The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is failing to protect the public from tens of thousands of toxic compounds because it has not gathered data on the health risks of most industrial chemicals, according to a report by the investigative arm of Congress to be released today.
The report by the Government Accountability Office found that chemical companies have provided health data to the EPA for only about 15 percent of chemicals that have been newly introduced over the past 30 years.
In addition, the report says the EPA has sought information about health dangers for less than 200 of the tens of thousands of industrial compounds that have been in use since before the late 1970s.
“EPA does not routinely assess existing chemicals, has limited information on their health and environmental risks, and has issued few regulations controlling such chemicals,” the report says. The GAO investigators conclude that the EPA “lacks sufficient data to ensure” the public is protected.
About 80,000 chemicals are used by U.S. industries, and scientific studies suggest that many of them pose an array of threats to the health of people and wildlife, such as cancer, birth defects, altered sex hormones and damage to developing brains.
Included are many substances that people are exposed to in everyday products, such as flame retardants in furniture and electronics, phthalates in cosmetics and various chemicals in plastics.
The GAO investigators recommend that Congress amend the Toxic Substances Control Act, the 1976 law that regulates industrial chemicals, to give the EPA more power to require companies to provide health data about chemicals and restrict their use.
“EPA has had difficulty proving that chemicals pose unreasonable risks and has regulated few existing chemicals under TSCA,” the report says. The law, as it now exists, is “unlikely to address more than the most serious chemical risks,” the GAO investigators concluded.
In recent years, tests by federal health officials and others have found that human bodies contain hundreds of chemicals. Such findings have drawn attention to the toxics law and prompted Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, D-N.J., Sen. James M. Jeffords, I-Vt., and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., last year to ask the GAO to investigate the EPA’s efforts to regulate chemicals.
Lautenberg has scheduled a news conference today to introduce a bill, co-authored by Jeffords, called the Child, Worker and Consumer Safe Chemicals Act, which would strengthen the toxics law. U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., plans to introduce the same bill in the House.
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