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HomeInvestigationEPA wants to restrict sometimes-deadly paint stripper chemical

EPA wants to restrict sometimes-deadly paint stripper chemical

The proposal — opposed by businesses that make and use the solvent — comes eight years after the European Union approved a ban on sales of methylene chloride paint strippers to consumers and companies, with the exception of businesses using it in industrial sites with protective equipment and other cautionary measures. The chemical is also known as dichloromethane.

The would-be rule is the third the EPA has proposed since December that would restrict chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act, reformed last year by Congress to give EPA the power to more effectively protect Americans from dangerous exposures at work and at home.

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“For the first time in a generation, we are able to restrict chemicals already in commerce that pose risks to public health and the environment,” Jim Jones, assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said in a statement last month.

But for the proposals to become rules, they will need the support of the incoming, regulation-adverse Trump administration. The president-elect has said that for every new rule his agencies enact, he wants to eliminate two. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, tapped as a Trump adviser, said his role will be “rallying against this overregulation that we have.”

Trade groups and businesses, meanwhile, tried to kill the paint-stripper proposal before it could be unveiled for public comment. Meeting with the White House regulatory-review arm that is the gatekeeper for rules, the Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance argued in December that the EPA action overstates the risks — though the group agrees that the chemical can be deadly in enclosed areas — and would leave people without a good paint-stripping alternative, according to the group’s presentation. As the EPA was working to finish its proposal last year, the trade group petitioned the Consumer Product Safety Commission to require stronger warnings on cans, then told the White House’s Office of Management and Budget that the EPA shouldn’t be “usurping” the CPSC’s authority.

W.M. Barr & Co., an employee-owned company that makes several methylene chloride paint stripper brands, including ones linked to worker deaths in recent years, said in its presentation to the Office of Management and Budget that the solvent “offers a truly unique set of benefits and can be safely used as millions of uses each year shows.” In an earlier interview with the Center, the company’s vice president of risk management pointed out that methylene chloride — unlike alternative chemicals for stripping — is nonflammable.

But the solvent is often paired with other, flammable chemicals in paint strippers, the EPA noted in its proposal. And chemical-safety advocates contend that there are safer, effective alternatives. Benzyl alcohol, which some state agencies have recommended, is less toxic and poses what the National Fire Protection Association describes as a “fairly insignificant” fire hazard. The Institute for Research and Technical Assistance, which tests safer substitutes for popular solvents, said it found benzyl alcohol to be a reasonably good replacement for furniture stripping — an industry exempted in the proposed rule — because it loosens the same coatings for roughly the same cost overall.

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The EPA said methylene chloride does cause unreasonable risks in furniture stripping and wrote in its proposal that it intends to propose regulation for that use later, “after seeking additional information to further characterize the impacts of potential regulatory action.” It wants to enact both rules at the same time.

Furniture strippers who died from exposure to the chemical include 18-year-old Johnathan Welch. In 1999, the week before he would have started college, he was stripping paint over a tank in a business near Chattanooga, Tennessee, when co-workers left the room to eat lunch. When they returned 35 minutes later, he was collapsed over the tank, a burned, swelling arm in the liquid. Doctors tried in vain to revive him.

His mother, Rita Welch, said neither she nor her son had any idea the job he started at age 16 — after school at first, then full time — was putting him in contact with something that could kill him. “In his second year, he started having some dizzy spells and having problems with his sinuses, but I didn’t link it to the chemicals,” she said in 2015 interview, choked up with regrets over the still-keen loss.

The deaths in recent years have typically involved bathtub refinishing, with workers leaning over tubs to remove the finish, not realizing that that the fumes were building up to dangerous levels. The solvents industry agrees that methylene chloride is unsafe for bathtub work but wants warnings on labels rather than a ban.

Because methylene chloride is an anesthetic, it can knock victims out and shut down their ability to breathe. Gary de la Peña, who survived a near-death experience with the chemical at a California paint company five years ago, was overcome seconds after he rushed into a nine-foot-deep tank to rescue a collapsed co-worker who’d been using paint stripper inside it. His co-worker died. De la Peña was hospitalized for four days and told the Center in 2015 that his health had never been the same.

Methylene chloride transforms in the body to carbon monoxide, giving it another way to kill — by triggering a heart attack from lack of oxygen. And while methylene chloride isn’t flammable, an open flame can convert it to phosgene, the poisonous gas that killed tens of thousands in World War I.

Some paint-stripping alternatives carry their own health risks. Studies have linked N-methylpyrrolidone, or NMP, to miscarriages and other effects on unborn children, and EPA’s paint-stripper proposal covers that chemical as well. But the agency offered two possibilities it asked for comment on: Whether to ban NMP outright in paint strippers, with a temporary exemption for national-security uses, or to require more dilution of the chemical in paint strippers along with better warnings on labels and more worker protections.

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