Stakeholders Urged EPA to Include Asbestos Legacy Use and the Libby Amphibole in the Risk Evaluation During Recent Meeting

Stakeholders from diverse backgrounds following a productive meeting with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Yesterday ADAO had the opportunity to sit down with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for an important joint meeting with twenty stakeholders to share our concerns and seek answers from the agency.

Stakeholders at the table included representatives from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, American Public Health Association, International Association of Fire Fighters, Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families and the Environmental Information Association.

In keeping with our ADAO tradition, we dedicated our meeting to Vaelua, Iva, and Fred who passed away from mesothelioma. ADAO also presented nearly 12,000 petition signatures from around the world urging the EPA to ban asbestos without loopholes and exemptions. I explained, the stack of petition signatories represented just a portion of names of the 15,000 deaths each year.

We shared our deep concern that the upcoming Problem Formulation Document for the asbestos risk evaluation will  follow EPA’s June 2017 Scope of the Risk Evaluation for Asbestos by excluding ongoing exposure from legacy asbestos products that remain in use and installed attic insulation containing Libby Amphibole asbestos. Collectively, we opposed these exclusions in comments on the scoping document and Administrator Pruitt agreed to reexamine them in a recent Congressional testimony. To exclude these important sources of exposure and risk would not only be contrary to TSCA’s mandate, but would also result in an incomplete risk evaluation that would fail to address severe threats to public health and the environment.

In addition to these exclusions, we urged EPA to include in its risk evaluation chlor-alkali industry imports and use of asbestos as used to make asbestos diaphragm. In 2016, the chlor-alkali industry imported 702 metric tons of raw asbestos rather than the 340 tons the U.S. Geological Survey previously estimated. There are numerous pathways of asbestos exposure for those mining, transporting, handling, repairing, removing, and disposing of asbestos for the chlor-alkali industry. Safer substitute materials are commercially available and have been already adopted by numerous companies in the industry and around the world. As U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reported, the chlor-alkali industry “accounted for nearly 100% of asbestos mineral consumption in 2017” in the US.

Our joint message was clear, the EPA should include chlor-alkali use in its risk evaluation, conclude that it presents an unreasonable risk of injury, and ban this obsolete and hazardous technology.  

The EPA attendees, including Deputy Assistant Administrator and Trump political appointee Nancy Beck, listened but made no commitments. The Problem Formulation document is expected  to be released soon and will be a critical test of whether EPA is serious about addressing the urgent public health threat from asbestos or will ignore this threat in its risk evaluation.

Check back for continued updates from Washington, D.C.

Respecting collaboration,

Linda
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