Related Article:
Too much "Stuff":
Toward a Culture of Producer Responsibility.
Click here.
|
|
California's Green Chemistry Revolution
An Interview with Maureen Gorsen
by Racquel Palmese
When it was first created in the 1970s, the
California Department of Toxics Control (DTSC)
was a tiny unit under the California Department of Health Services. Today its staff of over 1,000,
mostly scientists and engineers, works to reduce toxic pollution. Recommendations
developed by DTSC for the California Environmental Protection Agency's new
Green Chemistry Initiative have set the stage for California to pioneer a new wave of chemical
policies.
In an interview with Green Technology Magazine, DTSC Director
Maureen Gorsen describes what Green Chemistry is and how it will
strengthen the protection of public health in California.
Can you tell us a little bit about the DTSC and its mission?
We are over 1,060 people, mostly scientists and engineers - toxicologists
and chemists, engineers of different specialties. Our department started
in the 1970s as a division of the Department of Health Services doing
vector control at landfills. In the mid-1980s, when the Resource
Conservation Recovery Act (RCRA) and solid waste laws were established, we
were delegated to implement them and we went from a tiny little
department to over 1,000. At that time, there were hundreds and hundreds
of unlicensed, unpermitted hazardous waste generators and facilities.
Before the 1970s, toxics policy reflected the view that "the solution to
pollution is dilution." The view was that the environment - the water, the
air, the land had sufficient capacities to absorb everything. In fact,
that's still the approach in China. They really think that if you
throw it in the river there's enough water to dilute it, or if it's in the
air that there's enough air to dilute it. We realized that was not the
case in the 1970s.
When I started as director in January 2006, 70 percent of our staff was
involved in cleaning up hazardous waste sites. We had a 30-person
pollution prevention department that was trying to reduce the amount of
hazardous waste generated by facilities located in California.
When I started going through my first year of the budget process I started
realizing that we are not reducing the amount of hazardous waste. Not only
is the amount of hazardous waste we are producing increasing, it's
increasing per capita. All we've been doing is managing it, controlling it
and limiting its impact on the environment - but not really reducing it at
all. When I went through the budget process I realized we needed to put more resources into the pollution prevention part of my department.
It
didn't need to be this little 30-person boutique.
I tried to get money in the budget process for this and it was very, very
difficult. We are also the long term stewards for hazardous waste
landfills that have failed in the state. We have three hazardous waste
landfills for which we have become the long-term stewards. I got $50
million out of the general fund to keep operating them, even though we're
strapped, but I couldn't get $700,000 to expand my teaching program.
The realization hit me that we had to get out of the business of just
managing, controlling, cleaning up, which is what RCRA is based on. The "cradle-to-grave" philosophy is throughout the language of the law
- but what we need is a "cradle-to-cradle," green
chemistry philosophy.
How can we use the state's resources, the state's tools, the state's
policies to influence the design of the products we consume and the design
of the processes by which we make those products? Otherwise I really felt
like I'd been working, and would be working, at Rapunzel's hair salon. We will never, ever get out of it.
You mean we'll be cleaning up the messes that we're still making
forever?
Yes, the messes we're still making, and in greater quantities! You look at
global chemical production, global hazardous waste production - it's going
up, not just in volume but per capita.
Governments have been trying to regulate toxic chemicals for decades
with
varying degrees of success. There are still tens of thousands of
substances that have never even been fully tested for toxic effects.
What is different about what we're doing
here?
One of the things you're looking at is a very oligarchic economic model
for how we make chemicals. I have these giant maps on my wall that track
back from consumer products through intermediate products all the way back
to raw feed stocks. It's amazing how, no matter what product you're
talking about, all of them lead back to the same four or five companies,
and the same five raw material feed stocks.
You're not looking at a free
market here, you're looking at oligarchy. A free market means you have
infinite suppliers and infinite buyers. We don't have that. We also don't
have information, which is a huge problem and disables the market from
functioning properly. There are also tremendous entry costs for getting
into these businesses, and the true cost of these products is not
internalized in the price.
So the market's failing on three of the four keys of a functioning market.
How you change that using policy is really what we're looking at in the
Green Chemistry Initiative. First is creating the capacity for new entries
into the market, both on the supply side and the demand side. Second,
creating information through product ingredient disclosure, which
basically levels the playing field.
Mattell did not deliberately choose to
put lead in their toys, and they would not have had they known it was in
there. They suffered great liabilities and reputation risks because they
got blindsided. Invisibility along the supply chain means that people all
along the supply chain cannot make the right choices for their businesses.
New York just passed a law to have all venues show the calories of
everything they are serving on their menus. Starbucks is reporting that
Frappuccino
sales are way down - nobody's buying
Frappuccinos
now that they know they're 1,000 calories each.
What we want to do is build the capacity for new entrants in the market,
both the supply side and the demand side and build information to allow the
market to work. The last thing is building tools to allow the new
capacity to use this information very quickly. One of the stumbling blocks
in regulating toxic chemicals in the past has been that each chemical
undergoes a risk assessment, and each one of these is tedious five- or
six-year endeavor.
We've got to come up with very quick and easy tools. We're talking
algorithms here, which have come a long way. Consider Google. There are
billions of web pages on the internet and trillions of variables, but
through mathematics and software programs they all get sorted. We should
be able to use algorithms in the same way to make toxics assessments.
What you're talking about is trying to determine actual toxicity, or
actual danger of these different compounds?
Yes. Take lead, for example, that's in electronic components. Of course, people don't want lead in things, but what are the alternatives? We
took lead out of air bags, and the alternative was perchlorate, a highly
toxic chemical. But you need something to ignite the bag when the car hits
another car. You have a performance issue that needs to be addressed, and
it has a very high societal benefit. The choice is between those two
toxic substances. Which one is better, or is there an alternative? You've
got to compare them across their lifecycles among an infinite number of
variables. What is the risk of exposure to them? What happens at end of
life? What happens during manufacture? What happens during use?
Right now, none of the tools that environmental decision makers
have allows us to look at lifecycle analysis and make comparisons. It's almost like we're using a slide rule when the technology
to improved decision making is available. We need to have multidisciplinary
decision making models to help us make better decisions quickly. Speed is
of the essence.
The tools are needed to reduce the bottlenecks in decision making. Capacity,
information and tools. How can we quickly make these decisions? You have
to almost build a whole infrastructure to enable us to do this.
And you're trying to do this all with a small research staff at DTSC?
No. This is another break from traditional regulation. What we're going to
do is say to the people who make these products that this is the
information we need, these are the tools you have to use, these are our
performance standards and this is when we are going to audit you. It has
to be decentralized. There is no way that government people in Sacramento can
somehow monitor toxics produced globally. That is not going to work.
Even the auditing seems like a daunting undertaking.
Look at the IRS as a model. The IRS has to collect taxes, but they cannot
possibly go to every single person's house and help them fill out their
forms. We're all on the honor system. We all have to figure it out and we
all have to pay. Obviously we know that there's going to be cheating. What
the IRS has to do is change constantly and dynamically to figure out where the
cheating might happen, and to clamp down on that form of cheating. You'll
notice that they have a whole communications strategy every year when
they're going after certain areas where they think there's cheating. What
we have to do in auditing is maintain the highest level of compliance
possible given human behavior.
What we're trying to get overall is a less toxic world. We're trying to
change trillions of decisions by billions of people - whether it's
designing a product or buying it. We
can't possibly be there for all of that, so we have to set up a system
that has people thinking about the consequences of cheating.
You'll see the IRS using the fear of audit to keep people honest. In the
80s, the IRS they felt that people were declaring dependents that weren't
really there. They changed the form to add a column where next
to the dependents' names you had to put their social security numbers. The
IRS did not have at that time any way to link up the tax return with the
social security system, but no one really knew that. Each individual filer
had to decide to lie not just about a name now, but about a number. They
were looking at the comfort level of how many people were going to be
willing to lie that little bit more. The following year seven million
fewer dependents were claimed. That's a good result.
You're looking for a higher level of compliance all the time without
necessarily staffing up and auditing more people.
If everything goes well, when would you start seeing actual regulations
being set up with consequences for people who don't comply?
I'm really hoping that we'll have regulations by the end of 2009. The
actual due date is 2011, but I'm in a hurry. There is a risk that
perfection can become the enemy of the good. It's sort of like doing
ecosystem planning, you're talking about an infinite number of variables.
You have to go with something that, even if it's somewhat crude, gives you
an idea of what's safer than something else. You could learn in two or
three years that you are missing a key variable and that it didn't work.
The idea, though, is continual improvement of the model so that it gets
better and better over time.
A big part of the Green Chemistry Initiative is
finding alternatives to toxic chemicals. How can this be
achieved?
It's really about framing the question a little bit differently. In traditional risk assessment the debate is
around how bad a particular chemical is. You've got on the one side people
saying, "you haven't proven it's harmful" and on the other side saying,
"well there's some evidence showing it might be harmful." That debate
goes on forever. It's not really a question of how bad is it, the question
is, what is better? We're trying to get away from the "regrettable
substitutions" problem, like substituting perchlorate for lead in air
bags.
Many, many substances are not made in the state, like PBB's. Everyone's
concerned about them, but there are only four companies in the world that
make them. One's in Japan, one's in Israel, one's in Louisiana and other I
think is in Michigan. None of them are made in California, but are we
going to allow them to be sold in the state? That's the question. If it's
coming out of products sold here, what's going to be used in its place?
The fragrance people have said that if they have to disclose the
ingredients and the toxicity of those ingredients that they're not going
to sell in the state. I'm imagining a future where we all have to drive to
Nevada to get perfume. But I would be a little concerned about what's in
fragrances.
Is there something you'd like to say specifically to those in
California government?
This is what I'd like them to think about: Environmentally preferable
purchasing, the thing they have the most influence over, currently only
looks at particular environmental endpoints, like how much recycled
content or energy conservation a thing has. We think that what really
needs to be considered is a product's overall environmental footprint
based on its lifecycle.
Imagine if public contract code was based on the lowest environmental
lifecycle cost as opposed lowest cost in labor and materials with a couple
of little environmental add-ons a s a preference. These are very different
decisions. Having public contracting go to lowest lifecycle costs is a
huge recommendation that comes out of here, but it's going to be one of
the hardest things to change. I actually have more hope for changing
chemical industry than changing local government procurement policy.
How might this work specifically?
For instance, the Air Board worked with Purdue University to come up with
a carbon footprint tool. Now, every single car will be like the Starbuck's
Frappuccino.
There will be information on how much carbon the car has - not just how
much carbon it produces while its driven, but how much was used in making
the car and will be used in ultimate disposal of the car - the whole
lifecycle.
The car manufacturing facility that's a zero-waste plant, that has solar
energy on the roof, the car it produces is going to have a lower carbon
footprint than one from the plant that's coal fired. I think the Air Board
has led in this area. This idea of doing the overall footprint
and then making decisions based on the lowest environmental lifecycle cost
- that's a revolutionary concept. The amount of changes that people would
have to make are big.
What other government agencies will you be working with on this?
We are going to be working with all the agencies at CalEPA – the
Air Resources Board, Water Board (State
Water Resources Board), Waste Board (California
Integrated Waste Management Board),
OEHHA (Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment), all of them.
We're also looking at a lot of the agencies at the
California Resources Agency,
the
Ocean Protection Council,
Department of Conservation. We're
working with the
Department of Health
Services,
Department of General Services, the Governor's
Office
of Homeland Security which is very interested in chemical issues.
As far as you know, is this the first time this is being done?
An approach that's a multimedia lifecycle approach to chemicals?
Absolutely.
So all eyes are on California again?
We hope so.
Thank you.
To read the
recommendations for California's groundbreaking Green Chemistry
initiative,
click here.
|
