EPA bans two cancer-causing chemicals used in everyday products

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday banned two known carcinogens used in a variety of consumer products and industrial settings, which can seep into the environment through the soil and waterways.

The new rules, which underscore President Joe Biden’s efforts to enact key protections against harmful chemicals before leaving office, include the complete ban of trichloroethylene—also known as TCE—a substance found in degreasing agents, furniture care and auto repair products. The agency also banned all consumer uses and many commercial uses of perc—also known as perchloroethylene and PCE—an industrial solvent long used in applications such as dry cleaning and auto repair.

“Both of these chemicals have caused too much harm for too long, despite the existence of safer alternatives,” said Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz, a senior attorney at Earthjustice.

The EPA conducted risk analyses last year and found that both substances present unreasonable risk of injury to human health or the environment.

According to the EPA, perc is toxic to the nervous system and the reproductive system and is a persistent environmental pollutant. Multiple organizations—including the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the International Agency for Research on Cancer—have classified the chemical as a probable human carcinogen. Perc can also biodegrade into TCE.

Meanwhile, TCE is associated with numerous cancers, including non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia, and kidney and liver cancer, and is toxic to the nervous, immune and reproductive systems, even at low levels of exposure.

Michal Freedhoff, EPA assistant administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said the bans will protect workers, consumers and residents from the chemical’s harms. She said it was unacceptable to continue to allow cancer-causing chemicals to be used in consumer products.

Freedhoff called the TCE ban the most significant of her time at the agency. She began work related to the substance decades earlier, with then-Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts). She would routinely hear about an advocate, Anne Anderson, who brought awareness to the dangers of TCE in drinking water after her 3-year-old son, Jimmy, was diagnosed with leukemia. Anderson’s fight against industry in Woburn, Massachusetts—a small industrial city north of Boston—garnered national attention in the early 1980s.

“The only thing that we could do to really address the risks of this incredibly dangerous chemical was to ban it because there was no way to keep people and the environment safe from its effects,” said Freedhoff, who said Jimmy would be a year younger than her if he were alive today.

To her, it feels like a full-circle moment.

TCE can be found in contaminated soil near industrial sites, which can then leach into the groundwater. People living near facilities that use TCE or in areas that previously manufactured it are at a higher risk of developing heath conditions, according to the EPA. The liquid is colorless and evaporates quickly, allowing it to pollute the air, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Anderson had never given much thought to why the water in her Woburn home tasted and smelled so bad, or why she frequently needed to change the pipes under the bathroom and kitchen sink because of rust.

She would soon learn Jimmy wasn’t the only child with leukemia in the area: There was an unexplained cluster of leukemia cases throughout the neighborhood. Years later, a newspaper clipping answered her questions. Employees from local industry sites routinely dumped chemicals with known carcinogens, such as TCE, into the ground, contaminating supply wells and then the drinking water. Decaying barrels of contaminants also leaked.

Jimmy died nine years after he was diagnosed. Anderson’s story influenced the passage of the 1980 federal Superfund law, which requires the cleanup of hazardous waste industrial sites.

But for Anderson, now 88 years old, the new rule feels like a costly victory.

“I’m glad this happened, but it was never good because it cost too much,” Anderson said. “There is nothing that can change how much Jimmy suffered.”

The ban will prohibit the use of TCE in all products within a year, with some exemptions in the phaseout plan, including for its use in electric vehicle batteries, cleaning aircraft and medical devices, and manufacturing refrigerants while the industry transitions to climate-friendly ones.

Stricter worker protections will be implemented for limited industries still using TCE. While the proposal called for lower exposure limits for workers, the EPA amended the requirement in the final rule because the technology doesn’t exist to monitor at the low levels originally proposed, Freedhoff said.

For Markey, now a U.S. senator, who has championed the ban of TCE for decades alongside Anderson, the rule is significant.

“America is now committed to banishing the toxic legacy of this chemical into the history books once and for all,” said Markey, who met with the families in Woburn affected by hazardous waste contamination when he was a congressman in 1980.

Ray Dorsey, professor of neurology at the University of Rochester, said the TCE ban will “end a century of it causing cancer.”

Dorsey, who has also researched the strong links between TCE exposure and Parkinson’s disease, said the action will reduce cancers, stillbirths, congenital heart disease and Parkinson’s disease. But he noted the ban will do little to address the contamination already in the environment.

Still, environmental advocates welcomed the EPA’s ruling on both chemicals.

“When you have substances that can cause cancer, fetal heart defects and other serious illnesses at such low exposure levels, the best way to protect the public is to stop using them,” Kalmuss-Katz said.

He said the EPA deserves credit for finalizing the bans—even as he said they were long overdue.

EPA officials and advocates said the bans will help protect consumers and residents who live near industries that use the chemicals and workers often exposed to the toxic substances.

Perc, which is also used as a degreasing, lubricant and adhesive agent in manufacturing, has been used in the United States since the 1940s. It was initially introduced as a safer solution to older, highly flammable petroleum solvents, said Diana Ceballos, an assistant professor in the University of Washington’s department of environmental and occupational health sciences.

“It started as a miracle solvent,” Ceballos said. “We didn’t know back then that it was so toxic.”

According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, workers who routinely breathe in excessive amounts of the solvent or spill it on their skin are at an increased risk of developing health problems. Long-term exposure to perc can increase the risk of memory loss, damage to the liver and kidneys, skin irritation and blisters, and dizziness.

Jeff Moronta, whose family dry-cleaning shop in New York switched away from perc during the pandemic, always had concerns about his father’s health—he was around perc the most. After decades, Miguel’s Dry Cleaning upgraded its perc machines to a cleaner alternative, in part because of years of pressure from the state.

“Perc has a strong odor to it. An odor so strong that you know inhaling it will cause health issues,” Moronta said. His father has not had any major health issues as a result of his prolonged perc exposure. Understanding how hazardous perc was, he made sure he wore protective equipment whenever exposure was possible.

Perc spills through equipment failures, faulty hazardous waste practices and accidents that can cause soil and groundwater contamination. Once perc gets into the ground, it’s extremely difficult to remove and can contaminate communities for decades, Ceballos said.

“It reinforces that it’s not just toxic for the workers that are exposed at high levels, but also for residents in the general population, even when they’re exposed to very low levels,” Ceballos said.

Even tiny spills of perc can be hazardous to the environment because it can travel through concrete, said Katie Fellows, an environmental scientist at the Hazardous Waste Management Program in King County, Washington. In the environment, perc can be transformed into TCE and vinyl chloride, both known carcinogens.

“If it gets into the environment, it’s in the environment. You can’t just mop it up,” Fellows said.

Moronta described moving away from perc as the best decision his father made for the shop in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, adding, “any businesses still using perc are just stuck in the past.”

He recalled the pungent odor that would assault his nose for years when he would enter the shop—describing the scent as a mix of alcohol, gasoline and ammonia. It was coming from the dry-cleaning solvent used to clean the clothes.

The smell was enough to deter him from dry-cleaning his own clothes there.

“I was happy when they switched,” Moronta said.

The newly announced ban includes all consumer uses of perc and most industrial and commercial uses.

The perc ban gives companies less than three years to eliminate uses of the chemical in all consumer products, as well as in many industrial and commercial workplaces. It also gives dry cleaners 10 years to phase out all uses and prohibits perc use in newly acquired dry-cleaning machines after six months. For the industries that won’t be outright banned from using the substance, the EPA requires strict worker safety precautions.

The final rule increased the time frame given to companies to implement stricter precautions to 30 months, up from 12 months in the proposal. The final rule also allows some continued industrial uses with worker protection requirements that Freedhoff said were originally proposed to be prohibited after worker safety data was received during the public comment period.

Melanie Benesh, vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, called the action historic, highlighting the EPA’s goal to protect worker safety under the updated Toxic Substances Control Act.

“With these rules, you have seen a course correction in approach that the EPA is taking to risk assessment,” Benesh said.

Years before the federal rules, some cities and states placed their own regulations on perc.

Between 2018 and 2021, Fellows said, King County provided financial assistance to help cleaners convert to what’s known as wet cleaning, which mixes a small amount of water with eco-friendly specialized detergents, switching over half of the shops in the area. Then the state’s Department of Ecology created a reimbursement program for dry cleaners to replace their perc equipment with safer alternatives. The program doled out $40,000 for cleaners to switch to wet cleaning or $10,000 to switch to hydrocarbon cleaning, which uses a combination of hydrogen and carbon to make a solvent.

In 2007, California enacted amendments to discontinue the use of perc more than a decade after the state’s Air Resources Board identified it as a toxic air contaminant. California’s rule required perc dry-cleaning machines to be phased out by Jan. 1, 2023.

“We see it as an environmental justice issue to help these shops,” Fellows said. Many of the dry-cleaning workers in King County are immigrants who may not be able to adequately assess the risk from different solvents because of language barriers, she said.

“We are essentially just looking to steer businesses away from harmful chemicals to things that are safer for them and the environment,” Fellows said.