executive Lynn Ann Dekleva, the deputy assistant administrator in the chemical safety office who’s been playing politics with the science and altering EPA reports, and former pesticide industry lobbyist Kyle Kunkler who’s the new deputy assistant administrator for the pesticides program.

In the 2016 rewrite of the Toxic Substances Control Act that largely strengthened the law, Douglas Troutman was among the industry lobbyists who successfully worked in loopholes that chemical makers exploit today.

We can’t let BASF, Dow, and Procter & Gamble take over the EPA and gut the Toxic Substances Control Act.

TAKE ACTION BY NOVEMBER 7: Save the Toxic Substances Control Act!

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PETITION TO THE EPA

The EPA’s job is to protect the public from dangerous chemicals like asbestos and formaldehyde. Instead, it is doing the bidding of companies like BASF, Dow, and Procter & Gamble, moving to stop enforcement of the Toxic Substances Control Act by making it more difficult for the EPA to restrict or prohibit the manufacturing, processing, or distribution of toxic substances based on determinations that toxic substances present unreasonable risks to human health or the environment.

The EPA’s proposed rule is intended to reverse recent restrictions on toxic substances, including:

Methylene chloride, a chemical used in consumer products like shoe soles that has been blamed for the deaths of factory workers, as well as children who live near its use.
Trichloroethylene, a metal degreasing and dry cleaning chemical that contaminates 30 percent of drinking water and is known to cause kidney, blood, and liver cancer, as well as Parkinson’s disease in people who live one to five miles downwind of factories that use the chemical.

The proposed rule contravenes the purpose of TSCA. As Maria Doa, a senior director at the Environmental Defense Fund, puts it, the EPA is seeking to “downplay the links these chemicals have to cancer and chronic disease.” A former director of the Office of Science and Technology in EPA’s Office of Water says that the proposed rule joins a line of EPA decisions that “strip away the safeguards that keep cancer-causing and brain-harming chemicals out of our homes, schools, and workplaces.”

Please revoke this proposed rule and leave TSCA alone.

Thank you.