Former EPA Officials Urges Changes to Make Draft TSCA-Reform Bill More Workable

By Pat Rizzuto Monday, March 24, 2014

 A draft House bill that would modernize the Toxic Substances Control Act needs to make its requirements on the Environmental Protection Agency more practicable if it wants the EPA to improve its oversight of chemicals, two former agency officials told Bloomberg BNA.

The cumulative effect of the requirements that different sections of the bill would impose on the agency--to establish criteria to evaluate the quality of information, to make legal determinations concerning the proportionality and net benefits of managing risks and to determine the technical and economic feasibility of alternative chemicals and the likelihood that they would be used, for example--could make the agency's authority to manage chemicals as unwieldy as it has been under TSCA, or more so, the officials said.

Yet, apparently small changes to the language could make the draft bill more workable, they said.

Charles Auer, a private consultant who worked on chemicals assessment and management for 32 years at the EPA and directed the agency's Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, and Steve Owens, an attorney with Squire Sanders LLP who served under President Barack Obama as the EPA's assistant administrator of chemical safety and pollution prevention, discussed the proposed Chemicals in Commerce Act…..To Read More…..