Michigan Law
Professor Rachel Rothschild played a key role in developing a newly unveiled framework for regulating chemicals, particularly in marginalized communities.
Rothschild—who has a strong practical and academic background in environmental regulation—was part of an interdisciplinary team based at the University of California-San Francisco that developed the framework.
The project is “a step-by-step guide to how to think about these issues throughout the process of deciding whether to control a toxic chemical,” she explained.
“Historically, the scientific analyses and the cost-benefit analyses of toxic chemical controls have been pretty limited,” Rothschild said.
“So scientists, lawyers, economists, and representatives of environmental justice groups came together to propose a better framework for how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a state environmental agency, or a state legislature can decide if a toxic chemical is harmful and worth regulating.”
She recently answered five questions about the framework, which was just formally announced and will be published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology:
Historically, some communities have been disproportionately exposed to toxic chemicals because of structural barriers to equitable treatment. For example, in a decision about where to site a toxic waste dump, those communities’ wishes are not fully taken into account. Or the residents work in jobs where they may have disproportionate exposure to toxic chemicals.
Even today, the EPA usually only quantifies and monetizes cancer harms. They’re not trying to quantify the benefits of reductions in birth defects or reductions in heart problems or reductions in autoimmune diseases—all sorts of health effects that can result from toxic chemical exposures. So this combination of historic discrimination and a lack of community engagement has left many people disproportionately exposed to toxic chemicals.
Probably the best example is a place called Cancer Alley in Louisiana, where you have a lot of major chemical facilities, petroleum refining facilities, and it’s a historically Black community where there’s a legacy of racial discrimination. Those communities have much higher rates of cancer and other health harms than the general population.
You just have to look to Flint to see some of this here in our own state.
The hope for this was twofold. One, to try to provide a useful framework for better quantifying and monetizing these harms. And two, to try to better articulate how environmental justice concerns should be taken into account in the regulatory process.
Under the Toxic Substances Control Act, the EPA has to consider the costs and benefits of regulations before it can issue them. This paper is hoping to contribute by making sure that these other really important benefits of regulations are taken into account in that process by better quantifying them and then also reframing how we think about environmental justice concerns.
We put it this way: For the regulation of a certain chemical, the cost might outweigh the overall benefit to society. But if you focus on the particular community that’s going to be exposed, the calculus might change.
This framework is trying to focus the agency’s attention on not just overall society but also on individual communities.
For so long, we haven’t had very strong action coming from the federal government. The hope when we started doing this over the last few years was that we would have an administration coming in at the federal level that would take this seriously and implement it in EPA regulations.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to happen in the Trump administration.
In that sense, the publication is a bit bittersweet because I think we will probably not see progress on this front, at least while we have the current administration in office. But my hope is that in future years, this will be a really valuable resource.
States have recently been at the forefront of trying to protect their citizens against toxic chemicals, and federal law leaves some opportunity for that. As long as the federal government hasn’t made a decision that a certain chemical is not dangerous, states are free to move forward with controls.
For example, many states have been very concerned about a class of chemicals called PFAS and have been moving forward on this ahead of the EPA. This framework could give some guidance to them about how to think about what types of regulations to put in place.
In addition, some of the organizations that we work with, like environmental justice groups, will be able to take this framework and advocate for it. Giving those community groups this tool is really helpful. Rather than saying simply that they want their input taken into account, now they can show exactly how to do it.
There has not been as much attention to the risks from toxic chemicals as there has been to other prominent environmental issues, like climate change or air pollution. Even within many environmental groups, having a focus on toxics is a very recent thing.
This is an area where so much good could be done, but there’s a need for resources and public attention. So one thing that somebody who cares about this could do is simply talk to their representatives to let them know this is something they care about.
Tell the people in power that this matters to them and their family and their community, because it has been a very under-recognized area of environmental harm. Having more attention to it among the general population would be so valuable.
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