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Bakelite Synthetics, the only major source of formaldehyde emissions in Jefferson County, will have more time to comply with Biden-era pollution control requirements following a Trump proclamation. The plant neighbors the Riverside Gardens community, where residents have raised concerns about chemical emissions and other hazards in the past. "This would be the perfect time for this city to strengthen that permit in an effort to reduce our exposure to any of the chemicals coming from Bakelite," Eboni Cochran, a longtime environmental justice advocate with Rubbertown Emergency ACTion, or REACT, said in a text message. "There are solutions," Cochran said. "The city just needs to have enough will and courage to protect its residents."

Living in a healthy environment means that you can trust that your basic living conditions – air, water, food, shelter, and the things in your built world – will not make you sick. Living in a healthy environment means that, no matter your identity, you trust the safety of public spaces, and do not fear bodily harm in your home, workplace, or street. The Trump Administration is systematically dismantling the conditions of a healthy and safe environment. 

Today, Coming Clean, the Environmental Justice Health Alliance, and other members of the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters sent a letter urging members of Congress to oppose White House proposal to eliminate the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB). The CSB is an independent nonregulatory federal agency that Congress created pursuant to federal law after deadly chemical disasters in Bhopal, India and Institute, West Virginia. It is the only federal agency charged with investigating the root causes of industrial chemical disasters; issuing reports to Congress, EPA, and OSHA; and making recommendations to prevent future disasters. This year alone, there have already been over one hundred chemical incidents in the U.S

Eliminating the CSB will come at a cost to the safety of plant workers and neighboring communities, especially along the Gulf Coast, where the bulk of the U.S. petrochemical industry is concentrated, said former CSB officials and environmental groups. “Closing the CSB will mean more accidents at chemical plants, more explosions and more deaths,” said Beth Rosenberg, a public health expert who served on the CSB board from 2013 to 2014. On average, hazardous chemical accidents happen once every other day in the U.S., according to Coming Clean, an environmental health nonprofit. Coming Clean documented 825 fires, leaks and other chemical-related incidents between January 2021 and October 2023. The incidents killed at least 43 people and triggered evacuation orders and advisories in nearly 200 communities.

A new year-long study from the Campaign for Healthier Solutions (CHS) claims that many popular products found at the biggest dollar store chains across the country contain toxic chemicals. The report showed that nearly 50 personal care, baby, beauty, and cleaning products were found to have toxic chemicals. Many of these products were kids’ toys or baby products, which raises concerns for parents – especially parents of young kids, who often put things in their mouths."Busy parents shouldn't have to scan the ingredients list of every product they buy to make sure it's safe for our families,” Yolanda Brown Alston, director of workforce programs at Harambee House, said in a news release. “Dollar stores need to step up on chemical safety and provide quality products that add value to our communities.” 

The Campaign for Healthier Solutions (CHS) today published the results of a year-long effort to collect, test, and screen dollar store products for chemicals of concern. Highlighted products of concern purchased at Dollar Tree/Family Dollar and/or Dollar General include: “Baby Shark” baby lotion containing a formaldehyde-releasing chemical; daily moisturizer containing a chemical banned in European cosmetics; light-up children’s bracelets, plastic roses and mini candy pails containing lead; children’s products made with polyvinyl chloride or PVC, and receipts containing bisphenol-S. Published the week of Mother’s Day, “Product Testing for the People: Pitfalls, Persistence, and Progress in Transforming Dollar Stores” provides safe shopping tips for families and actionable recommendations for Dollar Tree and Dollar General to expand, improve, and enforce their chemical policies. The report also highlights loopholes in federal law that allow companies to sell products containing chemicals of concern, showing the importance of corporate action. Take action! 

Today 34 individuals and organizations sent a  letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin, opposing an unprecedented Presidential exemption that would allow hundreds of chemical plants to simply ignore stricter emissions standards that were finalized last year.  Among these was the “HON rule”, which requires over 200 chemical plants - shown to contribute to high cancer risk in fenceline communities - to conduct fenceline monitoring for six cancer-causing air pollutants and take action to prevent leaks if emissions exceed certain thresholds. A recent request from chemical industry lobbyists seeks to exempt all HON facilities from complying with the new standards.

The Environmental Protection Agency just hid data that mapped out the locations of thousands of dangerous chemical facilities, after chemical industry lobbyists demanded that the Trump administration take down the public records. The webpage was quietly shut down late Friday, according to records viewed by The Lever — stripping away what advocates say was critical information on the secretive chemical plants at highest risk of disaster across the United States. The data was made public last year through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Risk Management Program, which oversees the country’s highest-risk chemical facilities. These chemical plants deal with dangerous, volatile chemicals — like those used to make pesticides, fertilizers, and plastics — and are responsible for dozens of chemical disasters every year. A spokesperson for Coming Clean, an environmental health group focusing on the chemical industry, told The Lever that the organization was “surprised” to see the webpage taken down and that its staff had accessed the data as recently as Friday morning.“We know that industry had suggested it, so it seems like [regulators] are following industry’s lead,” the spokesperson added.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Thursday that it plans to rehash regulations under the Risk Management Program (RMP). The decision comes after lobbyists for the chemical industry sent a letter requesting the agency weaken the rule requiring nearly 12,000 highly hazardous industrial facilities to prevent and plan for chemical disasters.

The EPA is bending to the will of corporate lobbyists who are seeking to eliminate stronger rules finalized in 2024. These more protective rules were the result of years of public debate and incorporated input from industry and the public alike, including advocacy by environmental justice, labor, occupational and public health, and environmental organizations.

“It would mean a real disservice to communities, first responders and workers,” said Adam Kron, an attorney with Earthjustice. “It would put them in greater harm’s way from these chemical disasters.” Earthjustice is part of a coalition of environmental groups that tracks chemical disasters. This coalition has found that since January 2021, there have been more than 1,100 chemical incidents. The news of a potential rewrite comes days after Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, in which he vowed to take on toxic chemicals, saying, “our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply and keep our children healthy and strong.” Yet that rhetoric also comes as Trump has pledged broad deregulatory action, which could clash with upholding chemical safeguards. 

So-called sustainable and/or green chemistry is being promoted in many circles as a means to both harness chemistry innovation to support more sustainable economies and reduce the environmental and public health impacts of chemical manufacturing.  As we work to build research and policy which deliver health protections and justice to communities most impacted by the toxic harm of the chemical industry, we must critically examine sustainable chemistry initiatives and ask who will benefit from the technologies and practices.  When something is promoted as “sustainable chemistry,” who is it sustainable for?  Read more of this joint blog from Coming Clean and EJHA. 

"The chemical industry is asking the Environmental Protection Agency ... to hide chemical facilities at the highest risk of disaster and their safety records from public view." This story in The Lever highlights Coming Clean's and EJHA's report on "Chemical Incident Tracking 2021-2023," part of our decade-long collaboration to prevent chemical disasters.

Central Coast members of Lideres Campesinas organized a protest outside the Dollar Tree store in Orcutt, CA as part of the Campaign for Healthier Solutions national week of action calling on dollar store chains to protect their customers from toxic chemicals in the products they sell. “These big companies, they have their a store in the poorest community and the poorest area of the community, they establish their store for colored people, fieldworkers, people who are not able to buy expensive products,” says Rosalba Garcia.

Jose Bravo, Coordinator of the Campaign for Healthier Solutions, calls on dollar stores to do more to get toxic chemicals out of the productst they sell. "The nation’s largest dollar stores continually fail to meaningfully strengthen their chemical policies and intervene in their supply chains to keep their shoppers safe."

This week, supporters of the Campaign for Healthier Solutions are vising dollar stores in 30 states nationwide, with the support of health and environmental justice organizations, to demand products free of toxic chemicals.

On October 16, 2024, Coming Clean and the Union of Concerned Scientists published The Community Guide to Cumulative Impacts, a resource to drive policy changes at the state and local level to protect overburdened communities from cumulative chemical and pollution harms. The Guide is available in English and Spanish. The Guide was co-developed with over eight local organizations across the country, including Los Jardines Institute, Clean + Healthy, and COPAL (Communidades Organizando el Poder y la Acción Latina), that have long advocated for holistic policies that can reduce stressors on community health. The Guide defines cumulative impacts as “the combined chemical and non-chemical stressors on a community’s health, well-being, and quality of life.” It compares various metrics and mapping tools that can help environmental justice communities show policymakers that their community is experiencing multiple, reinforcing health stressors, such as proximity to many highly polluting facilities releasing multiple chemicals, lack of access to affordable healthcare and housing, and language barriers.

Over 125 organizations in the Coming Clean network agree that reducing cumulative impacts on environmental justice communities is one of our collective policy goals, as outlined in the Louisville Charter for Safer Chemicals. We know that environmental justice communities are not exposed to only one polluting facility or one health-harming pollutant at a time. When reviewing permits for polluting facilities, regulators should have to take into account the combined harm of existing industry on community health, and should have the authority to deny permit applications from facilities that add to disproportionate pollution burdens and existing health stressors. Passing cumulative impacts legislation at the state and local level is one promising way to make this possible. In 2021, Coming Clean released a policy brief by Drs. Nicky Sheats and Ana Baptista on state cumulative impacts legislation that passed in New Jersey, which we hoped would serve as a model for other states and cities. Since then, New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts and Connecticut have also passed cumulative impacts laws. Cities and counties are also pursuing creative ways to assess and reduce cumulative impacts, while involving impacted community members in decision making. Could your state or city be next? Read our Community Guide to Cumulative Impacts! 

Expanding the list of chemicals to bring more facilities under federal oversight has become a priority for environmentalists, explained Maya Nye, the federal policy director at Coming Clean, an environmental health nonprofit focused on chemical industry oversight. Being subject to Risk Management Program requirements, Nye said, “would have required [BioLab] to think about, ‘What is the emergency response plan? What may lead to a chemical disaster?’” Environmentalists fought hard to strengthen the EPA’s Risk Management Program to account for the impacts of extreme weather on chemical accidents. Thanks to the regulations finalized this year, facilities covered by the program will be required to consider, and map out, the potential hazards posed by climate change. But BioLab’s facilities, which fall outside of the program, will not.

NEW FACTSHEET In spring 2024, after a multi-year collective advocacy effort, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the “Safer Communities by Chemical Accident Prevention” rule which updated the Risk Management Program (RMP) rule “to further protect vulnerable communities from chemical accidents, especially those living near facilities in industry sectors with high accident rates.” You can read our high-level summary takeaways here.

NEW FACTSHEET Environmental health and farmworker advocacy organizations are urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to adhere to proven science when assessing the safety of chemicals regulated under its statutory authority, and warn against the misuse of New Approach Methods (NAMs) to designate pesticides and other harmful chemicals as safe. A new fact sheet explains that NAMs -  which are mostly unproven and include biochemical, molecular, and cell-based assays and computational models widely promoted by the chemical industry as an alternative to rodent tests - “frequently understate or incorrectly evaluate hazard and risk with potentially harmful consequences for workers, families, wildlife and ecosystems.”"We are alarmed that EPA is relying on these new, unproven tests to justify reducing protection from pesticide exposure. Farmworkers and their children will bear the brunt of this reckless decision." stated Anne Katten of California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, who coordinates Coming Clean’s collaborative team on Farmworker Health and Justice. Read the factsheet in English and Spanish.