GMA represents the world’s leading food, beverage and consumer products companies. The association promotes sound public policy, champions initiatives that increase productivity and growth and helps to protect the safety and security of consumer packaged goods through scientific excellence. The GMA board of directors is comprised of chief executive officers from the Association’s member companies. The $2.1 trillion consumer packaged goods industry employs 14 million workers and contributes over $1 trillion in added value to the nation’s economy. We have appreciated the opportunity to submit comments, respond to questions posted by the Department of Toxic Substances Control, and to participate in meetings and workshops for California’s Green Chemistry Initiative.
GMA’s membership includes leading consumer products companies that produce safe consumer products that are protective of human health and the environment while improving the quality of life and protecting the public health against dangerous diseases, infestation, and unsanitary conditions. Our members are committed to performing safety-based assessments that consider the lifecycle of their products before they are marketed. Our members provide clear and meaningful labeling on consumer products to ensure that consumers use products in accordance with label instructions. Our members routinely apply green chemistry and green engineering principles in their operations and have received awards for their efforts. GMA’s members have launched an Environmental Sustainability Initiative to help reduce their environmental footprint while simultaneously achieving their business goals. The consumer products industry develops products that meet or exceed the safety requirements of all state and federal agencies in the United States and Canada charged with regulating those products.
As we have stated in earlier comments, green chemistry is sustainable innovation. It is built upon a foundation of using hazard and exposure analysis to address safety from the start. It is about moving toward products with improved environmental quality and also better performance and value to meet all consumer needs. It uses analytic tools such as risk assessment and life cycle assessment to guide real product improvement and to protect against burden shifting or regrettable substitution that creates unintended harms, such as occurred with MTBE.
We believe that the Green Chemistry Initiative should ensure the safety of consumer products through the use of sound science in the decision-making process. It must foster innovation and encourage the development of new chemistry technologies. The Initiative should be designed to promote products that are technologically and commercially feasible to produce without compromising product efficacy, performance and usability. It should build on existing statutory and regulatory structures, voluntary initiatives and data development efforts. Throughout the development and implementation of the Initiative, CalEPA should continue to seek guidance from all stakeholder interests.
Framework for the Green Chemistry Initiative
We respectfully submit that the framework for the Green Chemistry Initiative should include the following essential elements:
• A systematic, collaborative process to address priority chemicals
We strongly support California’s movement beyond a chemical-by-chemical approach to developing a more systematic, scientific and collaborative process to address priority chemicals. As Governor Schwarzenegger said from the outset:
“I strongly believe there needs to be a systematic way to address these types of concerns where California’s scientists can work together with experts throughout the world to evaluate the health effects of chemicals, assess the risks they pose, and ensure that the safety of possible alternatives receives the same consideration.”
As we stated in our Phase I comments, fortunately California has the opportunity to tap into rigorous scientific work already underway. To develop a list of priority chemicals, CalEPA can collaborate with Health and Environment Canada on the Industry Challenge Program within the Chemicals Management Plan – not only on addressing the priority list of chemicals but the program in general. CalEPA also can tap into the ongoing efforts of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Canada and Mexico under the Montebello Agreement, particularly EPA’s Chemicals Assessment and Management Program (ChAMP).
This will enable California to focus its resources on a limited number of chemicals where there is the greatest opportunity to reduce risk to human health and the environment in a cost-effective manner. This will help California to make informed choices to optimize the benefits of the Green Chemistry Initiative.
• Focus on the toxicity and exposure of chemicals in specific uses and comparing practical alternatives
The chemicals management program must be based on sound scientific risk assessment to protect public health and the environment. In assessing alternatives, the life-cycle effects (risks, costs, performance, and benefits) of the substitute should be compared with those of the original chemical for specific applications.
We support appropriate use-restrictions for chemical ingredients where those scientific safety-based assessments indicate they cannot be used safely in a consumer product or use application. It is important that, where restrictions are warranted, they be targeted to reduce the likelihood of harm from specific intended uses. California should not adopt across-the-board restrictions or bans where a restriction on specific uses of a chemical could address the exposure of concern. Arbitrary, across-the-board bans do not make sense when they are not based on hazard and exposure. The same chemical in different applications and products can have very different levels of risk associated with it.
Naturally occurring trace levels of chemicals and impurities in chemical substances must have a de minimis limit, or a no-significant-risk limit. Alternatives to a “banned” chemical must be commercially and technologically feasible and, at the same time, must have sufficient data to ensure that they do not pose unreasonable risks to human health or the environment.
The decisionmaking process should be collaborative and include the input of scientists with expertise in toxicology and risk assessment – from government, academia, chemical manufacturers, product formulators, and nongovernmental organizations. Going forward, CalEPA may benefit from the input of an expert advisory panel whose members are selected on the basis of their expertise in the relevant scientific and technical disciplines and who are broadly representative of the scientific and technical views relevant to the decisions at hand. Any recommendations must take into account the technical feasibility, cost and performance of alternatives. Finally, transparency and due process must be a fundamental element of any use-restriction process.
• Ingredient communication
We support providing accurate information to consumers through ingredient communication. We support initiatives by companies, government and interested parties to promote consumer awareness of the importance of reading and following label instructions for safe product use, storage and disposal. It is important to bear in mind that protecting proprietary information is a strong market-driver that fosters continuous innovation toward safer, more cost-effective ingredients and products. Failing to address these considerations in a disclosure program could be counterproductive and lead to less innovation, rather than more. We would like to work with California to implement a means of ingredient communication that would provide consumers with the information they can use to make even better informed decisions regarding the products they use in their homes. An ingredient communication program should include ingredient chemical names while also allowing flexibility on the naming system and the media used to communicate the ingredients.
• Voluntary product safety assessments and product stewardship
Our members are committed to thoroughly evaluating their products through rigorous safety-based assessments before they are marketed. CalEPA could work with scientific experts to examine best practices and develop criteria for voluntary safety assessment programs and a toolkit for safety assessments.
In addition to product safety assessments, companies could move “beyond compliance” by adopting voluntary programs to ensure the safety of raw materials and packaging operations, storage and distribution, in-market surveillance, and the use and disposal of products.
• Supporting sustainable innovation
GMA supports initiatives that foster sustainable innovation by moving toward operations and products with improved environmental quality while also improving product efficacy and value. We welcome initiatives that encourage universities, educational institutions and industry to partner in developing “greener” ingredients that reduce environmental impact. Positive, market-based incentives could include tax credits for research and development, low interest loans, technical assistance, a fast-track regulatory process, awards for innovation, as well as funding for university research grants, scholarships and similar programs. These incentives should be open equally to all companies that are innovators and sell products in California – not just companies located in California.
Rather than focusing on penalties, California should focus on incentivizing innovation. The potential for green chemistry will not be met if the Initiative creates barriers to innovation by delaying or undermining the ability of companies to get safe, more sustainable products to market.
* * * * *
GMA believes there is real potential to expand the principles of green chemistry and to promote products with improved environmental quality that also deliver greater performance and value for the consumer. GMA appreciates the opportunity to participate in the Green Chemistry Initiative, and we look forward to continuing to work with you.
Sincerely,
Paul R. Noe, Esq. Vice President, Regulatory Affairs Grocery Manufacturers Association
I am writing on behalf of Californians for a Healthy and Green Economy (CHANGE), a broad-based coalition of approximately 35 environmental and environmental justice groups, health organizations, labor advocates, community based groups, parent organizations, and others who are concerned with the impacts of toxic chemicals on human health and the environment.
U.S. EPA has announced a new program, the Chemical Assessment and Management Program (ChAMP), with three purposes: to address U.S. commitments under the 2007 U.S.-Canada-Mexico Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP); to consider an HPV-type Challenge program for inorganic HPV chemicals; and to consider resetting the TSCA Inventory.
In the view of CHANGE, ChAMP constitutes small, incremental, largely voluntary steps that at best represent an effort by U.S. EPA to better exercise the limited authority it has under its authorizing statute, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). ChAMP does not address the fundamental problems inherent in TSCA. As the University of California's recent reports on Green Chemistry document and several reports from the Government Accountability Office explain in detail, the United States needs a major reform of TSCA's legal structure, and California needs a commensurate reform of its own management of chemicals. We do not view ChAMP as a serious effort at this scale of comprehensive chemicals policy reform. In fact, the limited nature of the information being gathered and the poor decision-making process under the ChAMP program suggest just how hamstrung U.S. EPA is under its current TSCA authority.
In addition to the fact that ChAMP does not address the fundamental problems with TSCA, a few of our specific concerns with the ChAMP initiative include: - Under ChAMP, U.S. EPA intends to make decisions about chemicals using incomplete or poor quality data, especially with respect to how chemicals are used and how people and the environment are exposed to them. - Under ChAMP, the decisions U.S. EPA makes about chemicals will not be transparent. They will involve information that industry claims as confidential business information (CBI) under TSCA's overbroad CBI provisions. Also, U.S. EPA’s intent to draw broad conclusions about exposure, including exposure to children, from the TSCA Inventory Update Rule (IUR) is unwarranted given industry's limited obligation under the IUR to obtain hard information about how their products are used. - Under ChAMP, the next step U.S. EPA is proposing for chemicals it finds to be of high-concern is merely to encourage companies to provide available information on a voluntary and non-confidential basis. We already know through the failings of the HPV Program that voluntary measures of this sort, even when industry commits to the program, will not be sufficient. - Under ChAMP, there is no mechanism to fill the gaps in safety data U.S. EPA identifies or to compel the testing of chemicals whose manufacturers have not volunteered to develop the needed data.
We would like to refer DTSC to the recent report by Dr. Richard Denison, "Environmental Defense Fund's Comments on ChAMP: EPA's Recent Commitments and Possible New Initiatives for Existing Chemicals," dated May 2, 2008. CHANGE agrees with the conclusions and analysis of ChAMP as a limited and perhaps even counterproductive program.
The State of California should not allow its Green Chemistry Initiative to be derailed in the least by ChAMP. ChAMP does not take the needed significant steps to remedy the deficiencies in TSCA, and so will not achieve the objectives that DTSC has set for the Green Chemistry Initiative. Moreover, because TSCA does not preempt states from taking stronger steps to regulate chemicals than does the federal government under TSCA, ChAMP presents no legal impediment to the Green Chemistry Initiative.
Through the Green Chemistry Initiative, dramatically stronger proposals have been proposed to reform chemicals policy than those embodied in ChAMP. DTSC and the State should proceed with further developing these proposals to both protect human health and the environment and to stimulate the development of a green chemicals industry within the State.
I am writing on behalf of the California Product Stewardship Council (CPSC). CPSC is a coalition of local governments and associations across California unified in support of our mission: To shift California's product waste management system from one focused on government funded and ratepayer financed waste diversion to one that relies on producer responsibility in order to reduce public costs and drive improvements in product design that promote environmental sustainabilty.
The existing Green Chemistry Report mentions our organization and ists Product Stewardship as a recommendation under "Closing the Safety Gap". The reason is that when Product Stewardship, otherwise called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), is implemented, the producer of a product must establish and pay for a system of proper management for its products at end of life (EOL). The EOL costs, which were previously externalized onto the taxpayers and ratepayers, create an incentive for producers to improve product design to reduce toxicity and make them less costly to manage. EPR programs are mandatory in Europe, Canada, Korea, Japan, and many other countries so this is not a new concept. We can learn from other countries on how to reduce public costs and encourage improved product design with EPR policies here in California.
CPSC urges DTSC in the process of working on Green Chemistry to refer and support the work of the California Integrated Waste Management Board's (CIWMB) EPR Framework. The EPR Policy Framework clearly outlines the recommended roles and responsibilities for the product producers, retailers, local governments and other stakeholders in a new EPR system. CPSC strongly supports the EPR Framework adopted by the CIWMB and hopes that DTSC can also support it as part of the Green Chemistry initiative.
Web Coordinator
3 Comments
Reader Comments (3)
Dear Director Gorsen:
GMA represents the world’s leading food, beverage and consumer products companies. The association promotes sound public policy, champions initiatives that increase productivity and growth and helps to protect the safety and security of consumer packaged goods through scientific excellence. The GMA board of directors is comprised of chief executive officers from the Association’s member companies. The $2.1 trillion consumer packaged goods industry employs 14 million workers and contributes over $1 trillion in added value to the nation’s economy. We have appreciated the opportunity to submit comments, respond to questions posted by the Department of Toxic Substances Control, and to participate in meetings and workshops for California’s Green Chemistry Initiative.
GMA’s membership includes leading consumer products companies that produce safe consumer products that are protective of human health and the environment while improving the quality of life and protecting the public health against dangerous diseases, infestation, and unsanitary conditions. Our members are committed to performing safety-based assessments that consider the lifecycle of their products before they are marketed. Our members provide clear and meaningful labeling on consumer products to ensure that consumers use products in accordance with label instructions. Our members routinely apply green chemistry and green engineering principles in their operations and have received awards for their efforts. GMA’s members have launched an Environmental Sustainability Initiative to help reduce their environmental footprint while simultaneously achieving their business goals. The consumer products industry develops products that meet or exceed the safety requirements of all state and federal agencies in the United States and Canada charged with regulating those products.
As we have stated in earlier comments, green chemistry is sustainable innovation. It is built upon a foundation of using hazard and exposure analysis to address safety from the start. It is about moving toward products with improved environmental quality and also better performance and value to meet all consumer needs. It uses analytic tools such as risk assessment and life cycle assessment to guide real product improvement and to protect against burden shifting or regrettable substitution that creates unintended harms, such as occurred with MTBE.
We believe that the Green Chemistry Initiative should ensure the safety of consumer products through the use of sound science in the decision-making process. It must foster innovation and encourage the development of new chemistry technologies. The Initiative should be designed to promote products that are technologically and commercially feasible to produce without compromising product efficacy, performance and usability. It should build on existing statutory and regulatory structures, voluntary initiatives and data development efforts. Throughout the development and implementation of the Initiative, CalEPA should continue to seek guidance from all stakeholder interests.
Framework for the Green Chemistry Initiative
We respectfully submit that the framework for the Green Chemistry Initiative should include the following essential elements:
• A systematic, collaborative process to address priority chemicals
We strongly support California’s movement beyond a chemical-by-chemical approach to developing a more systematic, scientific and collaborative process to address priority chemicals. As Governor Schwarzenegger said from the outset:
“I strongly believe there needs to be a systematic way to address these types of concerns where California’s scientists can work together with experts throughout the world to evaluate the health effects of chemicals, assess the risks they pose, and ensure that the safety of possible alternatives receives the same consideration.”
As we stated in our Phase I comments, fortunately California has the opportunity to tap into rigorous scientific work already underway. To develop a list of priority chemicals, CalEPA can collaborate with Health and Environment Canada on the Industry Challenge Program within the Chemicals Management Plan – not only on addressing the priority list of chemicals but the program in general. CalEPA also can tap into the ongoing efforts of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Canada and Mexico under the Montebello Agreement, particularly EPA’s Chemicals Assessment and Management Program (ChAMP).
This will enable California to focus its resources on a limited number of chemicals where there is the greatest opportunity to reduce risk to human health and the environment in a cost-effective manner. This will help California to make informed choices to optimize the benefits of the Green Chemistry Initiative.
• Focus on the toxicity and exposure of chemicals in specific uses and comparing practical alternatives
The chemicals management program must be based on sound scientific risk assessment to protect public health and the environment. In assessing alternatives, the life-cycle effects (risks, costs, performance, and benefits) of the substitute should be compared with those of the original chemical for specific applications.
We support appropriate use-restrictions for chemical ingredients where those scientific safety-based assessments indicate they cannot be used safely in a consumer product or use application. It is important that, where restrictions are warranted, they be targeted to reduce the likelihood of harm from specific intended uses. California should not adopt across-the-board restrictions or bans where a restriction on specific uses of a chemical could address the exposure of concern. Arbitrary, across-the-board bans do not make sense when they are not based on hazard and exposure. The same chemical in different applications and products can have very different levels of risk associated with it.
Naturally occurring trace levels of chemicals and impurities in chemical substances must have a de minimis limit, or a no-significant-risk limit. Alternatives to a “banned” chemical must be commercially and technologically feasible and, at the same time, must have sufficient data to ensure that they do not pose unreasonable risks to human health or the environment.
The decisionmaking process should be collaborative and include the input of scientists with expertise in toxicology and risk assessment – from government, academia, chemical manufacturers, product formulators, and nongovernmental organizations. Going forward, CalEPA may benefit from the input of an expert advisory panel whose members are selected on the basis of their expertise in the relevant scientific and technical disciplines and who are broadly representative of the scientific and technical views relevant to the decisions at hand. Any recommendations must take into account the technical feasibility, cost and performance of alternatives. Finally, transparency and due process must be a fundamental element of any use-restriction process.
• Ingredient communication
We support providing accurate information to consumers through ingredient communication. We support initiatives by companies, government and interested parties to promote consumer awareness of the importance of reading and following label instructions for safe product use, storage and disposal. It is important to bear in mind that protecting proprietary information is a strong market-driver that fosters continuous innovation toward safer, more cost-effective ingredients and products. Failing to address these considerations in a disclosure program could be counterproductive and lead to less innovation, rather than more. We would like to work with California to implement a means of ingredient communication that would provide consumers with the information they can use to make even better informed decisions regarding the products they use in their homes. An ingredient communication program should include ingredient chemical names while also allowing flexibility on the naming system and the media used to communicate the ingredients.
• Voluntary product safety assessments and product stewardship
Our members are committed to thoroughly evaluating their products through rigorous safety-based assessments before they are marketed. CalEPA could work with scientific experts to examine best practices and develop criteria for voluntary safety assessment programs and a toolkit for safety assessments.
In addition to product safety assessments, companies could move “beyond compliance” by adopting voluntary programs to ensure the safety of raw materials and packaging operations, storage and distribution, in-market surveillance, and the use and disposal of products.
• Supporting sustainable innovation
GMA supports initiatives that foster sustainable innovation by moving toward operations and products with improved environmental quality while also improving product efficacy and value. We welcome initiatives that encourage universities, educational institutions and industry to partner in developing “greener” ingredients that reduce environmental impact. Positive, market-based incentives could include tax credits for research and development, low interest loans, technical assistance, a fast-track regulatory process, awards for innovation, as well as funding for university research grants, scholarships and similar programs. These incentives should be open equally to all companies that are innovators and sell products in California – not just companies located in California.
Rather than focusing on penalties, California should focus on incentivizing innovation. The potential for green chemistry will not be met if the Initiative creates barriers to innovation by delaying or undermining the ability of companies to get safe, more sustainable products to market.
* * * * *
GMA believes there is real potential to expand the principles of green chemistry and to promote products with improved environmental quality that also deliver greater performance and value for the consumer. GMA appreciates the opportunity to participate in the Green Chemistry Initiative, and we look forward to continuing to work with you.
Sincerely,
Paul R. Noe, Esq.
Vice President, Regulatory Affairs
Grocery Manufacturers Association
I am writing on behalf of Californians for a Healthy and Green Economy (CHANGE), a broad-based coalition of approximately 35 environmental and environmental justice groups, health organizations, labor advocates, community based groups, parent organizations, and others who are concerned with the impacts of toxic chemicals on human health and the environment.
U.S. EPA has announced a new program, the Chemical Assessment and Management Program (ChAMP), with three purposes: to address U.S. commitments under the 2007 U.S.-Canada-Mexico Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP); to consider an HPV-type Challenge program for inorganic HPV chemicals; and to consider resetting the TSCA Inventory.
In the view of CHANGE, ChAMP constitutes small, incremental, largely voluntary steps that at best represent an effort by U.S. EPA to better exercise the limited authority it has under its authorizing statute, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). ChAMP does not address the fundamental problems inherent in TSCA. As the University of California's recent reports on Green Chemistry document and several reports from the Government Accountability Office explain in detail, the United States needs a major reform of TSCA's legal structure, and California needs a commensurate reform of its own management of chemicals. We do not view ChAMP as a serious effort at this scale of comprehensive chemicals policy reform. In fact, the limited nature of the information being gathered and the poor decision-making process under the ChAMP program suggest just how hamstrung U.S. EPA is under its current TSCA authority.
In addition to the fact that ChAMP does not address the fundamental problems with TSCA, a few of our specific concerns with the ChAMP initiative include:
- Under ChAMP, U.S. EPA intends to make decisions about chemicals using incomplete or poor quality data, especially with respect to how chemicals are used and how people and the environment are exposed to them.
- Under ChAMP, the decisions U.S. EPA makes about chemicals will not be transparent. They will involve information that industry claims as confidential business information (CBI) under TSCA's overbroad CBI provisions. Also, U.S. EPA’s intent to draw broad conclusions about exposure, including exposure to children, from the TSCA Inventory Update Rule (IUR) is unwarranted given industry's limited obligation under the IUR to obtain hard information about how their products are used.
- Under ChAMP, the next step U.S. EPA is proposing for chemicals it finds to be of high-concern is merely to encourage companies to provide available information on a voluntary and non-confidential basis. We already know through the failings of the HPV Program that voluntary measures of this sort, even when industry commits to the program, will not be sufficient.
- Under ChAMP, there is no mechanism to fill the gaps in safety data U.S. EPA identifies or to compel the testing of chemicals whose manufacturers have not volunteered to develop the needed data.
We would like to refer DTSC to the recent report by Dr. Richard Denison, "Environmental Defense Fund's Comments on ChAMP: EPA's Recent Commitments and Possible New Initiatives for Existing Chemicals," dated May 2, 2008. CHANGE agrees with the conclusions and analysis of ChAMP as a limited and perhaps even counterproductive program.
The State of California should not allow its Green Chemistry Initiative to be derailed in the least by ChAMP. ChAMP does not take the needed significant steps to remedy the deficiencies in TSCA, and so will not achieve the objectives that DTSC has set for the Green Chemistry Initiative. Moreover, because TSCA does not preempt states from taking stronger steps to regulate chemicals than does the federal government under TSCA, ChAMP presents no legal impediment to the Green Chemistry Initiative.
Through the Green Chemistry Initiative, dramatically stronger proposals have been proposed to reform chemicals policy than those embodied in ChAMP. DTSC and the State should proceed with further developing these proposals to both protect human health and the environment and to stimulate the development of a green chemicals industry within the State.
I am writing on behalf of the California Product Stewardship Council (CPSC). CPSC is a coalition of local governments and associations across California unified in support of our mission: To shift California's product waste management system from one focused on government funded and ratepayer financed waste diversion to one that relies on producer responsibility in order to reduce public costs and drive improvements in product design that promote environmental sustainabilty.
The existing Green Chemistry Report mentions our organization and ists Product Stewardship as a recommendation under "Closing the Safety Gap". The reason is that when Product Stewardship, otherwise called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), is implemented, the producer of a product must establish and pay for a system of proper management for its products at end of life (EOL). The EOL costs, which were previously externalized onto the taxpayers and ratepayers, create an incentive for producers to improve product design to reduce toxicity and make them less costly to manage. EPR programs are mandatory in Europe, Canada, Korea, Japan, and many other countries so this is not a new concept. We can learn from other countries on how to reduce public costs and encourage improved product design with EPR policies here in California.
CPSC urges DTSC in the process of working on Green Chemistry to refer and support the work of the California Integrated Waste Management Board's (CIWMB) EPR Framework. The EPR Policy Framework clearly outlines the recommended roles and responsibilities for the product producers, retailers, local governments and other stakeholders in a new EPR system. CPSC strongly supports the EPR Framework adopted by the CIWMB and hopes that DTSC can also support it as part of the Green Chemistry initiative.