13 



Senator Reid. Have there been any rules since that court deci- 

 sion? 



Dr. Goldman. We have a couple of small ones that we've been 

 working on. We have one on lead machine sinkers and there's 



Mr. Greenwood. There's a second one on a chemical called the 

 acrylimide. 



Dr. Goldman. Yes, acrylimide grout. 



Senator Reid. You talked about looking at groups of chemicals by 

 their uses when considering risk reduction. We've talked about 

 that, and I think you set up three categories. 



Has there been anjdihing written on that or where did this theory 

 come from? 



Dr. Goldman. It's an approach that was developed by people in 

 the program, actually, and they've actually developed a computer- 

 ized tool that they call the use cluster scoring system that helps 

 work through that process. There's a poster that I would like to 

 have put out that shows the approach as it was taken for looking 

 at the paint stripping industry, and paint stripping was interesting 

 because with one of the paint strippers there was a risk issue that 

 was raised as a result of using the cluster approvals. One of the 

 things that people realized was if we take action on this particular 

 paint stripper, that might push people to use a substitute — one of 

 the other chemicals that are available. But we're not looking at 

 those right now, and how do we know that we would actually be 

 reducing risk? We might be increasing risk by encouraging people 

 to use more hazardous paint strippers. 



And so the program looked at both the industrial and the 

 consumer or commercial methods, their physical, chemical, and 

 heat methods. Some of the chemicals are solvents, some of them 

 are caustics. From among the solvents, some of them are flam- 

 mable and some of them are non-flammable, and all of these things 

 are interesting because you get different kinds of risks from these 

 different types of chemicals. But what we can do is array for all 

 of these the risks to human health and the environment, the prob- 

 ability of exposure during use, and really get an idea of what really 

 makes sense here. Should we be pushing the market toward one 

 or another category of these paint strippers? Should we be pushing 

 the market toward different kinds of protection? 



One of the things we became aware of is that a lot of the expo- 

 sure for consumers is dermal exposure, and that, you know, there 

 are certain kinds of gloves that you can wear, but those gloves are 

 special gloves and the^re not packaged with the paint strippers. 

 And I don't know about you, but when I go to the hardware store 

 to buy something, I don't necessarily think about, you know, do I 

 need to have the special chemically impermeable glove for using 

 this product or do I just buy the first pair of gloves that I see that's 

 on the rack. 



These are the kinds of issues that you can get into, and then as 

 you said before, that gets away from the one chemical at a time ap- 

 proach. Looking at one chemical at a time could end up increasing 

 instead of reducing risk. 



Senator Reid. We've talked about some ambitious ideas that you 

 have for the TSCA program, but the problem we're having in gov- 



