Meeting Minutes and Final Report for March 2022 SACC Meeting on Draft TSCA Screening Level Approach for Fenceline Communities
Released on May 19, 2022.
The meeting minutes and final report are now available for the March 15-17, 2022 Science Advisory Committee on Chemicals (SACC) virtual meeting regarding EPA’s proposed Screening Level Approach for Assessing Ambient Air and Water Exposures to Fenceline Communities Version 1.0 under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The SACC serves as a scientific peer review mechanism of EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention and is structured to provide scientific advice, information and recommendations on the scientific basis for risk assessments, methodologies, and pollution prevention measures and approaches for chemicals regulated under TSCA. The SACC meeting minutes and final report are available in docket EPA-HQ-OPPT-2021-0415 at www.regulations.gov. A link to the document is also posted on the SACC meeting webpage.
TSCA requires EPA to evaluate all of a chemical’s conditions of use when conducting a risk evaluation. Under the previous Administration, the first 10 risk evaluations under TSCA generally did not assess air, water, or disposal exposures to the general population. Narrowing the scope of these risk evaluations left some chemical exposures to the general population unaccounted for. The approach to exclude certain exposure pathways also resulted in a failure to consistently and comprehensively abide by TSCA’s statutory direction to evaluate exposures to potentially exposed or susceptible subpopulations, including fenceline communities that are near industrial facilities and may be disproportionately exposed to chemicals over long periods of time.
Under the previous Administration, the SACC provided feedback regarding the exclusion of these exposure pathways in several peer review reports. For example, in the peer review report for 1,4-dioxane the SACC noted that the lack of an exposure assessment for the general population may leave substantial portions of the population at risk, which is particularly concerning for drinking water exposure. In both the carbon tetrachloride and the perchloroethylene SACC reports, the committee said that excluding multiple routes of exposure from the risk evaluation could not be justified by saying that some other part of the Agency regulates them. And similarly, in the review of 1-bromopropane the SACC stated that the exclusion of the general population “does not instill confidence that objectivity is being maintained in Agency assessments as part of TSCA.”
The Biden-Harris Administration agrees with this assessment from the SACC and reversed this policy in June 2021. As an initial step to understanding risks to fenceline communities, EPA released for peer review and public comment this draft version 1.0 of a screening methodology for assessing air and water-related risks to fenceline communities.
EPA plans to use the screening level methodology to help determine whether there are risks to fenceline communities from the air and water pathways that were not assessed previously for six of the first 10 chemicals for which EPA published risk evaluations. If the screening shows that there are no likely added fenceline community risks for a substance, or if it turns out that the rule already contemplated for that substance based on the existing risk evaluation would also address these risks, the Agency will move to rulemaking quickly to put the necessary protections in place.
But if the screening methodology shows that the rule supported by the previous Administration’s risk evaluation won’t sufficiently protect these communities, EPA will perform additional analysis before proposing a rule.
EPA greatly appreciates the SACC’s review and suggestions for how to improve this screening methodology. In particular, the SACC stated that version 1.0 of the methodology should only be used “as part of a tiered approach to evaluate risk to fenceline communities and should not be used to evaluate risks in isolation.” As noted above, that is how the Agency intends to use this version of the methodology as it relates to the risk evaluations finalized under the previous Administration. For the next 20 chemicals undergoing risk evaluation and beyond, EPA plans to expand this first version of the framework to include address broader potential environmental justice concerns.
The Agency is in the process of reviewing feedback from the meeting and will modify the proposed screening level methodology, as appropriate. EPA plans to issue its response to the SACC’s recommendations along with a revised version of the methodology in the coming months.