EPA, Stop Stalling on Non-Stick Chemical (C8) Regulation!
- par: Susan V
- destinataire: EPA Water Chief Nancy Stoner
Based on EPA's own data, C8 is found in drinking water in 94 counties in 27 states in the US. But the EPA still hasn't set a reasonable limit for this highly toxic industrial chemical used in non-stick pans and other products.
A member of the chemical family known as PFCs (or perfluorinated chemicals), C8 is also used in rain gear, upholstery treatments and even in cupcake wrappers and pizza box and popcorn bag liners.
Environmental Working Group, which calls C8 the "Teflon chemical," says it's been "linked to cancer, birth defects, heart disease and other illness." These fluorinated chemicals can even "decrease immune response to vaccines," notes "The Madrid Statement" on PFASs.
Recently, adds Mother Jones, an Ohio jury agreed with a woman who claimed Dupont's years of dumping C8 into the Ohio River contributed to her kidney cancer.
Even though in 2005 Dupont was sued by a group of 70,000 West Virginia and Ohio residents for contaminating drinking water with C8 and fined by EPA $16 million for withholding information about C8's health hazards, EPA is still stalling on regulating C8!
So far EPA has set only a voluntary limit for C8 that is 400 times more than what scientists suggest it should be, says EWG. What's worse, it’s planning to wait until at least 2021 to decide on a legally enforceable standard.
Tell EPA to do its job in protecting the public from chemical hazards and stop stalling on C8 regulation.
Dear [decisionmaker],
I believe that EPA has waited far too long to regulate levels of C8 in drinking water.
After all the lawsuits involving health threats to thousands of West Virginian and Ohio residents and fines for withholding information about C8 hazards, along with the recent findings by EWG that "EPA's 'Safe' Level is Hundreds or Thousands of Times Too Weak," there is no excuse for EPA to spend another 5 to 7 years deciding to do something definitive about this serious health hazard.
Even after the settlement of the class action suit involving 70,000 residents, EWG says "DuPont is paying for technology to filter – but not eliminate – the toxin from six area water systems."
Now new evidence makes the lax penalties on DuPont's polluting and EPA's weak voluntary restrictions on C8 levels all the more inappropriate. EWG reports that "two leading environmental health scientists have published research... that showed PFOA contamination of drinking water is a much more serious threat to health, both in the mid-Ohio Valley and nationwide, than previously thought," and that "tiny concentrations of PFOA – below the reporting limit required by EPA's tests of public water supplies – are harmful."
EWG insists that "EPA's health advisory level is hundreds or thousands of times too weak to fully protect human health with an adequate margin of safety."
And this is only dealing with the exposures people get from drinking water. With the chemical used in so many other products, it's hard to tell what the cumulative exposure effects are. Bill Walker who led the EWG report, told Mother Jones that it was a "broken system that allowed these chemicals to be used in hundreds of thousands of products without adequate safety testing." in the first place.
The 94 public water systems containing what scientists now say are unsafe levels of C8, says EWG, "provide drinking water to more that 6.5 million people."
The least EPA can do now is restrict exposures from polluted drinking water.
Therefore, Ms. Stoner, as EPA's water chief, we request that you amend your plan to take 5 to 7 more years to decide about C8 levels and instead take immediate steps to ensure C8 levels are below what scientists now, based on new evidence, say are safe.
[Your comments here]
Thanks for your time.
Sincerely,
[Your name here]
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-duponts-worst-nightmare.html
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