LANSING – The Department of Environmental Quality is looking to trim the list of chemicals it regulates as air emissions as part of the state’s overall effort to reduce regulations, a move that is drawing fire from some environmental groups.
The plan, which could be final and headed to the state’s rulemaking process by the end of the month, would have the state regulating only 756 toxic chemicals emitted from factories, power plants and other sources, Robert Sills, supervisor of the DEQ Air Quality Division Toxics Unit told Gongwer News Service. The current list is about 1,200 chemicals, he said.
“This involves a smarter look at what air toxics really raise public health concerns in Michigan,” Sills said. “Right now it’s an open-ended list. This is going to be a defined list.”
And it will make the state a more competitive place for manufacturing, Andy Such, director of environmental and regulatory policy for the Michigan Manufacturers Association, said. “Certainly, right now we don’t stack up that well in the competition for making regulations seem reasonable,” he said. “Michigan has to be more competitive in the Midwest and globally.”
But it will also make the state a less safe place to live, James Clift, policy director for the Michigan Environmental Council, said.
“Michigan can pride itself in being a manufacturing state but it has a regulatory program when it sites a facility, it can tell the neighbors of that facility we have looked at facility … there will be no long-term impacts of siting this facility,” he said. “If we start regulating something less than everything emitted from a facility, you can no longer say that.”
The list is still substantially larger than what the Environment Advisory Rules Committee had recommended, which was to bring the state down to the 187 chemicals regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Sills said.
The plan developed by the department’s workgroup on the issue instead hits the most important chemicals in the state, Sills said.
The state would still regulate any chemicals defined as carcinogens, but would track only the top 75 percent most dangerous of the non-carcinogens, he said. The state would also end regulation of chemicals with no studies of toxicity.
“Anything that we reviewed in the past and found no useful toxicity information, we’re not going to include those on the list,” Sills said. “We just don’t know if they’re toxic or not, so we’re not going to regulate them.”
Because their effects are unknown, they should be regulated, Clift said, adding it should be up to the company emitting the chemical to show it is not harmful. He said the current process for showing that is relatively easy in most cases.
“We don’t want to find out long after the fact just how bad they are,” Brad van Guilder with the Sierra Club Michigan Chapter and another dissenting member of the workgroup, said.
Such said the change does not go as far as the group would like, but will still reduce the burden on manufacturers enough to make the state more competitive.
Though he could not quantify it, he said any compounds removed from the list mean savings for manufacturers.
“There’s paperwork no matter how toxic it is,” he said. “These are not, ‘By the way, we’re emitting this.’ There has to be testing; there’s a number of things that have to go on, so there’s cost to it.”
The MMA is supporting the recommendation, which Such said still has to be approved by the department’s Air Advisory Council, but he said the group would have preferred to move to the federal standard, or at list to make the state’s list even smaller.
“There are some things that need a little bit more monitoring here in Michigan,” he said. “We would have liked to see it a little lower, maybe the 50th percentile.”
Sills said the 75 percent number was arbitrary, but seemed more appropriate than some smaller figures discussed. “As we looked at what chemicals are in that less toxic 25 percent, we became more comfortable that these chemicals are relatively low in their toxicity,” he said.
Among the chemicals that would no longer be regulated under the proposal are Freon and acetone. Both, he said, are relatively common and pose low health risks in the environment at the concentrations generally emitted.
Clift agreed the chemicals were less toxic than some others, but he said the change would look only at the characteristics of the chemical and not factor in the quantity or concentration of the chemical in the emissions.
“Someone could emit a lot of the less toxic chemicals and they could fall between the cracks of the new system,” he said.
van Guilder said the concern is also not just individual facilities. “I’ve been dealing with this for a while, communities that live in heavily industrialized areas that are in close proximity to residential neighborhoods,” he said. “You’ve got all these different toxics affecting these communities that overwhelmingly tend to be low-income and communities of color.”
The state’s regulations do not yet recognize the effects of emissions from multiple facilities, he said.
Clift said his group is hoping the administration, through the rulemaking process, will reject the recommendations like the new standards that do not have consensus of the workgroup, but move ahead with the recommendations where there was unanimous support.
The MEC had, for instance, supported changes that would make it easier for companies to move to cleaner fuels in their processes.
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