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Our chemical safety laws must protect people and the environment, not chemical company profits

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Our families and communities have a right to live in toxic-free environments. However, chemical companies are swamping the market with toxic chemicals found in products that we use, the air that we breathe, and the water we drink daily — and it is wreaking havoc on our health. Far too often, these chemicals go unregulated, and the agencies that are charged with protecting us fail to consider or address the threat these substances pose to public health and the environment.   

The government cannot protect the public from harmful chemicals unless it accounts for all the risks those chemicals pose to human health and the environment.  That is why the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed revisions to its rule governing chemical risk evaluations under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) – our nation’s main chemical safety law – are so important.  

We need the EPA to strengthen that rule to address all of the ways that people are exposed to and harmed by toxic chemicals, including exposures to multiple chemicals from multiple sources, and to resist the chemical industry’s efforts to weaken existing protections and leave the public in harm’s way. 

The Toxic Substance Control Act requires EPA to eliminate chemicals’ unreasonable risks to human health and the environment, including by restricting or banning toxic chemicals’ production, use, distribution, and disposal.   

When the law was first enacted in 1976, however, it was a failure. It allowed chemical companies to put chemicals on the market without showing that they were safe and limited EPA’s ability to address chemicals that were widely known to cause cancer, developmental and reproductive harm, and other serious health effects.   

For several decades, Earthjustice has been fighting alongside our clients and partners in the courtroom and the halls of Congress for badly needed upgrades to the Toxic Substances Control Act. We helped to pass important amendments to that law in 2016, and successfully challenged Trump administration rules that violated TSCA’s core requirements. Now we need to keep the pressure up. 

A stronger risk evaluation rule is needed to protect communities, workers, and families from the most harmful chemicals on the market.  If EPA continues to ignore known combinations of chemical exposures and to understate chemical risks, unsafe chemicals will remain in our air, water, homes, with the greatest impacts on overburdened, environmental justice communities. Tell the EPA to protect people and the environment and not chemical company profits. 

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September 30

Tell the Consumer Product Safety Commission to protect consumers from the dangers of gas stoves

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