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program has been blessed with the presence of several world-re- 

 nowned scientists, among them a winner of the American Chemical 

 Society's Environmental Award and a winner of the MacArthur 

 Foundation Genius Award." And I think this is the key — "This pro- 

 gram in its early days was blessed with generous personnel alloca- 

 tions and dollar resources. In later years, only after the program 

 started falling short, have its resources been quite constrained." 



I think that's important, that the program started out with a lot 

 of great personnel and resources and it was found that the statute 

 wasn't working the way that people had anticipated, then the re- 

 sources were falling away and it's become — these are my words not 

 yours — quite ineffective. 



Dr. MuiR. Indeed, that's correct, Senator Reid. 



My own particular view, which is a little different from many of 

 those that you've heard today, is that the Toxic Substances Control 

 Act was designed to address a different problem than the problems 

 that we face today. The Toxic Substances Control Act was passed 

 at a time when our view of the problem was that there was a lim- 

 ited number of PCB-like issues that, if the government could iden- 

 tify and determine through an "unreasonable risk" assessment and 

 then regulate, we would be able to resolve the important problems 

 of toxics in commerce. 



My own view is that this is not the problem that we face today. 

 Rather, I believe that there are problems associated with the inten- 

 tional commerce of chemicals in our country and all around the 

 world, that the problems are large, and that they represent a ma- 

 jority of the environmental burdens of toxics that we're trying to 

 cope with cleaning up or preventing. While I believe that the prob- 

 lems are large, they are the result of many small decisions being 

 made throughout our economy, at every stage in commerce, in a 

 very dynamic system. 



The biggest problem with TSCA is that it uses a government-cen- 

 tric approach with all the burdens placed on the Environmental 

 Protection Agency to become informed enough to carry out all of 

 the assessments to make determinations of unreasonable risks, and 

 then to tell people what they should do. This cumbersome, central- 

 ized approach is simply mismatched to the dispersed and dynamic 

 problems that we face. Therefore, the most fundamental problem 

 with TSCA is that it is government-centric in its approach. 



Secondly, I think that TSCA provides no norms to producers and 

 users of chemicals. The present approach assumes that the manu- 

 facturers and users of chemicals should carry on as they are until 

 such time as the Environmental Protection Agency, through a cum- 

 bersome and time-consuming rule-making process, determines that 

 there is an unreasonable risk. Only then is it incumbent upon pro- 

 ducers and users of chemicals to make any changes in their par- 

 ticular practices. TSCA simply sets no expectations on the part of 

 producers and users comparable to the expectations that are, for 

 example, incorporated in the Federal Pollution Prevention Act, 

 which set a waste-management hierarchy that is now widely ac- 

 cepted as a social norm: namely, source reduction is our preferred 

 option followed by reuse and recycling, followed by treatment and 

 disposal only as a last resort. 



