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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Thursday that it plans to rehash regulations under the Risk Management Program (RMP). The decision comes after lobbyists for the chemical industry sent a letter requesting the agency weaken the rule requiring nearly 12,000 highly hazardous industrial facilities to prevent and plan for chemical disasters.

The EPA is bending to the will of corporate lobbyists who are seeking to eliminate stronger rules finalized in 2024. These more protective rules were the result of years of public debate and incorporated input from industry and the public alike, including advocacy by environmental justice, labor, occupational and public health, and environmental organizations.

“It would mean a real disservice to communities, first responders and workers,” said Adam Kron, an attorney with Earthjustice. “It would put them in greater harm’s way from these chemical disasters.” Earthjustice is part of a coalition of environmental groups that tracks chemical disasters. This coalition has found that since January 2021, there have been more than 1,100 chemical incidents. The news of a potential rewrite comes days after Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, in which he vowed to take on toxic chemicals, saying, “our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply and keep our children healthy and strong.” Yet that rhetoric also comes as Trump has pledged broad deregulatory action, which could clash with upholding chemical safeguards. 

So-called sustainable and/or green chemistry is being promoted in many circles as a means to both harness chemistry innovation to support more sustainable economies and reduce the environmental and public health impacts of chemical manufacturing.  As we work to build research and policy which deliver health protections and justice to communities most impacted by the toxic harm of the chemical industry, we must critically examine sustainable chemistry initiatives and ask who will benefit from the technologies and practices.  When something is promoted as “sustainable chemistry,” who is it sustainable for?  Read more of this joint blog from Coming Clean and EJHA. 

"The chemical industry is asking the Environmental Protection Agency ... to hide chemical facilities at the highest risk of disaster and their safety records from public view." This story in The Lever highlights Coming Clean's and EJHA's report on "Chemical Incident Tracking 2021-2023," part of our decade-long collaboration to prevent chemical disasters.

Expanding the list of chemicals to bring more facilities under federal oversight has become a priority for environmentalists, explained Maya Nye, the federal policy director at Coming Clean, an environmental health nonprofit focused on chemical industry oversight. Being subject to Risk Management Program requirements, Nye said, “would have required [BioLab] to think about, ‘What is the emergency response plan? What may lead to a chemical disaster?’” Environmentalists fought hard to strengthen the EPA’s Risk Management Program to account for the impacts of extreme weather on chemical accidents. Thanks to the regulations finalized this year, facilities covered by the program will be required to consider, and map out, the potential hazards posed by climate change. But BioLab’s facilities, which fall outside of the program, will not.

NEW FACTSHEET In spring 2024, after a multi-year collective advocacy effort, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the “Safer Communities by Chemical Accident Prevention” rule which updated the Risk Management Program (RMP) rule “to further protect vulnerable communities from chemical accidents, especially those living near facilities in industry sectors with high accident rates.” You can read our high-level summary takeaways here.

NEW FACTSHEET Environmental health and farmworker advocacy organizations are urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to adhere to proven science when assessing the safety of chemicals regulated under its statutory authority, and warn against the misuse of New Approach Methods (NAMs) to designate pesticides and other harmful chemicals as safe. A new fact sheet explains that NAMs -  which are mostly unproven and include biochemical, molecular, and cell-based assays and computational models widely promoted by the chemical industry as an alternative to rodent tests - “frequently understate or incorrectly evaluate hazard and risk with potentially harmful consequences for workers, families, wildlife and ecosystems.”"We are alarmed that EPA is relying on these new, unproven tests to justify reducing protection from pesticide exposure. Farmworkers and their children will bear the brunt of this reckless decision." stated Anne Katten of California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, who coordinates Coming Clean’s collaborative team on Farmworker Health and Justice. Read the factsheet in English and Spanish.