78 



Great Lakes, and the stratosphere, contamination that represents a destructive leg- 

 acy to future generations. 



More than 70,000 chemicals are in commerce in the U.S. While industrial facili- 

 ties report a few billion pounds of environmental releases of toxic chemicals to the 

 Toxics Release Inventory, many trillions of pounds of chemicals are manufactured 

 for introduction into commerce in the U.S. each year. 



If environmental toxics concerns could be relieved by eliminating or phasing out 

 a few bad chemicals, public policy choices would be easy, and TSCA, as enacted, 

 might offer useful tools. Only a tiny fraction of the 70,000+ chemicals in commerce, 

 however, have been adequately characterized for their potential to pose health or 

 environmental effects. Even so, chemicals with well known toxicity can be used with 

 little environmental consequence, while others with much lower toxicity pose serious 

 risks when used inappropriately. It is not a chemical's toxicity alone, but the com- 

 bination of its toxicity and uses in specific settings, leading to human and environ- 

 mental exposures, that results in unreasonable risks in those settings. The heart of 

 the problem of toxic chemicals is not their ability to produce harmful effects, but 

 instead the particular uses of toxic chemicals in specific settings that allow harmful 

 effects to occur. 



Decisions that determine such uses are made in hundreds of thousands, if not mil- 

 lions, of settings across the country and at every stage in the economy. This deci- 

 sion-making is tightly integrated into the working of our dynamic economy, involv- 

 ing not only industrial use decisions, but also customer and supplier relationships 

 throughout. 



Thus, unreasonable risks from chemicals In commerce are not few, but many; not 

 national, but local; not static, but dynamic. Moreover, most of individual unreason- 

 able risks are not large, but when added together, make up a substantial portion 

 of our current and future concerns over chemical contamination and environmental 

 health. 



ADJUSTING TSCA TO THE REAL WORLD— FIVE PROPOSALS 



If the problems are many, dispersed, and djTiamic, a centralized government ap- 

 proach, especially one like TSCA requiring considerable information-gathering and 

 analysis to reach decisions, is doomed to failure. A decentralized approach to the 

 problems of toxics in commerce is essential -one that can take into account local cir- 

 cumstances and one that will stimulate many shifts from less appropriate to more 

 appropriate uses in specific settings. Thus, while decisions on the production and 

 use of chemicals are appropriately made on an unreasonable-risk basis, those deci- 

 sions necessarily are local, involving the specifics of uses at a location. 



Primary responsibility for avoiding unreasonable risks fi"om chemicals in com- 

 merce should rest with industrial producers and users of such chemicals and not 

 with EPA. However, TSCA provides no guidance to industrial firms in taking on 

 that responsibility. 



1. Provide Producers and Users of Chemicals with Guidance on Reasonable Uses of 

 Chemicals and Make Such Guidance an Enforceable General Duty-A Use-Based 

 Approach 



For wastes, in contrast, a hierarchy of environmental management approaches 

 has been widely accepted: source reduction is most desirable, followed in turn by 

 re-use, recycling, energy recovery, treatment, and only as a last resort disposal. Con- 

 gress unanimously adopted this hierarchy in the 1990 Federal Pollution Prevention 

 Act, with the support of both industry and the environmental community. The hier- 

 archy has been useful for companies in guiding their waste management decisions 

 and has provided a basis for all to evaluate industry's practices. 



No equivalent to the environmental management hierarchy helps guide decisions 

 on chemicals in commerce. Neither "Do not produce toxic chemicals" nor "Do not use 

 toxic chemicals" represents a reasonable norm, given that some uses involve little 

 or no human or environmental exposure, with no attendant risks. The alternative, 

 "Reduce toxic chemical use," succeeds on environmental grounds, but fails when ap- 

 plied to some uses, such as closed system applications, where there is little risk, or 



