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Dollar General shareholders urged the discount retailer to better protect the health of workers and shoppers today at its annual shareholder meeting in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. Shareholder advocates with the Campaign for Healthier Solutions (CHS) called on Dollar General to phase out chemicals of concern from its products and receipts, and voted yes on a shareholder proposal requesting an independent worker safety and well-being audit. New testing conducted by the Ecology Center Health Stuff Lab has found hormone-disrupting bisphenol S (BPS) in receipts that were printed in select stores of the major discount retailers in 2022, including Dollar General. 

Nationally, health advocates have long called for stronger prevention on chemical threats. Last year, they urged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to strengthen its Risk Management Plan Rule, which is meant to protect the millions of Americans living near high-risk chemical facilities. Among the changes advocates want: push facilities to adopt safer chemicals and processes, and require broad disclosure — in multiple languages — about chemicals stored on site. EPA is expected to issue a final rule in August. “Until EPA takes up measures like these, we’ll see incidents like East Palestine happen over and over,” Maya Nye, PhD, federal policy director for Coming Clean, an environmental health nonprofit, told The Nation’s Health.

Today, President Biden signed the executive order Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice for All, directly incorporating many recommendations of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. The executive order makes clear that the pursuit of environmental justice is a duty of all executive branch agencies and should be incorporated into their missions, directs agencies to consider the cumulative health impacts of pollution on communities, and directs agencies to strengthen their direct engagement with impacted communities. The White House also published an Environmental Justice Scorecard and announced new Justice40 covered programs.

President Biden on Friday announced the creation of a White House Office of Environmental Justice, one of several actions to address the unequal burden that people of color carry from environmental hazards.“Every federal agency must take into account environmental and health impacts on communities and work to prevent those negative impacts,” Mr. Biden told a crowd of applauding activists gathered at a Rose Garden ceremony. “Environmental justice will be the mission of the entire government.” Richard Moore, a co-coordinator of the Los Jardines Institute in Albuquerque, N.M., and a co-chairman of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, said the executive order was “answering a decades-long call to put environmental justice at the heart of federal policy.”

There is a chemical explosion, fire or toxic release every other day in this country. "That is just too much," said Dr. Maya Nye, Federal Policy Director of Coming Clean. "You can't smell cancer- these chemicals can do harm, either immediately or over a period of time." The Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters is calling for stronger EPA regulations, including mandating facilities to switch to safer alternatives. 

Some environmental advocates are pushing for more support for small farms that practice regenerative agriculture, said Jessica Swan, the community outreach organizer for the Agri-Cultura Network, a farmer cooperative in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She and her colleagues want the new Farm Bill to include new rules that not only cut chemically intensive farming practices nationwide and protect workers from pesticide-related illnesses, but also make farmer conservation programs more accessible to people who own small or urban farms. They also want to see crop insurance and commodity programs reward more farmers for organic and regenerative practices. In a letter to House Agriculture Committee Chairman David Scott, Agri-Cultura and 49 other food and agriculture organizations called for these measures and also called on Congress to block funds that support large, polluting animal agriculture operations.

Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a rule to significantly reduce emissions of toxic and other harmful air pollution from chemical plants, intended to reduce air toxics-related cancer risks in fenceline communities. Coming Clean and the Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform (EJHA) applauded the EPA for committing to take action to dramatically reduce emissions of cancer-causing chemicals from chemical and polymer plants. Under the proposed rule, these facilities will be required to conduct fenceline air monitoring to ensure compliance with new regulations, a priority for fenceline communities who have testified and submitted comments to the EPA in recent years.

Today, Coming Clean hosted a lobby day for members to meet with Congressional leaders to urge them to prioritize community food sovereignty and farmworker protections in the upcoming farm bill reauthorization, while incentivizing reductions in pesticide use. Members from across the country, including small farmers and farmworkers, scheduled visits throughout the day with lawmakers from their districts to highlight reforms that are most important to them and their communities.

The unusually high profile of the East Palestine derailment — which prompted the railroad to send a massive black plume into the air, went viral on social media and became a political flash point — drew national attention to federal rules governing toxic chemicals, railroad safety and chemical transport. While activists who talked to The Washington Post said heightened awareness of chemical risks is good, watching an emergency unfold can also be difficult. “Every time they happen, they remind you of the disasters that you’ve experienced,” said Maya Nye, a West Virginia activist and federal policy director at Coming Clean, a nonprofit organization that advocates for preventing chemical disasters. “It’s just yet another reminder of the protections that aren’t there that people in my community have been fighting for for so long,” Nye said. Some have also noted that the incident in East Palestine, a majority-White town of 4,700 people, drew more attention than those in their communities of color. In Houston, advocates’ frustration was compounded by the news that some of the toxic waste excavated in East Palestine would be trucked to a Southeast Texas facility. “We have become the dumping ground for the rest of the nation,” said Ana Parras, co-director of the Houston-based group Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, which advocates for people living near rail tracks and chemical facilities. Her organization and others protested the movement of the derailment waste to Harris County, Tex.

Bev Thorpe reflects on her participation in a roundtable event Sustainable Chemistry in RD&D to Transform the Chemicals Industry, co-hosted by the Dept of Energy/Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office and the Green Chemistry & Commerce Council. "Sustainable Chemistry – if rolled out well – will provide solutions for both the climate and chemical pollution crises and local communities will be integral to this success.   But this will only happen if decarbonization and detoxification go hand in hand."

Five weeks after the Norfolk Southern train disaster in the small town of East Palestine, Ohio, the company’s CEO Alan Shaw was grilled on Capitol Hill Thursday about the February 3rd derailment and so-called controlled burn that blanketed the town with a toxic brew of at least six hazardous chemicals and gases, including vinyl chloride, which, when heated, becomes phosgene, the World War I chemical weapon. The company has evaded calls to cover healthcare costs as residents continue to report headaches, coughing, fatigue, irritation and burning of the skin. For more on the ongoing fallout from the toxic crash, and its roots in the plastics industry, we are joined by Monica Unseld, a biologist and environmental and social justice advocate who has studied the health impact of endocrine-disrupting chemicals used in plastics like those released in East Palestine.

Since 2010, there have been at least 40 chemical incidents worldwide involving vinyl chloride and PVC.  These have occurred at 29 facilities worldwide, including a dozen chemical factories in the U.S.  Fires, leaks, and explosions killed at least 71 people and injured 637 people. Many more people, animals, and plants have been harmed over the long-term. Material Research today published a chronology and map of these incidents in collaboration with Coming Clean, in support of the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters.

In the wake of the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment, Governor Mike DeWine called on Congress to look into why the rural village didn’t know ahead of time they had volatile chemicals coming through town. “We should know when we have trains carrying hazardous materials through the state of Ohio,” DeWine said at a press conference. This information is out there, but it’s probably not what the governor had in mind. With the derailment of the Norfolk Southern train receiving international attention, more railroad communities are now asking what is traveling through their backyard. Stephanie Herron, a national organizer with the collective Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform said in a statement that neighboring communities refuse to accept these events as a fact of life. “These issues aren’t new to the people who live near hazardous facilities who have been speaking up about the urgent need to transition to safer chemicals to prevent disasters in their communities,“ Herron said. “What’s new is that more people are paying attention.”

Mike DeWine, the Ohio governor, recently lamented the toll taken on the residents of East Palestine after the toxic train derailment there, saying “no other community should have to go through this”. But such accidents are happening with striking regularity. A Guardian analysis of data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and by non-profit groups that track chemical accidents in the US shows that accidental releases – be they through train derailments, truck crashes, pipeline ruptures or industrial plant leaks and spills – are happening consistently across the country. By one estimate these incidents are occurring, on average, every two days. For Eboni Cochran, a mother and volunteer community activist, the East Palestine disaster has hardly added to her faith in the federal government. Cochran lives with her husband and 16-year-old son roughly 400 miles south of the derailment, near a Louisville, Kentucky, industrial zone along the Ohio River that locals call “Rubbertown.” The area is home to a cluster of chemical manufacturing facilities, and curious odors and concerns about toxic exposures permeate the neighborhoods near the plants.

 A new map released by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters today shows that the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio is one of at least 224 incidents involving hazardous chemicals – including toxic releases, fires and explosions – that have occurred since January 1, 2022. The map will be periodically updated through the year to reflect new chemical incidents. 

The nonprofit environmental health network, Coming Clean, is seeking to hire a full-time Network Program Associate to join our team. The Program Associate’s primary role and responsibility is to assist in the operation and membership engagement of the Coming Clean Network and to provide logistical support for program convenings

Dollar General, the largest discount retail store in the United States, took an important step to improve product safety this week by signing onto the Chemical Footprint Project, a benchmarking metric that helps companies quantify the total mass of chemicals of concern in their products, and understand opportunities for safer chemicals in their supply chains.  “We commend Dollar General for taking a hard look at its chemical footprint,” said José Bravo, National Coordinator of the Campaign for Healthier Solutions. “But we won’t stop organizing until the company adopts a robust chemical policy and phases out all chemicals of concern from its products.”