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Comment by dmckeon | Hacker News Reader

PFOA was only one of more than 60,000 synthetic chemicals that companies produced and released into the world without regulatory oversight. ... Under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, the E.P.A. can test chemicals only when it has been provided evidence of harm. This arrangement, which largely allows chemical companies to regulate themselves, is the reason that the E.P.A. has restricted only five chemicals, out of tens of thousands on the market, in the last 40 years.

Staggering. This is regulatory theater that makes the TSA version look like a pre-school play.

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My company is regulated by the EPA, so I was surprised by this statement and sent it to my lawyer to ask why the EPA often asks for tests for my products which are also regulated by TSCA but for which they have no evidence of harm. Turns out it's highly misleading as this statement only applies to chemicals in use before the EPA was setup in the 1970's. Those and naturally occurring chemicals were automatically added to the TSCA inventory (about 70,000 on the list). New chemicals do have to get approved for use. Clearly duponts cover up is egregious, but another way to read the fact that only five have been restricted is that many of the others are safe for their intended use. I can testify that EPA testing is pretty thorough, at least for small companies like mine.

I hate to be that cynic but it sounds like you need better conections like Dupont. You are probably not contributing political donations to the right people...etc. etc.

Sadly I don't think your cynicism is misplaced. I'm just back from a trip to Washington where the advice we got was essentially setup an industry group and hire a lobbyist. Am curious to see if it makes things easier.

It does. In same manner adding more armor on your car and removing the brakes, makes your car faster.

Setting up and industry group and hiring a lobbyist is not at all the same thing as making wink wink campaign donations.

Having done work in the environmental space, I do think the cynicism is misplaced. EPA isn't constrained because of well placed campaign donations. It's constrained because a huge part of the country believes that God literally gave us the earth to use up and considers any environmental regulation to be unamerican. Not to mention that every attempt at regulation is met with the same response: "it'll kill jobs."

Do big chemical companies have lots of lobbyists? Sure. Their job is to point out to Congresscritters every bit of uncertainty in the science (of which there is a lot), to reinforce what they already believed. Those companies don't need to make big donations to get their way--they just have to tell Congresspeople how many good blue collar factory jobs they create in their district. It's the environmental groups that really benefit from lobbying.

The way the government regulates them is ridiculous, too. They do it in such a way that simply adding an O-H group here or there avoids the regulation. See, for example, the FDA action against BPA.

I think about this every day. It really fills me with a sense of wonder.

In a lab, in a meeting room, somewhere in the chemical industry, someone basically said "Now that BPA is banned, we need something with the exact same chemical properties" and boom they made a clone of it, skipped human testing despite knowing it has literally the same properties, and called the job finished because the job was to circumvent the law and the law has been circumvented!

Just imagine that kind of attitude in your life. It's hard to imagine an analogy. It's like if you were dropping red bricks off a building onto people on the sidewalk and the judge was like 'you are no longer allowed to drop red bricks onto people' so you switched to chicago bricks.

The analogy sounds childish or ridiculous. But as far as I can tell it's a perfect match for BPA/BPS

The only bit you missed is that they get paid for every brick they drop. It all suddenly seems more horrifically, humanly possible.

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