Trump Administration Ignores PFAS “Forever Chemicals” Threat https://ceh.org/latest/press-releases/trump-administration-ignores-pfas-forever-chemicals-threat/ Community Groups in North Carolina Condemn Trump Administration for Ignoring the Public Health Threat of PFAS “Forever Chemicals” By Rejecting Their Petition to Require Essential Health and Environmental Effects Studies January 8, 2021 Co-Petitioners Vow to Continue the Fight for Protection of At-Risk Communities from PFAS Contamination of their Drinking Water by Chemours’ Pollution of Cape Fear River WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, six public health and environmental justice organizations in Eastern North Carolina expressed their deep disappointment and concern over the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) denial of their October 14, 2020 petition to address threats to public health from longstanding per- and polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) pollution of Cape Fear communities. The co-petitioners are Center for Environmental Health, Cape Fear River Watch, Clean Cape Fear, NC Black Alliance, Democracy Green, and Toxic Free NC. The petition asked EPA to use its authority under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to require The Chemours Company, a spinoff of Dupont, to fund comprehensive health and environmental effects testing on 54 PFAS manufactured at its production facility in Fayetteville. As a result of decades of pollution, these substances have been found in human blood, drinking water, groundwater, soil, air, and locally produced food adjacent to and downstream from the plant. They pose serious health risks to nearly 300,000 people in impacted communities. EPA’s petition denial does not dispute the serious health effects concerns associated with PFAS or the extensive contamination of the Cape Fear River basin caused by Chemours. Instead, it seeks to justify its refusal to require testing with a self-serving recitation of its actions on PFAS generally — actions which have been widely criticized as ineffective and inadequate. Poking small holes in the petition and blowing them out of proportion, the Agency also claims that petitioners failed to demonstrate that there is insufficient information available to assess the health impacts of the 54 PFAS. But it does not deny that there is little or no data on nearly all the 54 substances and that North Carolina residents exposed to these substances lack the scientific knowledge necessary to understand the risks of harm they face. Indeed, EPA itself has acknowledged the lack of meaningful health data for numerous PFAS yet, as the petition denial demonstrates, it has repeatedly refused to hold the companies responsible for PFAS pollution accountable for filling these alarming gaps in information. Under Donald Trump, protecting the profit margins of corporate polluters has repeatedly taken precedence over public health. EPA’s refusal to require Chemours to fund testing that should have been conducted decades ago is one more example of its willingness to sacrifice public health to protect industry’s bottom line. The petitioners vowed to use all means available to reverse the petition denial and continue the fight for public health protection of at-risk communities in North Carolina, including by asking the Biden Administration to grant the petition and require the necessary testing. CO-PETITIONERS OFFERED THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS: “It’s preposterous that the EPA has chosen to dilute the intent of the petition and prioritize corporate interest over the needs of the communities affected in North Carolina. This decision reflects the environment the outgoing administration created, poison over our health and profit over the people. We won’t stop here. We will continue to fight against our water being poisoned, and children left without a basic human right of access to clean water,” said La’Meshia Whittington, campaign director for the North Carolina Black Alliance. “I believe the EPA is lying to North Carolinians, and by extension the rest of America,” said Emily Donovan, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear and a mother living in a highly contaminated community. “If, as the EPA suggests, enough scientific data already exists to deny our petition, then where are the drinking water standards for these 54 PFAS? Fish and wildlife recommendations? Fact sheets for medical practitioners and state health departments? The required data doesn’t exist to produce these vital protections. The EPA knows it and my children are still being exposed to these PFAS. My friends and neighbors are sick. My husband almost lost his eyesight to a brain tumor and I’m tired of a government funded by taxpayer dollars refusing to do its job.” “EPA claims that cell culture-based screening tests can be developed and used to understand the toxicity of thousands of PFAS, however these methods have simply not progressed to the point where they come close to being useful for understanding the effects of PFAS. In fact, the animal and human studies proposed in the petition will produce the very data that EPA needs to validate these more efficient approaches to predict PFAS toxicity,” said Ruthann Rudel, Research Director at Silent Spring Institute. “Time and time again, EPA has failed to act swiftly and meaningfully when it comes to protecting human health and the environment from PFAS. The denial of this petition is no different from its other failures. EPA would rather spend millions of taxpayer dollars to develop and validate in vitro tests rather than do their job and force polluters to foot the bill for already-validated testing approaches. It is exhausting and frustrating to hear both EPA administrators and scientists, alike, lamenting about PFAS data gaps, but in denying this petition, they have shown that they are unwilling to force fluorochemical manufacturers to fill those gaps,” said Drake Phelps, PhD Candidate at North Carolina State University and member of Clean Cape Fear. “In denying this petition, which EPA has full authority under law to accept, EPA, yet again, failed to uphold its mission to protect public health and the environment, opting instead to support a multi-billion dollar corporation. Enough is enough.” said Dana Sargent, Executive Director, Cape Fear River Watch. “Once again Trump’s EPA is shamefully standing with corporations instead of fulfilling its duty to protect the health and wellbeing of hard-working families in North Carolina- and across the US- struggling with one of the biggest environmental threats of our time. Chemours should be paying for the comprehensive health and environmental testing of the chemicals it released from its Fayetteville facility. We call upon the incoming Biden Administration to reconsider this petition and hold Chemours accountable for the risks it took with human health and the environment.” said Michael Green, Chief Executive Officer, Center for Environmental Health. “The EPA is responsible for protecting the environment and the people from exposure to toxics, not for protecting corporations that gamble with public health. TSCA gives the EPA the purview to ask polluters to fund scientific studies that assess the health impacts of environmental pollution for a reason. The forever chemicals listed in the petition are already in our water, soil, air, produce and bodies. The thousands of residents exposed to these chemicals have a right to know what the health implications are and the EPA should support the efforts to fill in these crucial gaps in knowledge.” said Lior Vered, PhD, Policy Advocate, Toxic Free North Carolina. BACKGROUND PFAS “forever chemicals” are a large group of nearly 5,000 synthetic chemicals that make products water and grease-resistant. They are ubiquitous, found in non-stick cookware, water-repellent clothing, stain-resistant carpets, lubricants, firefighting foams, paints, cosmetics, paper plates, and fast food packaging. They are readily transported around the globe and build up in people and wildlife. These chemicals take thousands of years to break down in the environment and can remain in our bodies for decades. Certain PFAS are pervasive in the blood of the US population. Exposure to “forever chemicals” can cause cancer, thyroid disease, birth defects, hormone disruption, decreased fertility, immune system suppression, and other serious health effects. However, test data for most PFAS are not available. EPA has broad authority under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to order manufacturers like Chemours to determine the safety of their products and processes. However, the agency has failed to use this testing authority for PFAS and other chemicals since Congress strengthened TSCA in 2016. Chemours’ Fayetteville chemical manufacturing facility, located on the Cape Fear River upstream of Wilmington, North Carolina, has long been a major producer and user of PFAS under the ownership of E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Company, Inc. (DuPont). In 2015, Dupont created spinoff company Chemours after facing millions of dollars in civil suits and increased media attention for its production and use of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a chemical known to cause cancer and other health effects that was responsible for widespread contamination of drinking water near the company’s Parkersburg, West Virginia facility. Chemours stopped producing PFOA at the Fayetteville facility because of these issues but the replacement chemicals (called GenX) have been found, along with many other PFAS, in drinking water sources serving over a quarter of a million people in North Carolina.
US firms exploiting Trump-era loophole over toxic ‘forever chemicals’ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/12/pfas-toxic-forever-chemicals-trump-era-loophole Chemical companies are dodging a federal law designed to track how many PFAS “forever chemicals” their plants are discharging into the environment by exploiting a loophole created in the Trump administration’s final months, a new analysis of federal records has found. The Fiscal Year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act put in place requirements that companies discharging over 100lb annually of the dangerous chemicals report the releases to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But during the implementation process, Trump’s EPA created an unusual loophole that at least five chemical companies have exploited. The amount of PFAS being discharged into the air, water or disposed of on land “could be much higher than we already know”, said Jared Hayes, a policy analyst with the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and a report co-author. “Allowing manufacturers to skirt reporting requirements has serious public health consequences for communities that live near facilities that use PFAS and they have a right to know how many forever chemicals companies are releasing,” he wrote. PFAS are a class of about 12,000 chemicals typically used to make thousands of products resist water, stain and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down, and accumulate in humans and the environment. A growing body of evidence links them to serious health problems like cancer, birth defects, liver disease and autoimmune disorders. The chemicals are estimated to be contaminating drinking water for over 200 million people in the US, and state and federal regulators have passed a barrage of new legislation in recent years designed to rein in pollution. Public health advocates say PFAS discharges from chemical plants have sickened residents living near or downstream from them. Contamination from a Chemours factory in North Carolina has contaminated hundreds of square miles around the facility, and DuPont paid $670m (£610m) for sickening thousands of residents near its West Virginia PFAS production plant. EWG’s analysis of federal reporting records identified five plants discharging unknown amounts of 14 PFAS compounds, though there may be more. The Trump EPA gave PFAS an unusual exemption under the law that allows companies not to report discharges if the amounts are “negligible”, which is defined as less than 1% of a total mixture. The rule is referred to as the “de minimis exemption”. Companies discharging thousands of pounds of PFAS could have gotten their releases under the 1% threshold via several routes, said Melanie Benesh, EWG’s vice-president of government affairs. Companies may have added water to PFAS to dilute it to the point that it is below 1%. However, the total amount of PFAS released is still high, and may present a threat once in the environment. Companies may also be using complex mixtures with multiple PFAS. If the companies keep any one PFAS compound below the 1% threshold, then they won’t have to report it, even if the total amount of all PFAS compounds in the mixture far exceeds 1%. “The reason we have the [reporting law] is so communities downstream from those facilities know what’s in their water, so if you have companies that are avoiding reporting then it undermines the purpose of the law,” Benesh said. In a statement to the Guardian, an EPA spokesperson said the agency is aware of the loophole and has begun the process to potentially close it. Benesh said she is uncertain why the Trump administration would agree to create the loophole, but noted that chemical companies or trade groups asked for the exemption during implementation’s public comment. Meanwhile, the American Chemistry Council, a trade group representing companies that avoided reporting PFAS discharges, had lobbied the EPA office in charge of implementing the law. The NDAA required companies managing and disposing of 180 different kinds of PFAS over 100lb (45kg) annually to report their releases to the EPA’s toxics release inventory (TRI). Separately, the chemical data reporting rule (CDR) already required companies that use PFAS in volumes more than 2,500lb (1,134kg) annually to report use data. The EPA last year noticed companies that handled or produced large volumes of PFAS and reported to the CDR did nor report discharges under the TRI. Companies contacted by the agency cited the 1% de minimis exemption as the reason for not reporting. Allowing PFAS to be exempted under de minimis is “clearly at odds with Congress’s intent”, Hayes wrote. Lawmakers intentionally set the 100lb (45kg)-reporting threshold because all substances with such low reporting levels are labeled “chemicals of special concern”. Manufacturers cannot use the de minimis exemption to avoid reporting releases of chemicals of special concern. But when the Trump EPA implemented the law, it did not include PFAS as a chemical of special concern, and instead gave it a designation with chemicals with reporting thresholds of 10,000 pounds or above, Hayes wrote. PFAS are the only chemicals with a 100lb (45kg) reporting limit that can use the exemption. “EPA’s de minimis loophole gives companies an opportunity to keep their pollution secret, which goes against the very purpose of the toxic release inventory,” said Tim Whitehouse, a former EPA attorney and executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. In a statement to the Guardian, the EPA said its proposed rule changes include removing the eligibility of the 1% exemption for PFAS, designating PFAS as a chemical of concern, and “reversing the approach set forth by the previous administration”.
This has been occurring long before the Pandemic along with Fentenayl usage around the world. On top of that, planet Earth is warming...we set a +100 year record for the overall warmest day for Earth Yet, dumbasses out there still can not understand and prefer to blame Covid vaccines instead of dealing with what's causing increased mortality...unexplained deaths. wrbtrader
Check the date March 14, 2023 FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Takes New Action to Protect Communities from PFASPollution
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