Until last year, one of the best ways to find out if you live near one of the roughly 12,000 facilities that store hazardous, cancer-causing chemicals used in manufacturing products like pesticides or medical devices was to go to an EPA webpage for the Risk Management Program (RMP). There you could type in your zip code in a search tool, and see if any of these chemical factories are nearby. (Latino, Black and low-income people are more likely to bear the brunt of chemical pollution; they disproportionately live closer to chemical plants than other groups.) But last April, the Trump administration took down this tool. Now the only way to get this information is to drive to one of several dozen EPA reading rooms across the country to examine paper records. “You have a right to know what’s in your back yard,” said Maya Nye, federal policy director for Coming Clean, a non-profit environmental health collaborative. She said the removal of the tool is particularly concerning because “we haven’t figured out how to prevent chemical disasters and people are still experiencing them”.

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Wayne County, Mississippi, in a quiet southeast corner of the state, is home to about 20,000 people surrounded by forest and farmland. But Wayne distinguishes itself in two ways: it is home to a Sipcam Agro plant that processes the toxic herbicide paraquat. Within the U.S., the plant is the largest single emitter of paraquat. Wayne County also sees high rates of Parkinson’s disease deaths, in the top 7% of all U.S. counties that reported Parkinson’s deaths between 2018 and 2024. Troves of evidence have long linked paraquat to Parkinson’s, the world’s fastest-growing – and incurable – neurodegenerative disease. In March, Syngenta announced it would stop producing paraquat. But Syngenta’s exit doesn’t mean paraquat will stop entering the U.S. Instead, other companies and other facilities – like the one in Wayne County – will fill the gap, likely increasing the amount of paraquat they handle.

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Climate change is making the risk of disastrous chemical accidents more likely. But the EPA wants to gut recently enhanced safety requirements for hazardous facilities. Raschelle Grandison had just walked out her front door to grab something from her car on a chilly March morning in 2019 when she stopped dead in her tracks. Grandison stared in disbelief at what looked like a nuclear mushroom cloud approaching the Houston home she shared with her mother, who ran outside to see what was wrong. They were still watching the giant black cloud hurtling toward their neighborhood from the Houston Ship Channel when the shelter-in-place alerts started blaring. A massive fire had started at a bulk-liquid storage facility run by the Intercontinental Terminals Co. about 5 miles away after a faulty pump released naphtha, a highly flammable hydrocarbon used to make gasoline and plastic, from an 80,000-barrel tank. 

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Two policy papers released today call for an urgent transformation of our approach to hazardous chemicals if we are to prevent further harm to people and the environment. The papers were developed in support of the Louisville Charter for Safer Chemicals, a platform for changing the way chemicals are used, made and regulated, that is endorsed by over 125 organizations. Together the two policy papers set clear recommendations for taking health protective action with available data and information, to overcome weaponized doubt that leads to harmful delays. Read the papers:"Use Scientific Data to Support Health-Protective Policies and Practices"and "Act with Foresight to Protect Health and Prevent Pollution."

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Workers, lawmakers and environmental advocates gathered  this week to speak out against a proposed federal rule that would roll back protections for people who live near hazardous facilities across the country. “This is just the latest example of how this administration will do whatever it can to put industry profit over the health and safety of workers, first responders and communities that allow those companies to exist in the first place,” US Rep. Paul Tonko, a Democrat from New York, said during a March 25 press event on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The event was organized by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters, an alliance of community, environmental, and labor organizations working to strengthen federal regulations to prevent chemical disasters.

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