Voluntary Priority and Toxic Chemical Reduction – US EPA

Byoliveridley

Priority and Toxic Chemical Reduction | Resource Conservation Challenge | US EPA

Priority and toxic chemicals make up a fairly limited volume, yet potentially hazardous portion of the nation’s waste stream. We are working to eliminate or reduce priority chemicals and other chemicals of national concern from commercial products, waste streams, and industrial releases through pollution prevention, waste minimization, and recycling/reuse.The 31 priority chemicals are federal priorities because they are persistent, bioaccumulative, and highly toxic. We’re focusing on reducing priority and toxic chemicals to better protect human health and the environment.

By substituting or eliminating certain chemicals in their manufacturing processes, companies produce less waste and thus lower their waste disposal costs. Our goal is to substantially reduce the volume and toxicity of priority chemicals in waste by asking companies to voluntarily:

  • Substitute safer alternatives when they can;
  • Minimize the amount of priority chemicals they use, if they can’t substitute for them;
  • Maximize their recycling efforts;
  • Practice cradle-to-cradle chemical management; and
  • Design products to minimize exposure to, and release of, priority chemicals during manufacturing and use.

Sounds good, and Worldchanging has more:

But nowhere near the progress some companies are making on their own in cleaning up toxic emissions — not simply to be good guys, but to reduce their costs, liabilities, and exposure to activist and shareholder pressures. And, in some cases, to meet their customers’ growing demands for less-toxic or nontoxic alternatives to business as usual.

Read the whole post, which sounds ambivalent about the scheme. The idea is Environmental Good Sense 101, use less, or none at all, practice cradle to grave economics and minimize exposure. Simple stuff, huh. The biggest problem, however, is that by setting limits on a voluntary basis, you always run the risk of setting the bar too low, and then indulging in relentless and pointless self congratulation about how the “market” solved everything, and how rules are so, well, 1970s?

you need a good mix of

  1. Regulation, which sets a minimum, health based bar
  2. Flexibility to the business on how to achieve their targets
  3. Market systems to trade emission credits, etc
  4. Voluntary industry-government initiatives like the one above
  5. Relentless citizen activism that forces governments/business to act
  6. Community outreach and education so consumers can make informed choices
  7. Costing mechanisms that actually reflect free market efficiencies (no stupid subsidies, accurate costing of “externalities”, etc. )

Yeah, this does not fit neatly into the Mano a Mano, you’re with us/you’re against us false dichotomy of choice that seems to beset almost every policy debate (environmental or otherwise). It seems that you never have to do one or the other, but a bit of both, or all of them at the same time.

In the meanwhile, the voluntary program will work, but only in areas in specific instances where it is to a company’s advantage.

BTW, I think that good old fashioned regulation in Europe – See Reach and many many more existing regulations, such as this one for PCBs and Dioxins which I know a little too much about, have a little more to do with American companies reducing POP levels that they care to admit!

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    Power to Build Border Fence Is Above U.S. Law

    Byoliveridley

    Banana Republic Alert…

    Securing the nation’s borders is so important, Congress says, that Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, must have the power to ignore any laws that stand in the way of building a border fence. Any laws at all.

    Last week, Mr. Chertoff issued waivers suspending more than 30 laws he said could interfere with “the expeditious construction of barriers” in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. The list included laws protecting the environment, endangered species, migratory birds, the bald eagle, antiquities, farms, deserts, forests, Native American graves and religious freedom.

    Power to Build Border Fence Is Above U.S. Law – New York Times

    I don’t know what to say, rule of law, so quaint, so pre 9/11…

  • Coral Reefs do not recover from warming induced bleaching

    Byoliveridley

    BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Warming set to ‘devastate’ coral

    Bleaching in 1998 occurred in all reef regions of the world; 16% of the world’s reefs were lost in that one year, alone. But the western Indian Ocean suffered most because of an interaction between El Nino and another periodic climate phenomenon called the Indian Ocean dipole.

    In the seven years since, the damaged reefs have been largely unable to reseed. Many simply collapsed into rubble and became covered in algae.

    This collapse removed food and shelter from predators for a large and diverse amount of marine life. The survey showed four fish species could already be locally extinct, and six species are at critically low levels.

    The survey also revealed that the diversity of fish species in the heavily impacted sites had plummeted by about 50%.

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    California Ban on Diacetyl?

    Byoliveridley

    Flavoring-Factory Illnesses Raise Inquiries – New York Times

    For a good background on flavoring-factory lung disease (formerly known as popcorn worker’s lung), check out the Pump Handle’s many posts, especially this recent one. Short primer, diacetyl is the chemical that gives popcorn its so called buttery taste (and smell, it’s fake!!). Well, there’s pretty good evidence that diacetyl causes bronchiolitis obliterans. Some symptoms…

    Bronchiolitis obliterans renders its victims unable to exert even a little energy without becoming winded or faint.

    “The airways to the lung have been eaten up,” said Barbara Materna, the chief of the occupational health branch in the California Department of Health Services. “They can’t work anymore, and they can’t walk a short distance without severe shortness of breath.”

    OSHA has been unwilling to seriously regulate diacetyl, so California, as it is wont to do, is considering banning this killer chemical.

    But in California, which has 28 flavoring plants known to use diacetyl, some legislators and government officials seem unwilling to wait. A bill to ban diacetyl in the workplace by 2010 has passed two committees in the State Assembly and could be taken up by the full body this summer. It is the first proposal of its kind in the nation. Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, the author of the bill, said she introduced it because of what she said was the slow response by the flavoring industry, which is largely self-regulating on occupational safety. “What we’ve heard is that the flavoring industry has known for years that this is potentially a problem, and they haven’t taken action,” said Ms. Lieber, a Democrat.

    I am all for California’s regulation. But as written, this law will only protect workers in California. They should also consider going one step further by restricting the use of diacetyl in food sold in California. Only then can the giant market that is California exert its influence on the diacetyl manufacturers and users.

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    Coffee Roasting and Popcorn Lung

    Byoliveridley

    Cross-posted from Interrobang

    Who among us coffee drinkers don’t love the smell of freshly roasted coffee? I am sure some of us imagine how much fun it would be to smell freshly roasting coffee more often. I don’t, because smell for me is an instant jolt of pleasure/pain followed by a rather rapid decline into the background.

    Caution, though. New measurements from the US Centres for Disease Control warn of high exposure to some pretty nasty chemicals that can cause your lungs to be destroyed irreversibly, the unfortunately named “popcorn lung” or bronchitis obliterans:

    Investigators with the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, a research arm of the CDC, spent several days at Madison-based Just Coffee in July. Investigators tested personal air space and took air samples to measure the concentration of the chemicals diacetyl and 2,3-pentanedione… NIOSH researchers found levels in three breathing-zone samples that exceeded the safety levels recommended by the CDC.

    Coffee Roasting Plants and Exposure

    The test results show a marginal exceedance in this case, but noted that ventilation is a big factor and these tests were done under well ventilated conditions on a warm and dry day when doors were open. So, exposure can be higher in other circumstances.

    Worker exposures are to higher levels, and are more sustained, so they deserve the most attention.

    So, local coffee roasters, it may make sense to confirm that your roasting environments are not exposing your workers to harmful, lung obliterating chemicals. Remember, organic, shade grown, fair pay, artisanal roasting aside, chemical exposures to workers don’t change. And, everything that smells good isn’t good for you.

    One of my frequent points of emphasis (rants, some might say) is on the relative risk vs. media attention to exposures of people to ambient, day to day concentrations of potential harmful chemicals vs. those faced by workers everywhere. The last time diacetyl and bronchitis obliterans were in the news, it was around the use of diacetyl to produce that buttery smell so beloved in microwave bag popcorn (I don’t like it myself, olive oil all the way!). Despite reports of many workers facing severe lung issues, it took the detection of the disease of one person eating multiple bags of microwave popcorn over many years to actually move government regulators into action on diacetyl. People who work in factories, in the fields, and make things are exposed to thousands of times higher concentrations of harmful chemicals for longer periods of time, but their concerns are often de-emphasized.

    This doesn’t mean ambient exposures in the general population are to be ignored, but worker exposures are to higher levels, and more sustained, so they deserve the most attention.

    16-May-2016 Update

    This US Centers for Disease Control page is a good collection of information and further readings. They recommend facility tests to measure diacetyl and its cousin 2,3-pentanedione, and better ventilation, worker safeguards and personal protective equipment as necessary. They also note that at least five workers in large scale coffee processing plants have been diagnosed with bronchitis obliterans.

    Coffee image By Ailura – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

  • Models underestimate global warming impacts

    Byoliveridley

    No, not Tyra Banks and Riyo Mori, climate models that is.

    ES&T Online News: Models underestimate global warming impacts

    Modelers don’t purposely err on the conservative side, says Marika Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, but some processes “are just not well understood, and because of that have not been incorporated into climate models.” Holland has published model results on the fate of sea ice and coauthored the recent paper showing that ice is melting faster than models predicted. There are many reasons for the underestimates, she says. For example, models don’t fully capture heat transport between ocean and atmosphere, or faster warming as reflective ice gives way to darker, heat-absorbing waters.
    But Rahmstorf says that modelers might unwittingly make models more conservative by applying “one-sided filters”, weeding out models that clearly overestimate the changes seen so far, but hanging onto ones “where everything is too well behaved and stable.”

    Scientists are human too. The political and social climate in the US have been harsh to people who overestimate the effects of climate change. So, modeling scenarios that deviate significantly from accepted limits or runaway uncontrollably are discarded. Models are sets of assumptions based on underlying theory. If the theory of a particular sub-process is not clearly understood, then the assumptions become subjective. In a social climate that is waiting to pounce on an overestimate as example of negating the entire global warming phenomenon, assumptions made are conservative. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it comes at a price! As more observations come in, it does become clear that sometimes, things are happening faster and at greater magnitudes than our model predicted.

  • Federal Study Results in Invention of Wheel

    Byoliveridley

    Federal Study Finds Accord on Warming – New York Times

    A scientific study commissioned by the Bush administration concluded yesterday that the lower atmosphere was indeed growing warmer and that there was “clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.”

    Wait, we still need to study this more, we need to eliminate all uncertainty before we act, we need more proof, we need to be more certain :-;