Red, Green, and Blue

The EPA’s system for deciding whether or not some chemicals we use on an everyday basis are toxic and can cause cancer is severely flawed, and the agency isn’t really doing anything about it. It’s gone buried under all the talk about the election and the environment – neither of the candidates making any fuss about these EPA procedures.

Although the media reported on it earlier this year, on Sept. 18 the Government Accountability Office made public a March report finding a number of alarming shortcomings in the EPA’s system – the only nationwide system the United States uses to assess household chemicals. And it’s a system that’s already behind that of the European Union, which lists more chemicals as dangerous – meaning we may be putting on makeup and using household products made of substances banned for their toxicity by our counterparts in Europe. So, this report has some grave implications that go beyond merely pointing out flaws in the EPA.

From the report:

“Although EPA has taken important steps to improve the IRIS (Integrative Risk Information System) and productivity since 2000…its efforts to finalize the assessments have been thwarted by a combination of factors including the imposition of external requirements, the growing complexity and scope of risk assessments, and certain EPA management decisions.”

IRIS was created in 1985 for the government and state agencies to make decisions about whether to allow human exposure to certain chemicals. The report says the EPA has assessed 540 chemicals, and nine million users a year look at the information.

But the system is plagued with an extreme backlog of cases, so much so that only four assessments were finalized in 2006 and 2007. Says the report: A variety of delays have impacted the majority of the 70 assessments being conducted as of December 2007 – 48 had been in process for more than five years, and 12 of those for more than nine years.

Yikes! This means that we could have been using dangerous chemicals with health risks for NINE years, and we wouldn’t know it. This fact alone sets those alarm bells ringing, but the report goes on, narrowing down its findings into a few key points.

1. Too much emphasis on backlogs

A dedication to backlogged chemicals means those 540 chemicals aren’t kept up to date, and that new chemicals take a long time to merely get into the process, much less get processed.

2. Assessments take too long to complete

The average chemical takes EIGHT years to be assessed. Basically, allow a whopping six years for a chemical to go through the EPA system, and another two for findings to be reviewed by outside parties. Which would be OK if the assessments were actually completed at that time, but…

3. Assessments become outdated before they are even completed

Because the process takes so long, by the time a chemical nears finish, the whole process may have to start all over again! Take the chemical naphthalene – the EPA has been examining this chemical for more than six years for a possible connection to cancer, but in 2006, it went back to the drawing board because the assessment became outdated. And this is a common chemical found in jet fuel, moth balls, dyes and insecticides.

4. Third-party changes to the assessments aren’t disclosed

The report cites transparency, or lack thereof, as another flaw within the system. After an assessment is completed, the findings are sent out to be reviewed, but those comments are then kept closed.

5. Decisions take into account political motives

It used to be that science drove the whole operation. Now it’s a combination of science and political policy – which is a little scary considering it’s the science part that can affect our health, not the political part.

And how do politics play a role in all this? According to an investigative report by CBS, it’s the White House that’s built up the review process that takes years to complete. Agencies from the Energy Department to the Defense Department are allowed into the process, and the Office of Management and Budget is cited directly in the report as trying to hush up the names of toxic chemicals.

With something this important to the everyday health of Americans, it seems this should enter the election arena, and definitely at a higher priority than the only difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom.

Photo Credit: Lance Upperkut at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Related Posts:

EPA Fails to Control Hazardous Export of E-Waste to Third World

EPA Protects Something…But Not Environment

Tweet This Post

You might also like: