Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2021
Abstract
In 2016, Congress amended the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) through the Lautenberg Act, with the aim of spurring the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to issue more expansive and protective regulations of harmful chemicals. The new statutory framework provides a three-step process for evaluating and controlling the risks of chemicals currently in use: prioritization, risk evaluation, and risk management. After finding during the prioritization process that a chemical may present an unreasonable risk, EPA must conduct a risk evaluation to assess its hazards, including to especially vulnerable populations. If the agency’s risk evaluation finds that the chemical does indeed pose unreasonable risks, EPA must then issue a risk management rule that eliminates the unreasonable risks
During the Trump administration, EPA completed risk evaluations for ten chemicals but did not issue any risk management rules. These ten risk evaluations have numerous problems, including the exclusion of certain chemical uses and exposure pathways, and several are subject to pending court challenges brought by environmental, health, and labor groups as well as state and local governments. The Biden administration is planning to issue risk management rules for three of these ten chemicals, as EPA believes their risk evaluations to be acceptable, while simultaneously revising the remaining seven risk evaluations to better account for the total risks posed by those chemicals.
Under the 2016 Lautenberg Act, EPA is required to consider the health and environmental benefits as well as the economic costs of regulation when deciding how to control chemicals that pose an unreasonable risk. Accordingly, this report identifies best practices for EPA to follow when assessing the costs and benefits of potential risk management options. Specifically, we recommend that any such analysis should include consideration of 1) benefits of regulating below the “unreasonable” risk level, 2) benefits from reducing exposures that may fall under the jurisdiction of other statutes, 3) benefits from reducing harms to vulnerable subpopulations, 4) unquantified benefits, 5) substitution effects, and 6) distributional consequences. Robust cost-benefit analyses that incorporate these elements will satisfy EPA’s statutory obligations and aid the agency in selecting the risk management approaches that will be most welfare-enhancing. Finally, we recommend that EPA rely on cost-effectiveness metrics only when choosing between risk management options that offer similar net benefits.
Recommended Citation
Lienke, Jack and Rachel Rothschild. "Regulating Risk from Toxic Substances: Best Practices for Economic Analysis of Risk Management Options Under the Toxic Substances Control Act." Institute of Public Integrity (2021).
Comments
Copyright © 2021 by the Institute for Policy Integrity. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission. Work published when author not on Michigan Law faculty and included by author request.