A national company (Bed Bath & Beyond) has announced almost 200,000 UGG comforters sold nationwide could be contaminate with mold. Buyers are instructed to stop using immediately.
Industry News
January is National Radon Action Month
Learn about 5 easy things you can do to take action against this silent killer during National Radon Month.
Wildfire Smoke Causing Lingering Health Issues
Researchers in Missoula County, Montana are gathering data about how the worst wildfire season on record affected county residents. Emergency room visits and other respiratory issues increased dramatically after a month long series of wildfires enveloped the area in a smokey haze.
EPA Ordered to Take Action on Protecting Children from Lead Based Paint
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/366598-court-orders-epa-to-take-quick-action-on-lead-paint
A federal appeals court is ordering the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to take action within 90 days to revise standards meant to protect children from lead-based paint. The San Francisco-based Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled Wednesday that the EPA has taken too long to act on a 2009 petition from health and environmental groups who want the agency to further restrict lead paint limitations. The judges issued a “writ of mandamus,” a rare edict from a federal court that requires a litigant to take action.
The EPA told the court that it would take another six years to develop a lead paint rule, which the judges did not accept. “EPA fails to identify a single case where a court has upheld an eight year delay as reasonable, let alone a fourteen year delay, if we take into account the six more years EPA asserts it needs to take action,” Judge Mary Schroeder, nominated by former President Carter, wrote on behalf of herself and Judge Randy Smith, a George W. Bush nominee. The judges said the EPA also has an unambiguous duty to act. Scientific studies point toward a higher danger to children from lead paint than when Congress developed standards in the 1990s, studies that the EPA did not dispute.
“Under the [Toxic Substances Control Act] and the Paint Hazard Act, Congress set EPA a task, authorized EPA to engage in rulemaking to accomplish that task, and set up a framework for EPA to amend initial rules and standards in light of new information,” the judges said. “The new information is clear in this record: the current standards for dust-lead hazard and lead-based paint hazard are insufficient to accomplish Congress’s goal.”
An EPA spokesman said the agency would review the Wednesday ruling, and pledged that officials would “continue to work diligently on a number of fronts to address issues surrounding childhood lead exposure from multiple sources.” The EPA has declared lead poisoning to be the greatest environmental hazard to children under age six. The agency agreed in 2009 to accept public comments on the lead petition and to initiate a rule-making, but did not set a time period for the rule-making. The judges ordered the EPA to propose a new rule within 90 days and make a final rule within a year after that.
10 Tips for a Clean Christmas
If you have red, watery eyes, an itchy nose or can’t stop sneezing over the next few weeks, the holidays may be to blame. Don’t laugh. Apparently, “Christmas tree syndrome” is real and is caused by mold, pollen, dust, mites and other irritants that hitch a ride home on your Christmas tree or lay in wait with the decorations you stored last year. “There’s a number of ‘cutely’ named phenomenon that occur – there’s thunderstorm asthma, back-to-school rashes. We have these clinical observations that come from what’s going on in the environment,” said Patricia Lugar, a specialist in allergy and immunology at Duke University School of Medicine.
The risk can be especially high for those with allergies, asthma and other respiratory problems. Damp environments, like crawl spaces, attics and basements found in the Southeast, can make the problem worse, she said, especially for allergy shot patients. “We generally counsel people, particularly allergy shot patients, if you’ve been digging around in the crawlspace or the basement or your attic, wait 24 to 48 hours before you come to get your shot and let things settle down, just to make sure you’re not going to have a problem,” she said. Cardboard and paper boxes can cause the biggest problem, she said.
“Paper boxes are a great recipe for insects, they are a great recipe to become damp and hold dampness, become moldy. Plastic is really the way to go. Just get a bunch of those big plastic bins. They can seal out insects and cockroaches, and they’re also really resistant to moisture.” Don’t be afraid to throw out something either, especially if there is visible moisture damage, discoloration or a musty smell, she said. “The last thing you want to do is open up this incubator of mold spores, and it all goes into your face or you release it into the air, because it’s been sealed in this plastic box,” she said.
10 TIPS FOR A CLEAN CHRISTMAS
- Use a damp cloth to wipe your decorations when removing them from storage
- Avoid scented sprays, candles and other decorations
- Stick with metal and plastic ornaments, and give them a warm, soapy bath, then air dry
- Protect fabric decorations or heirlooms by keeping them in a plastic, vacuum storage-type bag
- Store decorations and artificial trees in plastic bags or bins, not cardboard
- Wear a long-sleeve shirt, gloves and – for especially sensitive people – an N95-rated dust mask to handle the tree or dig through storage
- Remove visible pollen from the tree with a leaf blower
- Wipe the tree’s trunk with a solution of 1 part bleach to 20 parts lukewarm water
- Spray the tree with water and let it dry in an enclosed area outside the home, such as a garage, to dry
- Ditch the poinsettia; it belongs to the rubber family and contains compounds similar to those in latex
Asbestos – Out of Site, Out of Mind?
LAKE CHARLES, LA (KPLC) –
http://www.kplctv.com/story/36900823/major-insurance-provider-canceling-policies-due-to-asbestos
Out of sight, out of mind, right? Well, that’s not the case for a major insurance provider that is now dropping clients because of a policy change regarding asbestos. A homeowner came to 7news with a letter stating their Allstate homeowner’s insurance policy is being canceled.
The siding of the home is made of asbestos, a popular insulation material used before it was outlawed in 1980 because exposure can be dangerous, often leading to lung cancer and mesothelioma. President of Lyons Insurance, Stephen Lyons, says about 20% of homes in the area have asbestos due to older construction. “Whether it be the siding, the roofing, the floor even the commercial spaces, some still have asbestos,” said Lyons. He says there are a lot of factors to determine the risk of an older home, but asbestos is one that is harder to assume for some major providers.
“Removal or remediation of asbestos is very expensive,” said Lyons. “There can also be lawsuits from the contamination or the physical damage of the removal of asbestos.” It’s not just Allstate. Lyons says many carriers are being selective in this area and it may be because we can be exposed to asbestos easier. “Number one there’s the wind risk factor, number two there’s the water risk factor,” said Lyons.
So, insurance companies may be more willing to write up policies for newer homes rather than take a bigger risk on an older one. Lyons says there are a few options for homeowners with asbestos. You can either get rid of it, or find a policy and provider that will assume the higher risk. We reached out to Allstate and are awaiting a response.
Senate Democrats Float EPA Asbestos Ban Bill Due To Fears Over Dourson
November 15, 2017
Eight Senate Democrats have introduced a bill seeking to ban asbestos — even as EPA is working on a precedential risk evaluation of the substance under new responsibilities in the reformed Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) — in part because of concerns that President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the agency’s toxics office wouldn’t ban its use. “The main context is the [Michael] Dourson nomination” to be the assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, “the way that’s impacting our view of the situation,” a Democratic Senate staffer tells Inside EPA. “When we passed the bipartisan [TSCA reform] bill last year, there was the feeling that any potential EPA official working in good faith would ban asbestos as part of the first 10 high priority cases” that EPA elected for risk evaluation as directed in the reformed statute.
As expected, EPA shortly before the end of the Obama administration selected asbestos among the first 10 existing chemicals — those on the market when the original TSCA took effect in 1976 and largely grandfathered under the original law — to be prioritized for risk evaluation and potentially regulation. EPA has a statutory deadline of three years to complete evaluations of the 10 chemicals, after which any uses of the chemicals deemed not to meet TSCA’s unreasonable risk standard must be regulated. “But there’s really a high degree of alarm about Dourson,” the staffer says. “And in a wide variety of instances he may recommend controls on chemicals that are much weaker than we would like to see and those could get locked in for a long period of time.”
As a result, Democrats recently introduced their legislation to require EPA to ban asbestos in case Dourson opts against pursuing any prohibition on the substance. Democrats, environmentalists and some public health advocates have stridently opposed Dourson’s nomination, arguing the former EPA toxicologist’s non-profit risk assessment consulting group is too close with myriad chemical industry clients. They have pointed to numerous chemicals where Dourson proposed risk standards that are weaker than those EPA or state agencies ultimately adopted. Senate Democrats on the Environment and Public Works Committee vowed to oppose Dourson’s confirmation, even as the committee voted along party lines to advance his nomination to the floor.
Dourson’s nomination seems to have stalled, however. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) moved a Nov. 9 party-line confirmation vote of another controversial EPA appointment, that of William Wehrum to lead the air office. But McConnell did not advance Dourson’s nomination, signaling that there may by dissension in the Republican ranks. With the GOP holding a slim three-vote majority, Republicans cannot lose more than two votes if Democrats vote as a block. The two Republican senators from North Carolina have recently told reporters that they have concerns about Dourson, linked to his past work on perfluorinated chemicals — which are currently contaminating North Carolina’s Cape Fear near a Fayetteville facility — and his past work on trichloroethylene, a solvent that contaminated the drinking water supply at Camp Lejeune, NC.
“I think the real question is if McConnell is willing to burn floor time on [Dourson]. But he did today with Wehrum,” the staffer says. “If they actually have a tax thing to move, that’s going to take up a lot of their floor time. But if they get stalled on that they may move to nominees.”
Asbestos Legislation
Eight Democrats, led by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), introduced S. 2072 Nov. 2. The bill reintroduces legislation proposed in the last Congress by former California Sen. Barbara Boxer (D), as she was negotiating reform of TSCA with Republicans and more moderate Democrats. Merkley is joined by cosponsoring Sens. Cory Booker (NJ), Richard Durbin (IL), Dianne Feinstein (CA), Edward Markey (MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Jon Tester (MT) and Sheldon Whitehouse (RI).
If signed into law, the bill would require EPA within 18 months of enactment to “impose, by rule, prohibitions, restrictions, and other conditions, including prohibitions on the manufacture, processing, use, distribution in commerce, and disposal of asbestos and mixtures and articles containing asbestos, that the Administrator determines to be necessary to eliminate human or environmental exposure to asbestos.”
The bill seeks to amend TSCA Title VII and revise TSCA’s definition of asbestos, which generally refers to various types of mineral fibers that are harmful to the lungs. TSCA strictly defines “asbestos” as consisting of six fiber types, but the bill would expand the definition to include “all forms of asbestos.”
EPA, however, is restricting its ongoing risk evaluation to the existing TSCA definition of those six fiber types. This application of the narrow definition of asbestos and other changes further restricting the ongoing risk evaluation is another driver for the introduction of the new asbestos bill, says Linda Reinstein, CEO and co-founder of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization. The new bill and its predecessor are named for Reinstein’s husband Alan, who died of asbestos-related mesothelioma. Reinstein pointed to changes the Trump EPA made to the final rules implementing TSCA reform, and in particular changes to how conditions of use will be evaluated in TSCA risk evaluations as a major concern — particularly as applied in the scoping document that EPA released describing how it plans to evaluate asbestos
“The conditions of use being changed in the scoping document was for me alarming and deeply concerning,” Reinstein told Inside EPA in a Nov. 9 interview. “To change the conditions of use, to exclude legacy uses and [some types of asbestos, such as] Libby amphibole — by altering the conditions of use to strongly favor the chlor alkali industry equals no ban.”
Reinstein remains concerned that the chlor alkali industry, the major remaining ongoing use of asbestos, will successfully lobby EPA to exempt the industry from any ban that EPA might propose for asbestos upon completion of the risk evaluation. Reinstein notes that the chlor alkali industry successfully lobbied for an exemption when EPA last proposed banning many uses of asbestos in 1989, and that the industry has made similar arguments in comments to EPA on its ongoing risk evaluation. Reinstein said that after reviewing the asbestos evaluation scoping document that the Trump EPA released last June, “it was abundantly clear to me that we would never have a ban if we relied on the existing EPA to evaluate the risk.” — Maria Hegstad
EPA Scales Back Review of Asbestos and Deadly Chemicals
Dangerous chemicals in houses and business could be left in place by a review under the Trump administration. A US government review of dangerous chemicals will be reduced in scope leaving potentially millions of tons of toxins in homes and businesses. The review by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will cover potentially deadly chemicals including asbestos and carbon tetrachloride, many of which are known or thought to cause cancer. Instead of covering the chemicals and materials already in insulation materials, roofing and other uses that might expose people to toxins, the review will be limited to new products being manufactured, sold or imported.
Phys.org reports that the review, which began under the previous administration, has been scaled back by President Donald Trump’s administration under pressure from the chemical industry. The EPA has been on the front line of the Trump administration’s tough stance on regulation and the environment, blocking scientists from discussing climate change and subjecting scientific findings to vetting by political staff.
Asbestos is banned in many countries including the UK, where it was banned in 1999, but remains in many homes and buildings. An attempt to ban asbestos in the US failed in 1991, and it is still not technically banned despite causing the disease mesothelioma.
Read the full story at:
https://www.cnet.com/news/epa-scales-back-review-of-asbestos-and-deadly-chemicals/
Post-Harvey relief and the Texas mold law
By Elizabeth Glass Geltman JD, LLM, Nicolas Wilhelm, JD, and Abraham Gutman, MA
Hurricane Harvey was called “the most extreme rain event in U.S. history.” In just a few days, the storm dropped 50 inches of rain on Houston. Now that the storm has ended, the response is moving from relief efforts to repair and cleanup efforts to deal with the extensive damage Harvey caused.
Unfortunately, the danger to first responders and volunteers does not end when the floodwaters recede — some of the most significant health concerns come from post-storm environmental perils, including mold. One study following Hurricane Katrina indicated that the concentration of mold in flooded areas was roughly double the concentration in non-flooded areas. After Harvey, Houston should expect to see a significant increase in mold hazards in homes.
Mold produces a fungus called mycotoxin which can make exposure to mold a health hazard. According to a World Health Organization report, people who have been exposed to mold are at risk of developing symptoms such as coughing, wheezing, and asthma (in sensitized persons). Moreover, exposure to mold could also lead to chronicconditions, such as chronic rhinosinusitis and chronic fatigue syndrome. The impact of mold is not always seen immediately. Individuals exposed to mold may see negative impacts on their health for years after leaving the moldy space.
Texas is one of 12 states and the District of Columbia that passed laws that regulate the way mold should be assessed, treated, and remediated to protect the public’s health from adverse effects of moldy buildings and homes.
The Texas mold law requires contractors providing mold removal services, or “mold remediation,” to complete an accredited training program and be certified to remove the mold. This certification requirement was designed to both protect the health of mold remediators and to ensure that those doing the removal do so properly so mold is less likely to grow back.
The Texas Department of Health Services, however, released emergency guidelines, allowing out-of-state mold remediation companies and unlicensed companies to apply for a temporary waiver to remediate mold in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.
Although the number of properties flooded may exceed the number of mold remediators certified by Texas, it remains important for individuals and contractors working to remediate mold take appropriate measures to protect themselves and property inhabitants. The waiver might be needed to increase in emergencies, but mold remains dangerous.
Asbestos Imports Higher than once Thought
WASHINGTON – The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, the largest independent nonprofit asbestos victims’ advocacy group in the United States – along with the Environmental Working Group, a consumer advocacy group that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment – released a statement in response to new data showing asbestos imports nearly doubled in 2016, after years of decline.
Data from the Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission estimates that 705 metric tons of raw asbestos were imported last year, compared to 343 metric tons in 2015. The U.S. Geological Survey reported asbestos imports came from Brazil and Russia. The only remaining user of raw asbestos in the U.S. is the chloralkali industry, which uses it to “manufacture semipermeable asbestos diaphragms.”
Much of the surge in imports in 2016 came in the fourth quarter of the year, following the passage of the revamped Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA. Lobbyists from the American Chemistry Council, on behalf of the chloralkali industry, are now pushing for an exemption from the new chemical safety law that would allow it to continue to import and use asbestos just as it does today.
The EPA is currently in the process of implementing TSCA, an overhaul that gives the agency broader authority to ban toxic chemicals, and under which asbestos is being evaluated for regulation.
“Opponents of an asbestos ban have long argued that asbestos use is shrinking in the United States, but now we know just the opposite is true,” said Linda Reinstein, president and co-founder of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization. “Each year, asbestos-caused diseases claim the lives of 15,000 Americans. It is shocking that unlike more than 60 nations around the world, the U.S. has not only failed to ban asbestos, but its use is increasing dramatically. The EPA needs to ban asbestos with no exceptions. There is no safe or controlled use of asbestos in mining or manufacturing.”
“The chloralkali industry’s insistence on the continued use of deadly asbestos is reprehensible,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “Meanwhile, we shut our eyes to the communities in Brazil and other asbestos-producing nations, where miners and their families are exposed to this killer.”
“It is incredulous that, in the face of such harrowing facts, the chloralkali industry continues to peddle their ‘safe use’ propaganda to the EPA, the public, and their shareholders,” said Dr. Richard Lemen, former assistant U.S. surgeon general and current co-chair of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization’s science advisory board. “If the EPA does not put a stop to this environmental and public health disaster now with a complete asbestos ban, more innocent Americans will die preventable deaths due to bureaucratic inaction.”