Word: epa
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...appears they?re ready to try a skirmish on for size. Tuesday, EPA chief Christine Whitman announced she will go ahead with a Clinton-Administration plan to force uber-corporation General Electric to foot the bill for a $460 million clean-up-by-dredging of an area of the northern Hudson River that the company?s plants used as a dumping ground for 1.3 million pounds of PCBs until 1977, when the toxic substance was banned by the federal government...
...tell them all to stuff Kyoto, and announce your firm intention to intention to wean America off coal in ten years, natural gas in 20, and oil in 25. (Let the current nukes die of natural causes.) Corporate tax breaks will be handed out according to cleanliness by the EPA; personal ones for conservation by the DOE. Subsidies will be generously provided so that Big Coal, Big Gas and eventually Big Oil can die a humane death by diversification...
...nations, including Sweden, Germany, Vietnam and Indonesia, have banned or restricted CCA use, but federal and state regulators in the U.S. have taken a far more lax approach. In 1987, California passed a law requiring CCA-treated structures to be coated with paint or sealant every two years. The EPA set guidelines of its own, establishing a program under which woodmakers would provide a warning sheet with each package of treated lumber shipped to retailers. But critics charge that the California law has been largely ignored and point out that the EPA program is strictly voluntary. Even when suppliers provide...
...foes don't buy this, pointing out that the EPA has already banned arsenic for all other pesticide applications--not the kind of thing the agency does lightly. In March, lawyers from Florida, New York, Washington and Indiana filed a class action against the industry and some retailers, hoping to force them to pay for sealing existing structures built with CCA and cleaning up contaminated sites. Such legal sword rattling may be having an effect. Last week PlayNation, a Georgia-based maker of playground equipment, announced that it will immediately switch to nonarsenic-based preservatives. According to several sources...
...help shape that market by voting with their wallets. In the meantime, activists are launching a nationwide campaign to encourage testing of playground equipment for arsenic. Next week the Consumer Product Safety Commission will begin a new study to assess the arsenic risk kids face in playgrounds, and the EPA plans similar investigations in the fall. The EPA is also reviewing more than 300 pesticides (including the arsenic in CCA) to decide whether it will continue to approve their use. With the current flap over CCA, there is a fair chance arsenic won't make...