EDF Applauds Clinton Administration Initiative On Chemical Testing

Fred Krupp, the executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), today applauded Vice President Al Gore’s announcement that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is launching an initiative to assure that basic health data for widely used chemicals are publicly available.

“One key to the public’s right to know about chemicals are the basic facts about whether they are toxic,” said Krupp. “Unfortunately, even basic health-effects tests are missing from the public record for most of the top-selling commercial chemicals. As a result, government lacks the information needed to assess the health risks that a chemical may pose. This does not mean these chemicals are harmful, but it means no one can tell if they’re safe. This initiative reinforces EDF’s request last summer to the CEOs of top chemicals companies asking for voluntary commitments to conduct basic health tests and make the results of those tests publicly available.”

“Last month the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Dr. Kenneth Olden, testified to Congress stating that ‘We are clearly in a state of toxic ignorance.’ Today, EPA is saying that ignorance is no longer acceptable, beginning with chemicals that are used in large volumes,” said EDF senior attorney Karen Florini. “It’s a big step toward effective public health protection.”

EDF’s July 1997 study, “Toxic Ignorance”, documented a lack of health screening tests for 71% of high- production-volume chemicals (the ones produced in annual quantities of more than 1 million pounds). That study was based on a random sample of regulated high-volume chemicals, and examined the public availability of data needed to complete the Screening Information Data Set as defined in 1990 by the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. “We’re delighted that EPA is taking steps to assure that basic data on high-volume chemicals will be generated and made available to the public,” said Florini.

“While we’re pleased that the Board of the Chemical Manufacturers Association voted earlier today to increase the US chemical industry’s pace of testing from 25 a year to 100 a year through the international OECD testing program, even at that accelerated rate it would take almost two decades just to complete the screening-level tests for high-volume compounds. We continue to believe that individual chemical companies need to take responsibility to assure that their own products have been adequately screened by the year 2000, as I requested in my letter to chemical company CEOs last summer,” said Krupp.

Information on high-volume chemicals, and many others, is now available free to the public on the Internet, on a chemical-by-chemical basis. Last week EDF launched a new website called the EDF Chemical Scorecard (www.scorecard.org), which includes information on nearly 6,000 chemicals, along with local pollution data, health rankings, and other important chemical facts. Over 300,000 inquiries daily are being answered by this site.