House bill strengthening regulation of chemicals nears passage

WASHINGTON — The House is expected to pass landmark environmental legislation Tuesday that for the first time since Gerald Ford was president would toughen regulation of thousands of industrial chemicals in everyday use, many of which currently receive little federal scrutiny.

The bill rewrites a 1976 toxic chemicals law that has left the Environmental Protection Agency with so little authority that the agency was unable to ban even asbestos, a highly carcinogenic substance that has caused thousands of deaths and is still used in many imported products.

The new law would mandate safety reviews by the EPA for all chemicals currently in active commerce and require new chemicals to be deemed safe before they are allowed on the market.

More than a decade in the making, the legislation promises to be among the signature legacies of retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who blocked a version three years ago and fought ferociously through last weekend to ensure that federal law preserves California’s tougher regulatory laws.

The bill also assigns a priority for the EPA to review toxic chemicals that are known to persist in the environment and accumulate in the food chain, including in the human body.

At a news conference last week announcing a tentative agreement, Boxer said the compromise is weaker than she would have liked, “but where it is right now is in my view better than current law, and I certainly could not say that for a very long time.”

At the news conference, she and other Democrats from the party’s most ardent environmental wing stood side by side with Republicans who have been their chief antagonists, including Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, home to much of the nation’s chemical industry.

Andy Igrejas, national campaign director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, a coalition of 450 environmental and health groups is neither endorsing nor opposing the legislation.

Richard Denison, the lead senior scientist at Environmental Defense Fund who was deeply involved in negotiating the bill, agreed that reviewing the chemicals will be a slow process.

“That’s a big paradigm shift, away from a passive system where unless EPA finds a problem, basically the chemical can stay on the market or come onto the market,” he said.

Scott Faber, head of government affairs for Environmental Working Group, which opposes the legislation, said the bill marks an improvement, in that companies would no longer be allowed to introduce a new chemical into commerce unless EPA says it is safe.

Cal Dooley, a former House Democrat representing Fresno, now chief executive of the American Chemistry Council, representing the industry, said the industry has been “concerned with the decline in public confidence” in chemical safety and praised the breadth of support for the new legislation as “almost unprecedented.”