A failure to protect
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has told residents of the town of Kingsbury, Washington County, that it’s shoring up oversight after an elevated risk of cancer was found for those working and living near a local industrial plant. The facility, Sterigenics, uses the chemical ethylene oxide to sterilize medical devices.
Sterigenics’ parent company notes that it meets or exceeds all regulatory standards. But as the EPA has learned more about the risks of ethylene oxide — linked to blood and breast cancers — it is taking a closer look at how these facilities operate.
To residents of Cohoes, this may all sound familiar.
That’s where, a few years back, the aggregate plant Norlite was fueling its incinerators with firefighting foam containing toxic PFAS chemicals without testing whether it was safe to do so — and leaving the EPA and the state Department of Environmental Conservation playing catch-up. (New York has since banned PFAS incineration.)
At the time, Norlite noted that the foam compounds were not considered hazardous waste or pollutants under federal regulations, and they were under no obligation to disclose their incineration to the city. PFAS, or perand polyfluoroalkyl substances, are associated with illnesses such as thyroid disorders and cancer. Amid continuing concerns over dust contamination from Norlite, residents are being relocated from one nearby public housing complex.
The common thread here: The community has a right to know what’s happening inside the industrial plant next door, and regulators need to do a much better job of protecting them.
On the one hand, it’s understandable that industry and innovation are going to outpace science: We don’t start out knowing all there is to know about a chemical, and our knowledge expands as the substance is put to use. But on the other hand, we depend on regulators to weigh how much we don’t know, and to make sure that innocent people don’t become the lab rats in an industrial experiment.
It’s been close to seven years since the EPA sharply upped its assessment of ethylene oxide’s cancer risk. Why has it taken this long for them to take action in Kingsbury? Why are regulators just now weighing plans for tighter emissions controls? Meeting regulatory standards, as Sterigenics says it has done, means little if the standards aren’t strict enough to keep people safe. The EPA is facing pressure from communities nationwide for being slow to act on ethylene oxide.
And in Norlite’s case, the plant has been allowed to keep operating despite being, as state and local officials have called it, a “serial violator” of environmental laws. We not only need rigorous standards, we need government to enforce them.
It will be interesting to see if New York’s new Green Amendment, which affirms that New Yorkers have a right to “clean air and water, and a healthful environment,” will nudge lawmakers to strengthen protections. For example, after years of discriminatory policies that regularly placed public housing near industrial sites, as happened in Cohoes, will we see more relocations, more medical monitoring, and larger buffer zones to keep residences and industry apart?
Make no mistake: We need industry. This isn’t an either/or question. But we must demand that regulators err on the side of caution. And in Kingsbury’s case, the EPA has failed.