After 3 Years Under Court Order, EPA Finally Produces Plan That Barely Cuts Toxic Plastic Emissions
Environmental groups had been waiting nearly three years for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to comply with a federal judge’s orders to update Clean Air Act rules governing emissions of various toxic chemicals. The agency finally proposed those new rules last week, saying they would reduce emissions of ethylene oxide, a carcinogen that the EPA recently determined is more dangerous than the agency once believed.
But interviews and records show that the new rules, if implemented, would scarcely make a dent in emissions of the cancer-causing pollutant. The rules call for annual airborne emissions of ethylene oxide to be reduced by 10 tons nationwide, which would represent a roughly 7% reduction from the 140.7 tons that chemical plants emitted in 2018. That reduction would barely make up for the ethylene oxide that’s likely to be emitted by a planned Formosa Chemicals plant in St. James Parish, which according to permitting documents will release up to 7.7 tons of the carcinogen into the atmosphere each year. The plant is scheduled to be built by 2022.
The proposed rule change comes as the Mississippi River corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is experiencing a dramatic expansion of petrochemical facilities, and with it an increase in the toxic emissions they produce. A recent analysis by ProPublica and The Times-Picayune and The Advocate show that many of the new plants, like the Formosa facility, are being built in communities that already have very high concentrations of toxic chemicals.
Ethylene oxide is used in the manufacture of a number of other chemicals, including ethylene glycol, which is used as an antifreeze. Louisiana has 13 plants that emit ethylene oxide in sufficient amounts that they must report it to the Toxics Release Inventory, a database maintained by the EPA. Eleven of the 13 plants are between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, while the other two are near Lake Charles. Between them, the Louisiana plants in 2018 released 27.8 tons of ethylene oxide, about one-fifth of the total produced nationwide. The new rules will only affect parts of two of those 13 plants, according to the EPA. Officials with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality dispute that, saying only one plant in the state will be affected. Regardless of which agency is correct, the reason is that the new rules apply only to a small subset of processes and equipment used at American chemical plants, and those processes and equipment account for a small proportion of the total amount of ethylene oxide produced.
EDIT
https://www.propublica.org/article/new-epa-rules-aim-to-reduce-toxic-emissions-but-many-cancer-alley-chemical-plants-wont-have-to-change
