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| Dear Friend, |
| Our families and communities have a right to be protected from toxic chemicals found in the products we use, the air we breathe, and the water we drink on a daily basis. Far too often, however, these toxic chemicals go unregulated, and the agencies that are charged with protecting us fail to consider or address the threat these substances pose to public health and the environment. |
| The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently proposed rules to change the process it uses to evaluate the risks of toxic chemical exposures and the agency is asking for your input today. |
| The Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA) is the country’s main chemical safety law. It provides the EPA with broad authority to restrict or ban chemicals’ production, use, distribution, and disposal to protect human health and the environment. |
| When the law was first enacted in 1976, it was a failure. It allowed chemical companies to put chemicals on the market without showing that they were safe and provided little authority for the government to regulate chemicals that were widely known to cause cancer, developmental and reproductive harm, and other serious health effects. |
| For several decades, Earthjustice has been fighting alongside our clients and partners in the courtroom and the halls of Congress for badly needed upgrades to the Toxic Substances Control Act. These efforts resulted in sweeping amendments to the law in 2016 and a 2019 court decision rejecting the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back that amended law by disregarding critical kinds of exposures and risks, including risks from legacy uses of very toxic chemicals such as asbestos. On behalf of impacted communities and workers, we also challenged several of the Trump administration’s flawed risk evaluations in court and have pushed the Biden administration to stringently regulate known carcinogens and other toxic chemicals. |
| This recently proposed rule from the EPA is a result of those efforts, and now we need to participate in the public comment period to ensure that EPA’s risk evaluations address all of the ways that people and the environment are exposed to and harmed by toxic chemicals. |
| We are advocating for the strongest possible protections for human health and the environment with a particular focus on reducing the toxic burdens on low-income communities and communities of color, which have disproportionately borne the brunt of EPA’s failure to adequately evaluate and regulate toxic chemicals. |
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Sincerely,
Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz
Supervising Senior Attorney,
Toxic Exposure & Health Program |
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| Earthjustice, 50 California Street, Suite 500, San Francisco, CA 94111 |
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| Photo Credits: Even the EPA regulation banning virtually all uses of asbestos, a dangerous and well-known carcinogen, was struck down by the courts as not authorized because TSCA requires the “least burdensome” approach for the industry. (Ashley Whitworth / Shutterstock) |
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