Three Members Of EPA Chemicals Advisory Panel Resign

Three members of a panel that advises EPA on the management of commercial chemicals resigned as a bloc effective Oct. 4.

The National Pollution Prevention & Toxics Advisory Committee "has been unable or unwilling to consider systematic, structural problems" with EPA's assessment and management of chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act, they said in an Oct. 2 resignation letter to the agency.

Leaving the 15-member panel are Richard A. Denison, senior scientist for Environmental Defense; Joseph H. Guth, executive director of the California League for Environmental Enforcement Now; and Joel Tickner, assistant professor in the Department of Community Health & Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

The three said EPA has been reluctant to acknowledge and confront limitations in its approaches for assessing and managing chemicals. Also, the agency has "repeatedly cited EPA's budgetary constraint as a barrier even to considering changes."

In addition, the advisory panel is "numerically weighted excessively toward industry," they said. This has allowed some industry members to put off the panel's discussion of broader issues and limit its agenda to "narrow, short-term issues" that do not warrant the time and expense to EPA of having the advisory committee, the three wrote.

Industry members include representatives of the American Chemistry Council, the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association, the American Petroleum Institute, Dow Chemical, Procter & Gamble, and GE Advanced Materials. Chairing the committee is Harry Gregori Jr., the vice president of Environmental Solutions, an environmental consulting firm.

Other members of the panel are a retired executive director of the Risk Science Institute at the International Life Sciences Institute, a representative of the National Center for Healthy Housing, and officials from two state agencies and one from a Native American tribe.

The committee was scheduled to meet in a public session on Oct. 4???5, but EPA abruptly cancelled the meeting on Oct. 2, providing no explanation. Calls from C&EN to EPA on the issue were not returned by deadline.