EPA to Consider Whether to Evaluate 5 Chemicals for Public Safety Risks
The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to designate five chemicals as high-priority substances for risk evaluation under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the agency announced July 24.
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The five chemicals are involved in the production of plastic. Moving forward with these proposed designations means that the EPA would begin the risk evaluation process for these chemicals: vinyl chloride, acetaldehyde, acrylonitrile, benzenamine and 4,4’-methylene bis(2-chloroaniline).
The high-profile release of vinyl chloride into the local environment was a key impetus for federal regulators’ scrutiny of a February 2023 Norfolk Southern freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
“The Biden-Harris Administration continues to make significant progress in protecting workers and communities from exposure to harmful chemicals as we implement the 2016 TSCA amendments that strengthened EPA’s authority on chemical safety,” Michal Freedhoff, assistant administrator for the EPA Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said in a release.
“Studying the safety of these harmful chemicals -- all five of which have been linked to cancer and are used to make plastic -- would help lead to critical public health and environmental protections in communities across the country and would ensure that the public has access to more data on these chemicals sooner.”
The EPA says these five chemicals were named in a 2014 review of chemicals needing further assessment of their hazards and potential for exposure. It first has to decide whether to conduct risk evaluations for these five chemicals, which is the input that the EPA is seeking, it said in a notice.
Should the EPA finalize these designations, the agency will initiate risk evaluations. If at the end of the risk evaluation process EPA determines that a chemical presents an unreasonable risk to health or the environment, the agency may take regulatory action to eliminate these unreasonable risks, EPA said.