TL: ERA OF FAILURE : LOWLIGHTS OF EPA'S FIRST 20 YEARS SO: Greenpeace USA (GP) DT: December 1, 1990 Keywords: toxics us epa failures lists problems enforcement regulations legislation chemicals effluent greenpeace reports gp / ---------- ERA OF FAILURE-- LOWLIGHTS OF EPA'S FIRST 20 YEARS [part 1 of 8] On the 20th birthday of EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), the agency is patting itself on the back for doing a great job. However, during the agency's 20-year lifetime, threats to the environment have continued to grow. We now have 10,000 pages of environmental regulations, and the public and industry are devoting over $90 billion each year to end-of-pipe pollution control; yet the environment continues to deteriorate at an accelerating pace. While the Agency could not have foreseen some of today's most urgent environmental problems such as global warming, its record reveals a serious dereliction of duty in the face of foreseeable dangers - particularly with regard to toxic substances. The agency has regularly caved in to pressure from polluters when it comes to proposing laws, writing regulations, and enforcing the law. It has adamantly refused to try to PREVENT pollution rather than try to CONTROL it after it has been produced. Worst of all, it has routinely worked against grassroots activists and allied itself with polluting industries at waste dumps, superfund sites and contaminated communities around the country. As a result, the EPA today has lost the confidence of its natural constituency, environmentalists and the public. Its legacy of myopic policies, misplaced priorities, and, ultimately, of abject failure continues to grow. This is not a happy anniversary. Here are some of the "lowlights" of the last 20 years of EPA efforts: TOXICS During EPA's 20 years of efforts to control toxic materials, industry has continued to produce more toxics each year (averaging 6.5% increase annually); thus in 1990, industry produced roughly four times as much toxic material as was produced the year EPA was born. EPA has consistently underestimated the amount of hazardous waste produced in the U.S., from its 1973 report which put the number at 10 million tons annually to its latest report which puts the number at 259 million tons annually; the American Chemical Society says the true number is somewhere between 530 million tons and 2.9 billion tons annually -- two to 10 times more than the EPA acknowledges. Despite saying that the control of pesticides is its Number One priority, EPA says it will be "well into the next century" before all dangerous pesticides are banned, restricted, or regulated. In 1972 Congress told EPA to gather new data on the 600 active ingredients in 45,000 different pesticide formulations because data on the hazards was either scientifically inadequate, fraudulent, or non-existent. To date, EPA is willing to provide safety assurances on only a handful of the more than 600 active ingredients and the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) questions whether even these assurances have any validity. [] ERA OF FAILURE-- LOWLIGHTS OF EPA'S FIRST 20 YEARS [part 2 of 8] SUPERFUND Since its inception in 1980 the Reagan/Bush EPA has deliberately undermined the Superfund (the nation's hazardous waste cleanup program). Former EPA Administrator Ann Gorsuch resigned as evidence mounted that she steered cleanup funds to communities based on partisan politics and not the severity of contamination. Her Assistant Administrator in charge of the program went to jail for lying to Congress about these activities. Today, despite having one of the nation's strongest environmental laws at its disposal, the Agency continues to mismanage the Superfund. By its own admission, the EPA has information on 27,200 potential Superfund sites but the agency has placed fewer than 1200 of them on the official Superfund list and has actually cleaned up fewer than 100 sites. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) says the EPA is badly misinformed because GAO has found evidence that somewhere between 103,340 and 425,480 contaminated sites need investigation. EPA opposed legislation that gave EPA responsibility for sponsoring research and development on new technologies for detoxifying wastes removed from Superfund sites. EPA still has never defined "how clean is clean" at a Superfund cleanup site, thus leaving every cleanup subject to debates that are political and not based on scientific or medical judgment. EPA now routinely allows responsible parties (dumpers) at Superfund sites to control the scope and direction of remedial action studies, thus giving the polluters an important voice in the amount of cleanup that will be attempted. In the mid-1980s, EPA proposed a "new technology" for cleaning up Superfund sites; they called it "natural flushing" and it consisted of doing nothing but allowing natural rain to slowly remove chemicals from an old chemical dump by washing them away over a 400-year period. EPA officials argued that this met Congressional requirements for a "permanent cleanup" strategy. EPA's own auditors say the agency has paid "excessive amounts" of money to Superfund contractors. Such contractors have overcharged EPA "several thousand percent" for equipment purchased, and have overcharged for labor anywhere from 14% to 103%. [] ERA OF FAILURE-- LOWLIGHTS OF EPA'S FIRST 20 YEARS [part 3 of 8] ATMOSPHERE During EPA's 20 year history the air most Americans breathe remains unhealthy, and toxic chemicals have eroded a hole in the earth's protective ozone layer. Greenhouse gases are literally choking the planet to the point where dramatic climate disruptions appear to be inevitable. For 15 years, EPA actively opposed legislative proposals that would have required the agency to monitor up to 85 toxic air pollutants in large cities and near large polluters. EPA claimed, that instead of taking on this responsibility itself, it favored helping states develop their own monitoring programs. This assures that such programs would be fragmented, contradictory, underfunded and ultimately fail, as they have. For the past decade, EPA contributed substantially to the destruction of lakes and forests by acid rain, by refusing (illegally) to enforce Clean Air Act prohibitions against tall stacks on power plants and smelters. In clear violation of the Clean Air Act, EPA has allowed approximately 100 American cities to exceed carbon monoxide and/or ozone limits for a decade. For 15 years, EPA ignored the ozone-layer threat posed by CFCs, despite the agency's own estimate that DuPont's stratospheric ozone hole will cause some 40 million cases of skin cancer and 800,000 cancer deaths among Americans before the year 2075. [] ERA OF FAILURE-- LOWLIGHTS OF EPA'S FIRST 20 YEARS [part 4 of 8] PREVENTION EPA still has not established a program to prevent non-point sources of pollution, such as runoff from farms and from the streets of cities, even though the agency identified such sources to be major problems more than a decade ago. EPA made a policy decision in 1984 to start promoting hazardous waste incineration as an alternative to landfills, instead of encouraging, or requiring, waste reduction and pollution prevention. Then, EPA exempted 80% of all liquid hazardous waste from RCRA [Resource Conservation and Recovery Act] by allowing cement kilns and industrial furnaces to burn such wastes as fuel (EPA calls this "recycling" of wastes). EPA has institutionalized "risk assessment" as the basis for all important decisions regarding control of toxic materials, thus sanctioning the repulsive concept that government can kill citizens without due process of law simply because the names and addresses of those to be killed are not known. EPA now routinely says it is an "acceptable risk" to plan to kill one out of every million citizens affected by a chemical or by a project such as an incinerator. Legalizing pollution in this manner undermines efforts to force industry to adopt clean production techniques that would reduce toxic discharges even further. EPA has aggressively pressured states to install incinerators for municipal solid waste, as an alternative to landfills, rather than reducing, recycling and composting the nation's garbage. EPA has done an end run on Congress's clear intention to prevent hazardous wastes from being landfilled. EPA ignored Congress's language forbidding landfilling of any materials that might migrate out of a landfill and instead substituted language that allowed landfilling of hazardous substances if mathematical models could be developed that showed that these substances posed no threat to the environment. [] ERA OF FAILURE-- LOWLIGHTS OF EPA'S FIRST 20 YEARS [part 5 of 8] GRASS ROOTS POLICIES The sorriest chapter in EPA's brief history has been its abandonment of ordinary people trying to protect their homes from chemical contamination. In case after case where concerned citizens have taken on polluters - at superfund sites, incinerators, landfills and manufacturing plants - EPA has sided with the polluter. It is no wonder that a growing number of Americans who consider themselves part of a movement for environmental justice (some 8,000 or more local organizations) view the EPA as an adversary rather than an ally. EPA criticized and opposed the successful efforts of a coalition of consumer groups and environmental activists who negotiated an agreement with supermarkets in California to test produce for pesticide contamination and provide consumers with the results. The Agency defended pesticide residues as acceptable risks. One of the first Technical Assistance Grants under the Superfund program was denied citizens of Jacksonville, Arkansas and given instead to a group organized by the company that EPA had identified as the responsible party at the Superfund site. Only after public outcry, grassroots mobilization and Congressional investigation, did EPA withdraw the award and give it to the citizens. In 1985 EPA proposed, and in 1990 allowed, poor families to move back into homes that had originally been abandoned to protect people against toxic contamination at Love Canal. While the toxics beneath Love Canal have not been cleaned up, but political pressure has crushed the EPA's will to resist such foolish plans. EPA's is clearly sending the nation a message: actual cleanup of Superfund dumps is unimportant; what's important is the appearance that all is well. For more than a decade EPA has violated its own regulations by allowing federal agencies (e.g. the Department of Defense) and some private waste haulers to dump cleaned-up Superfund wastes into landfills that are known to be leaking, such as Chemical Waste Management, Inc.'s toxic dumps at Kettleman Hills, CA, and Emelle, AL. EPA joined the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) in renaming one-third of the nation's so-called "low-level" radioactive wastes; the new name is "below regulatory concern" (BRC). Now these renamed (though still radioactive) BRC wastes are officially considered non- radioactive and therefore can be put into municipal landfills, incinerators and recycling programs. Processing BRC wastes will result in inevitable increases in the public's exposure to radiation. In 1990, EPA approved plans to incinerate dioxin-contaminated chemical-biological warfare agents in a residential section of Jacksonville, Arkansas. This action sets a chilling precedent, indicating the agency believes it is acceptable to incinerate hazardous wastes, including dioxin wastes, adjacent to homes. [Greenbase Inventory October 27, 1991 ] =======[#]======= [] ERA OF FAILURE-- LOWLIGHTS OF EPA'S FIRST 20 YEARS [part 6 of 8] ENFORCEMENT Throughout its 20-year lifetime, EPA has repeatedly missed deadlines for enforcement of environmental laws such as: deadlines to stop sewage dumping into the Atlantic ocean; the deadline to make all surface waters fishable and swimmable by 1983; deadlines to begin controlling air toxics; and Congress's stated goal of zero discharge of toxics into the nation's waterways by 1985. EPA has allowed for a massive loophole to develop in RCRA (Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the nation's basic hazardous waste control law), by declaring that hazardous chemicals dumped into sewage treatment plants are no longer legally defined as hazardous wastes. In 1986, EPA estimated that 202 million pounds of hazardous wastes were exempt from RCRA because they were dumped by industry into sewers each year. The figure is almost certainly larger today. EPA has never established siting criteria for hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal facilities. Thus, siting has become a political football, resulting in dumps and incinerators usually being placed in minority communities where residents are poor and politically vulnerable. EPA has routinely proposed fines for polluters that fail to recover amounts larger than the profits earned by illegal activity, thus, EPA's enforcement programs have sent polluters the clear message that crime pays. More often than not, EPA has then lowered the fines still further during negotiations, collecting even less than originally proposed. EPA waffled on banning daminozide (Alar), a cancer-causing growth-regulator widely used on apples. The agency first announced it would ban Alar in 1985, then responded to pressure from Uniroyal (manufacturer of Alar) and reversed its decision in 1986, then finally flip-flopped again in 1990. Ultimately diminishing public confidence in both science and government. EPA gave a "waiver" of hazardous wastes rules (even though EPA's regulations make no mention of the existence of such waivers) to the Department of Energy (DOE) to allow them to bury hazardous chemical wastes in a salt mine in New Mexico where DOE is proposing to bury one ton of plutonium and other assorted radioactive wastes. EPA has continued to issue licenses (RCRA Part B permits) to hazardous waste landfills, despite the agency's frequent statements, which are corroborated by independent scientists, that all landfills leak. In the mid-1980s, EPA embraced the concept of selling "pollution rights," thus strengthening the legal position of polluters and ensuring that pollution will always be with us since polluters can purchase a "right" to produce it. EPA tried aggressively (though, fortunately, without success) to prevent states (like North Carolina) from passing laws that would control the number, size, and location of toxic waste processing facilities that private waste haulers could build. All this really showed is how heavily the EPA has been infiltrated and manipulated by the hazardous waste management industry. William Reilly's infamous breakfast meeting with Dean Buntrock, CEO of Waste Management, Inc., merely confirmed the influence this industry has come to exert upon the agency. [] ERA OF FAILURE-- LOWLIGHTS OF EPA'S FIRST 20 YEARS [part 7 of 8] ASBESTOS AND LEAD EPA has failed to control the problem of lead in drinking water; they estimate that at least 38 million Americans drink water containing lead at levels that exceed EPA safety standards. EPA has failed to protect the nation's children against lead pollution. Despite EPA's explicit recognition of the dangers posed by exposure to lead, an astonishing 88% of American children under age 6 now have enough lead in their blood (the average is 160 micrograms of lead per liter of blood) to reduce their IQs measurably. For 15 years EPA failed, and in some years blatantly refused, to even ask Congress for funding to clean up asbestos in schools, where an estimated 15 million children are at risk. After Congress took action to force the agency to get involved in this issue, EPA dragged its feet, then finally established a program that was subsequently found to be inadequately monitored, inspected and enforced and which, in many cases, exposed children to more asbestos than they might have encountered if no removal program had been undertaken. EPA took 20 years to announce a serious intention to ban asbestos from consumer products, even though it was well-established by scientists and physicians in the 1950s and 1960s that thousands of men and women have acquired cancer through exposure to asbestos. EPA has failed to establish health and safety standards for lead in soils, even though the agency's own Science Advisory Board has said that contaminated soil is the main source of lead exposure to the nation's children. [] ERA OF FAILURE-- LOWLIGHTS OF EPA'S FIRST 20 YEARS [part 8 of 8] WATER By the late 1980s, 27% of America's rivers and 22% of America's lakes were either not fishable or not swimmable, despite Congress's 1972 mandate to EPA to make them fishable and swimmable by 1983. The United States is bound by the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement to achieve zero discharge leading to virtual elimination of persistent and bioaccumulative toxics into the Great Lakes. Both the Clean Water Act and the Toxic Substances Control Act give EPA the power to stop the continued poisoning of the Great Lakes. EPA has no plan in place to enforce this fundamental goal of the Agreement. EPA estimates that 50% of the nations's groundwater reserves are contaminated with chemicals, mostly agricultural chemicals. This estimate is probably conservative since the Agency skewed its study to bypass agricultural areas. Endangered Species EPA has admitted that it routinely fails to act to save threatened and endangered species when notified by other federal agencies that pesticides are causing serious damage to wildlife. ENDS