A bathtub. A floor. A bike. The items Kevin Hartley, Drew Wynne and Joshua Atkins had been working on at the time of their deaths less than 10 months apart varied, but what cut their lives short was the same: a chemical in paint strippers and other products sold in stores nationwide.

In their grief and horror, their families vowed to fight like heck to keep methylene chloride from killing again.

Get it off the shelves. Ban it. 

But in the U.S., with its checkered history of weak worker and consumer protections, astonishingly few chemicals have ever met that fate. That’s how methylene chloride became a serial killer despite warnings of its fumes’ dangers before Hartley, Wynne and Atkins had even been born. No agency intervened as it struck down dozens of people — if not more — in recent decades. 

After a Center for Public Integrity investigation and pleas from safety advocates, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finally proposed to largely ban it in paint strippers.

That was January 2017, the final days of the Obama administration. Hartley died that April, Wynne in October of that year and Atkins the following February amid the deregulatory fervor of the Trump administration, which wanted to dump rules rather than add them — especially at the EPA. The methylene chloride proposal was going nowhere.   

The three men’s mothers and other relatives had a seemingly impossible task ahead of them.

And yet, 13 months after Atkins’ death, the under-pressure Trump EPA acted to stop retail sales of paint strippers with methylene chloride. And in April, the Biden EPA proposed a rule to ban the chemical in all consumer products and most workplace uses.

“It’s rare that we do this in America,” said Dr. Robert Harrison, a clinical professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “These families are my heroes.”

Here’s how they beat the odds to get those results — and the advice they give if you’re starting down a similarly hard road, whether the situation involves a dangerous product, an unsafe work environment, pollution or other harm.

Start with research

“Google everything,” said Brian Wynne, whose brother Drew, 31, had purchased a methylene chloride product to refinish the floor of a walk-in refrigerator in his South Carolina cold brew coffee business. “And reach out to people.”

That’s how he found the Public Integrity investigation published two years before his brother’s death, connected with experts and learned everything from the places you could purchase the products to the reasons these fatalities are hard to track. (Methylene chloride kills when its fumes build up in enclosed spaces, and its ability to trigger a heart attack can look like death from natural causes if no one orders a toxicology test.)

A tip from Wendy Hartley, Kevin’s mother: “scholarly” is a super keyword in searches. There could be a whole universe of studies out there, just waiting for you. “This will help weed out the opinion pieces from the facts,” she wrote in an email.

Lauren Atkins, mother of Joshua, 31, who died refinishing the front fork of his BMX bike, talked to UCSF’s Harrison on multiple occasions. His understanding of methylene chloride helped her translate her son’s toxicology and autopsy reports into a clear cause of death. That clarity was a solid foundation for action.

Often, chemical exposure hurts people on a delay, triggering health impacts that might not show up for years. Pollution can be a similar story. But if you’re trying to get government action on harms of that sort, academic studies are still a great place to begin.

Team up with everyone you can

A key source of their success is that the families connected with groups already working on chemical safety, and with each other. 

Lauren Atkins, for instance, found a Change.org petition about methylene chloride products from the advocacy group Safer Chemicals Healthy Families, now part of Toxic-Free Future, and signed it in honor of the son she’d so recently lost. Brian Wynne quickly reached out.

Teaming up leveraged their strengths. The families didn’t have to start from scratch to press retailers to pull the products from their shelves in the absence of EPA action: Safer Chemicals Healthy Families already had a Mind the Store campaign for exactly that type of appeal.

And they didn’t have to figure out the inner workings of agency rulemaking or Capitol Hill lobbying on their own. Staff with Safer Chemicals Healthy Families and the Environmental Defense Fund had that expertise. 

They opened up doors “that I would not have known how to open,” Lauren Atkins said.

“When you can put together a squad like that … you’ve got something really powerful,” said Brian Wynne, pointing to the Natural Resources Defense Council as another active group on the issue. 

Not everyone with a stake in the fight will be able to take a public role in it. Immigrants without permanent legal status face higher risks of workplace hazards, for instance, and that lack of status can make it hard or impossible to speak out.

But if you’re in that situation, you might still be able to connect and help in private.

Work the system(s)

Had the families focused all their attention on the EPA, the agency paradoxically might not have acted — especially during the rule-averse Trump administration.

Instead, they and the groups they’d joined forces with fought on multiple fronts.

With Mind the Store, they pressed retailers to save lives by not selling paint strippers that contained methylene chloride. Petitions and protests worked. One by one, companies ranging from The Home Depot to Walmart agreed to stop.

With Safer Chemicals Healthy Families and the Environmental Defense Fund, they pressed members of Congress to take action. They traveled to Washington, family photos in hand. They talked to reporters, getting news coverage that further turned up the heat. 

South Carolina’s senators and one of its congressmen wrote to Scott Pruitt, then administrator of the EPA. Another congressman called Pruitt out on the issue in an April 2018 hearing. Brian Wynne thinks all of that helped the families schedule a meeting with Pruitt in May 2018.

“The security guard was shocked because nobody got in to meet him,” Brian Wynne said. “It was a lot like meeting with the great and powerful Oz.”

Two days later, the EPA announced it would, in fact, do something about methylene chloride.

Along the way, the families turned to courts for action. They used social media to warn people not to put themselves at risk. And Lauren Atkins traveled to hardware stores to see for herself whether they’d actually pulled the methylene chloride items from shelves as they said they would. (Sometimes yes. Sometimes no.)

If all that seems exhausting, you’re not wrong. But the families think it’s clear what would have happened, had they not stepped in.

“Nothing would have been done,” Lauren Atkins said, “just like it hadn’t been done before.”

Remember it’s a marathon, not a race

“Don’t get frustrated with the small results,” Brian Wynne advised. “Be encouraged.”

Small wins multiplied. One thing led to another because the families didn’t give up.

Settling in for the long haul is often necessary: Federal rulemaking is slow by design.

An agency might need several years — or many more — to complete the research required to propose a rule. The proposal must jump hurdles to get finalized. And even then, any restrictions or new requirements might phase in over time.

What allowed the families to win a partial ban from the EPA so quickly, relatively speaking, is that the agency already had issued a proposal before effectively shelving it. But it still took two-and-a-half years after Kevin Hartley’s death before the EPA restrictions went into effect. And they didn’t cover workplace uses — such as the bathtub refinishing that Kevin, 21, had been doing on the job. 

Still, an agency can make different decisions with different people in charge. The EPA’s latest proposal, targeted for enactment in August 2024, would ban workplace use of methylene chloride in most cases. Bathtub refinishing included.

“You have to have patience, you have to have persistence,” Lauren Atkins said. “When it comes to somebody’s life, especially when it’s your child, you’ll find it. It’ll be right there.”

Mind your mental health

Pushing for change is hard. Pushing for change because you or a loved one was harmed can be even harder — even as it might offer a solace nothing else can bring.

“Buckle up, because it’s going to be an emotional train wreck,” Lauren Atkins warned. “I kept being asked, as emotional as this was and as hard as it was, why do I keep doing this? And my answer has always been and always will be, ‘So that you don’t have to sit in my seat. So that you don’t have to be where I am.’”

That mission gave her purpose amid the fog of grief. 

“How do you function when you’ve just lost half of yourself? At times, I felt the same day his heart stopped beating, so did mine,” she said. “But because I didn’t want anyone else to go through this and I didn’t want anyone else to lose what Joshua lost, that was my goal. I was willing to do whatever it took.”

Brian Wynne, similarly driven, suggests leaning into a stress-relieving activity that helps ground you through the marathon. The gym was his. “You’ve got to find your outlet to have an emotional release,” he said.

The Wynne family also started a foundation in Drew’s name to fund entrepreneurs like him.

Wendy Hartley found the activism itself healing — because of the support from the other families and the results they achieved together. 

As an organ donor, her son had an immediate effect on other people’s lives. Seeing his impact ripple further, through retailer shelves and the halls of government, was a comfort. 

“Kevin has now saved more lives,” she wrote, “and will continue to save lives for years to come.”

Never forget that your story is powerful

If you’re pushing for change, it can be easy to assume that lobbyists paid to maintain the status quo will always win out. But your life experience has heft that cannot be bought.

“If you know how to present your story, which is part of your life, so you can do it — when you can present that story, good luck, lobbyists,” Brian Wynne said. “We’re coming with passion and love, and it’s hard to beat that.”

Wendy Hartley’s advice: “Don’t be afraid to show emotion.” Talk about the effect on you and your family. “Show them the personal impact with pictures.”

“Six years ago, if somebody would have said, ‘If you scream loud enough, the government will listen,’ I would have laughed,” Lauren Atkins said. “Guess what? A voice can make a difference. I consider this part of my son’s legacy.”

So don’t count yourself out.

“Your impact,” Wendy Hartley wrote, “may be larger than you think.” 

The post Three families vowed to stop a killer chemical. Here’s how they did it. appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Many toxic substances harm people slowly, causing serious illnesses years after repeated exposure.

But methylene chloride’s fumes are so dangerous, the chemical can kill you in a matter of minutes.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned consumer sales of paint strippers with this ingredient in 2019 after an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity into a decades-long string of methylene chloride deaths — and a sustained campaign by relatives of its victims and safety advocates to press the EPA to act.

The coalition pushed for more: Workers weren’t protected by the narrow restrictions, they said. The vast majority of deaths Public Integrity traced to methylene chloride exposure happened on the job. And paint strippers were far from the only product you could find it in.

Now the EPA is proposing to ban most uses of methylene chloride — still with some on-the-job exceptions, but far fewer.

“I’m sort of stunned, you know?” said Brian Wynne, whose 31-year-old brother, Drew, died in 2017 while removing paint from his business’ walk-in freezer. Wynne had thought the EPA’s 2019 action on paint stripper “would be as far as we possibly could get — that we ran into a brick wall of funded lobbyists and councils that are paid to keep people like us away and ensure that their bottom line is prioritized ahead of safety.”

The proposed rule would prohibit methylene chloride in all consumer products and “most industrial and commercial uses,” the agency said in its announcement last week. 

The EPA said it hopes the rule will take effect in August 2024. Federal rules must go through a set process to give the public a chance to influence the final outcome. 

The chemical, also known as dichloromethane, can be found in products on retail shelves such as aerosol degreasers and brush cleaners for paints and coatings. Adhesives and sealants sold for commercial purposes use it. Manufacturers tap it to make other chemicals.

At least 85 people have died from methylene chloride’s quick-acting harms since 1980, including workers who had safety training and protective equipment, the agency said. 

That figure comes from a 2021 study by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the University of California, San Francisco, that quantified the ongoing fatalities, building on Public Integrity’s earlier tally. The number is almost certainly an undercount because one of the ways methylene chloride kills is by triggering a heart attack, which can look to observers like death from natural causes unless someone thinks to do a toxicology test.

The chemical has also caused “severe and long-lasting health impacts” such as cancer in people whose exposure didn’t rise to immediately lethal levels, the EPA said.

“Methylene chloride’s hazards,” the agency wrote in its proposed rule, “are well established.”

So well established, in fact, that experts say the federal government should have acted long before.

Public Integrity’s 2015 investigation turned up multiple missed opportunities for intervention since the 1970s that could have saved lives. Yet more deaths occurred amid delays after the EPA first proposed a rule at the end of the Obama administration in January 2017 — the Trump administration shelved the proposal until pressured to act.

‘Protect as many people as possible’

Liz Hitchcock, director of Safer Chemicals Healthy Families, the federal policy program of Toxic-Free Future, is among the people working for years to stop methylene chloride’s killing spree. She hailed the proposed-ban announcement as “a big day.” 

“Again, people have died using these chemicals,” she said. “People have gotten sick being nearby when people are using these chemicals, people have gotten chronic illnesses from the use of these chemicals. We want to make sure we protect as many people as possible.”

But she wasn’t happy to hear that the EPA believes the rule won’t be finalized for 15 more months. 

And Lauren Atkins, whose 31-year-old son Joshua died in 2018 while using paint stripper to refinish his BMX bike, worries about the impact of the uses that won’t be banned. Seeing those loopholes in the announcement hit her hard.

“I about jumped out of my shoes until I actually read the whole thing, and then I was pretty sad,” said Atkins, whose driving goal since her son’s death has been to get methylene chloride off the market so it can’t kill anyone else. “I lost my son, but my son lost everything.”

The chemical’s use in pharmaceutical manufacturing isn’t covered by the Toxic Substances Control Act, so that isn’t prohibited in the proposed rule, the EPA said. Workers who continue to use methylene chloride in other activities the proposal would allow, the agency said, would be covered by a new “workplace chemical protection program with strict exposure limits.” Methylene chloride kills when its fumes build up in enclosed spaces.

Some higher-volume uses would remain in those exceptions, which include “mission-critical” or “safety-critical” work by the military, NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and their contractors; use in laboratories; and companies using it as a reactant or manufacturing it for the allowed purposes, the EPA said. 

But some of those exceptions would end after 10 years.

And most uses would be prohibited. 

There would be no more methylene chloride in paint strippers beyond the federal-agency exceptions. The product was a common cause of reported deaths, frequently among workers refinishing old bathtubs in homes and apartments. 

And methylene chloride would no longer be allowed in commercial and industrial vapor degreasing, adhesive removal, finishing products for textiles, liquid lubricants, hobby glue and a long list of other applications. 

“Currently, an estimated 845,000 individuals are exposed to methylene chloride in the workplace,” the EPA said in a statement. “Under EPA’s proposal, less than 10,000 workers, protected from unreasonable risk via a required workplace chemical protection program, are expected to continue to use methylene chloride.”

Dr. Robert Harrison, a clinical professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has focused on methylene chloride for roughly a decade. He said the EPA is walking a line with the proposal, trying to balance safety with economic and national-security considerations, and he finds the extent of the ban heartening.

“I think that this is a win. It’s a win for workers,” said Harrison, who worked on the 2021 study about fatalities caused by the chemical. “This sets a really great precedent for making decisions based on clear-cut science and establishing the principle … that we should move away from these toxic chemicals to safer substitutes where the harm clearly outweighs the benefits.”

62,000 chemicals

You might think a chemical can’t be sold on the market unless it’s deemed safe. But that’s not how the U.S. system works.

Concerns about chemical safety prompted Congress to pass the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976, setting some requirements for chemicals. But those were widely seen as weak, giving the EPA no authority to broadly assess safety. A federal inventory published in 1982 counted roughly 62,000 chemicals, a number that’s continued to grow. 

In 2016, Congress amended TSCA and mandated chemical risk evaluations by the EPA. Methylene chloride was the very first that the agency tackled.

“This is what we worked so hard to reform TSCA to do,” said Hitchcock, who shared the Public Integrity investigation with congressional offices during that period as a potent example of deadly inaction.

The next step for the proposed methylene chloride ban is a 60-day public comment period. People will be able to weigh in on the EPA’s docket — and safety advocates are organizing around that.

“This is a big step forward for public health, but it’s not without its flaws,” Hitchcock said. She’s hoping to see comments that “urge EPA to enact the strongest rule possible.”

Harrison used to say that chemical regulation in the U.S. moved at a glacial speed — until glaciers started outpacing it. But he does see improvement since the 2016 TSCA amendments. The new regulatory action on methylene chloride makes him hopeful.

“There are many other chemicals that can follow the decision that the USA has made about methylene chloride,” he said.

The post The EPA wants to broaden a ban on a deadly chemical on store shelves appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

After decades of death and regulatory inaction, the federal government announced a rule Friday that will ban retail sales of paint-removal products with an ingredient that has killed unsuspecting people as they used it on bathtubs, floors, furniture and other items.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation targets paint strippers containing a chemical called methylene chloride.

But the ban on consumer sales backs away from broader restrictions proposed during the final days of the Obama administration, which would have blocked sales of the product to almost all workplaces as well.

Safety advocates said the government’s pullback puts lives at risk. The vast majority of deaths linked to methylene chloride have happened on the job, as a 2015 Center for Public Integrity investigation showed. The investigation found at least 56 deaths in the United States since 1980 that were linked to methylene chloride, particularly in paint strippers, and only a few involved consumers.

“The EPA is supposed to be protecting us, and they are not,” said Wendy Hartley, whose 21-year-old son, Kevin, died on the job in April 2017 while using a paint stripper to refinish a bathtub.

The EPA’s assistant administrator for chemical safety, Alexandra Dunn, said Friday that the agency was proud of its action “to ensure that no other family experiences the death of someone close to them from this chemical.”

Dunn said officials could decide later to ban the use of methylene chloride paint strippers in work settings. But for now, she said, the agency is requesting comments on a possible rule to require training and certification instead.

Kevin Hartley received training, his mother said. It didn’t help. Wendy Hartley is among those suing the EPA to get it to enact the wider ban it originally considered.

The agency, which under the Trump administration has focused on rolling back rules, almost didn’t act at all — even on behalf of consumers. In December 2017, at the end of a year in which at least three people died using methylene chloride paint strippers, the agency indicated that it was indefinitely delaying restrictions. Two months after that came yet another death.

Getting even the partial ban took sustained pressure from families of three of the four recent victims, chemical-safety groups and, increasingly, both Democratic and Republican members of Congress.

“It took a lot to get here,” said Brian Wynne, whose 31-year-old brother, Drew, died in October 2017 while removing paint from his business’ walk-in freezer. “I don’t think this is a celebration, but I think this is an acknowledgement of accomplishing a once-impossible task.”

Methylene chloride poses a variety of health risks. But in enclosed areas like bathrooms, it can be immediately dangerous. As the fumes build up, they can kill by asphyxiation or by triggering a heart attack.

The chemical, also called dichloromethane, has struck down teenagers on the job, an Iraq War veteran working on a church baptismal pool and a mother of four, among others.

Along the way, regulators missed multiple opportunities to save lives.

Researchers warned of these dangers at least as far back as 1976. In 2012, after a study showing a rash of methylene chloride deaths among bathtub refinishers, the Consumer Product Safety Commission declined to act despite requests from California and Washington state officials for stiffer rules. That year, EPA decided that it would take a close look at the chemical. But it wasn’t until January 2017 that the agency proposed to largely ban methylene chloride in paint strippers.

Then the EPA essentially shelved the rule.

But people kept dying. Joshua Atkins, 31, succumbed in February 2018 while refinishing a section of his BMX bike, 13 months after the EPA proposed to make it impossible for most people to get their hands on the product he bought.

He was visiting his mother at the time, and Lauren Atkins found him slumped in her bathtub, where he seemed to have moved the project to avoid making a mess. She thought at first that he was simply asleep. Then she learned the truth — and found out about the EPA’s delays.

“If they had done what they were supposed to do back then,” she said, “my son would still be here.”

The EPA’s consumer ban will not take effect quickly: Retailers won’t have to stop selling the products for about eight months. But many major retail chains have already pulled them from shelves or committed to doing so, reacting more quickly to the appeals from victims’ families than the EPA did.

Wynne, whose brother died, said the families aren’t giving up. Pressure on the EPA from other parts of the government limited what the agency could do, in his opinion. But people and their elected officials can keep ratcheting up the pressure, too, he said.

“I hope we’ve opened the doors for additional action,” he said.

The post EPA restricts sales of deadly paint strippers after years of delays appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Jan. 8: This story was updated. 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has finally finished working on a rule to restrict paint removers that have killed dozens of people — after nearly two years of delays, during which four more men died while using the products. 

Now it’s up to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to decide whether to let the restrictions go into effect, a process that could be quick — or could drag on for months. Normally, OMB review is supposed to last no more than 90 days, but one worker-safety rule languished at the agency for 2 ½ years before it was finalized in 2013. 

The EPA’s rule targets paint strippers with methylene chloride, a solvent that can quickly kill while people are using it. A 2015 Center for Public Integrity investigation, cited in the EPA’s rulemaking, found at least 56 deaths in the United States since 1980 that were linked to methylene chloride. When used in enclosed areas, its fumes build up, posing a potent risk of asphyxiation. It can also trigger a heart attack. 

Roughly a dozen retailers have either stopped or promised to shortly stop selling paint strippers with methylene chloride, after the relatives of recent victims urged them to do so. The relatives and both Democratic and Republican members of Congress also pressed the EPA to act, and the agency said in May that it would “shortly” send a final rule to OMB. But OMB, which updated its website this week to show it had received the rule, indicated that the EPA did not send it until Dec. 21. 

“This step by the EPA is due in large part to brave and relentless advocacy by the families of methylene chloride victims,” Liz Hitchcock, director of the advocacy group Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, said in a statement. “Despite their pain, they shared their loved ones’ stories time and again until decision makers listened.” 

The EPA, now caught up in the government shutdown, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Updated Jan. 8, 3 p.m.: While the contents of the rule are not yet public, including how the agency intends to restrict the use of methylene chloride in paint removers, the EPA signaled that it focused its protections on consumers but not workers. The same day it sent OMB its final rule, the EPA also forwarded an advance notice of a proposed rule it labeled a methylene chloride “Commercial Paint and Coating Removal Training, Certification and Limited Access Program.” Handling workplace exposures separately “is deferring for years needed action to protect workers,” the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group, said in a statement.

Most of the reported methylene chloride deaths occurred on the job, said Lindsay McCormick, chemicals and health project manager at the Environmental Defense Fund. 

“EPA had the opportunity to do the right thing,” McCormick said in an interview. Instead, she said, the agency is following in the footsteps of mass retailers on consumer protection and leaving workers, some of whom use paint removers acquired from specialty distributors, in the lurch.

Brian Wynne, whose brother Drew died in 2017 while using a methylene chloride stripper to remove paint in his business’ walk-in freezer, had predicted in mid-December that the EPA would act before the end of 2018. President Donald Trump has said he plans to nominate EPA’s acting administrator, Andrew Wheeler, to run the agency on a permanent basis. A nomination hearing before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works would almost certainly bring pointed questions about the status of the rule, Wynne noted. 

Wheeler faced such questions from that committee at a hearing in August, and so did another EPA official at a nomination hearing in November. 

The post Restrictions on deadly paint strippers near the finish line appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

About a dozen retailers have pledged to stop selling paint-removal products that can kill their customers, but formal restrictions promised by a federal agency have yet to materialize.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in May that it would “shortly” finish its proposed rule about certain widely available paint strippers — those containing a chemical called methylene chloride — and send it to the White House office that must sign off before new regulation is enacted.

Now, seven months later, the EPA won’t say when it anticipates taking that step or if it is still contemplating a ban on retail sales. The agency would only say that it is “currently evaluating the proposal … to determine the appropriate regulation.”

Since a ban was first proposed on methylene chloride paint removers in January 2017, at least four people have died using the products to strip paint or other coatings. In enclosed areas such as bathrooms, the fumes build up, putting workers and consumers at risk of death by asphyxiation. The chemical can also trigger heart attacks.

A 2015 investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, cited by the EPA in its proposed rule, found at least 56 deaths in the United States since 1980 that were linked to methylene chloride.

“This should be an easy decision,” said Liz Hitchcock, director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, an advocacy group that has called on the EPA and retailers to act. “People died using the product, and we know that there are alternatives. … Why not take it off the market?”

Paint strippers with the chemical are easy to buy, but that’s changing. Pressed by relatives of men who died in 2017 and 2018, major chains — including Lowe’s, The Home Depot, Walmart and Amazon — say they will phase out sales of these products, in many cases by the end of this year. The retailers also promised to stop selling paint removers with an ingredient, often known as NMP, that research suggests could reduce fertility and endanger unborn children.

Still, some businesses, including a few large hardware-store chains, aren’t taking the methylene chloride products off the shelves. That’s motivated families of three recent victims — Kevin Hartley, Drew Wynne and Joshua Atkins — to continue pressing the EPA to enact a ban. The mothers of Hartley and Atkins, along with advocacy groups, notified the EPA in October that they intend to sue the agency.

“Further delay will unnecessarily leave users of paint removal products at serious risk and could result in additional deaths,” they wrote in their notice.

For Hartley, 21, death came while stripping a bathtub in Tennessee to refinish it. Wynne, 31, was removing paint from the walk-in-freezer in his South Carolina cold-brew coffee business. Atkins, 31, was refinishing part of his bicycle at the Pennsylvania home of his mother, whom he was visiting.

The EPA proposed the ban in the final days of the Obama administration, before any of the three men died. The Trump administration indicated as recently as last spring that it intended to sit on the rule indefinitely — amid broader efforts to gut regulations — but pressure from grieving relatives and members of Congress this year seemed to change officials’ minds. In May, the EPA announced its plans to finalize the rule.

Brian Wynne, one of Drew Wynne’s brothers, said he’s hopeful the agency will ultimately follow through. He spoke last week to Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, which must review any paint-remover rule before it is enacted. Wynne got off the call with the impression that the EPA might forward the rule there before the end of the year.

One reason: President Donald Trump has said he will nominate EPA’s acting administrator, Andrew Wheeler, to run the agency on a permanent basis. That means a nomination hearing — presumably soon — before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Wheeler faced pointed questions from that committee about the status of the rule at a hearing in August, as did another EPA official at a nomination hearing in November.

Multiple members of Congress have called for the EPA to act, including Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, both of South Carolina.

Chemical manufacturers, pressing the EPA not to restrict sales, have said that nothing works as well as fast-acting methylene chloride, also known as dichloromethane. Some of those companies later introduced alternative products as the voluntary phase-outs by retailers began to mount. Wynne said the speed those new products hit the shelves suggests there was no reason to expose customers — including his brother — to methylene chloride.

“It just makes what happened to these young men all the more tragic,” said Wynne, who lives in North Carolina.

Some newly released alternatives pose different hazards. They’re flammable — that was one of the arguments that industry groups made in favor of methylene chloride, which is not (though it is frequently mixed with flammable solvents in paint strippers).

Some products, meanwhile, took out methylene chloride — which among other health risks is considered a likely cancer-causing agent — only to put in toluene and methanol, both linked to birth defects. A 2015 report on ingredients that could be used in place of methylene chloride, released by a safer-chemical organization called BizNGO, classified toluene and methanol as “high concern” and important to avoid.

A new formulation that avoids those chemicals was developed by the Toxics Use Reduction Institute, a state agency located at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The institute launched a project in 2015 to develop a safer paint stripper that would work as effectively. Older methylene chloride alternatives on the market are slower to cut through coatings. The BizNGO report called two solvents the institute ultimately used lower risk, on par with safer alternatives to methylene chloride.

Greg Morose, research manager at the Toxics Use Reduction Institute, said the paint stripper his team created did not catch fire in flammability tests because the formulation tamps down on vapor evaporation.

A Canadian company has begun manufacturing the institute’s formulation under the name “Super Remover New Generation,” but so far only Canadian retailers have opted to carry it.

“I hope we’ll be in the U.S. eventually,” said Sébastien Plourde, president of Super Remover, which is phasing out its methylene chloride paint strippers.

There’s a long history of regrettable substitution in the United States — one dangerous chemical swapped for another. An EPA ban, if it comes, won’t address that.

But starting Jan. 1, California will require that firms selling paint strippers with methylene chloride in the state investigate alternatives. If the new options are problematic, California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control can require the companies to keep looking.

That step is “the way to make sure we don’t get in trouble on the back end,” said Meredith Williams, who heads the agency’s Safer Consumer Products program.

The post Some paint strippers are killing people. The EPA promised to act — but hasn’t. appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Our data analysis behind the Unequal Risk investigation into work-related diseases in America.

CANCER RISK

Our interactive cancer-risk graphic is based on an analysis by Adam M. Finkel — a former director of OSHA’s health regulatory divisions who is now at the University of Pennsylvania Law School — and the Center for Public Integrity. It tackles a thorny question: If 1,000 workers are exposed to a chemical’s legal limit over their entire careers, how many will likely get cancer as a result of that exposure? What, in other words, is the excess risk above and beyond the cancer risk everyone faces?

First, an important note: Any risk analysis produces estimates, not exact numbers. Its value is showing how much hazards can vary under the law. (This analysis doesn’t look at average exposures, but rather the impact of what exposure at exactly the legal limit would be. But the Center also mined an OSHA inspections database for a separate analysis to find out how often the agency detected several toxic substances above the legal level. See the exposure-data section below for more on that.)

Our group of theoretical workers is 1,000-strong for a reason. OSHA considers a grave risk such as cancer that affects one worker in 1,000, all equally exposed over the length of their careers, to be “clearly significant.”

That means the agency should enact workplace standards that lead to less risk, particularly since OSHA says it doesn’t see 1 in 1,000 as the dividing line between too much and OK. But for all the years the agency has quantified risk — since the Supreme Court required it in 1980 — OSHA has never enacted a standard on the right side of that threshold, it says. Court decisions have made clear that limits must be set based on what is technologically and economically feasible — a hotly contested issue.

Americans enjoy much stronger federal protections from chemicals when they’re off the clock than on it. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, operating under different laws and court decisions, aims to protect the public so no more than one cancer case in 10,000 results from pollution in the community — and more often, no more than one in 1 million. On paper, that’s 10 to 1,000 times more protective.

What our analysis with Finkel suggests is that the actual difference is far worse. That’s because cancer risks at OSHA’s exposure limits are often much higher than 1 in 1,000.

The analysis relied on cancer-risk figures developed by the U.S. EPA and California’s EPA for certain known or likely human carcinogens. These “inhalation unit risk” figures allow researchers to calculate cancer risk over a lifetime of community exposure at a specified level. We adjusted these figures to account for on-the-job exposure: 40 years instead of 70, 50 weeks a year instead of 52, five days a week instead of seven and the amount of air inhaled by the typical employee during a workday compared with a resident off work all day (10 cubic meters of air vs. 20, which takes into account both the difference in hours and breathing rates).

We used U.S. EPA risk figures when available, and if not, CalEPA. After adjusting the figures for occupational exposure, we used them to calculate the risk at OSHA limits as well as the risk at voluntary guidelines called “Threshold Limit Values.” TLVs, as they’re known, are developed by the nonprofit American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists and are often tighter than OSHA’s “Permissible Exposure Limits.”

OSHA, in fact, recommends that companies look to voluntary limits such as the TLVs rather than its own standards to protect workers. In 2013 the agency released a side-by-side comparison to make that easier: OSHA limits vs. TLVs, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s guidelines and California’s workplace limits, which are mandated only in that state. (California is one of the few states that sets its own exposure limits.)

Our analysis relied on that side-by-side comparison for information on OSHA limits and the ACGIH’s TLVs. The vast majority of OSHA’s limits are actually decades-old TLVs, adopted by the then-new agency in 1971. While the ACGIH has kept updating since, most of OSHA’s limits haven’t changed. (Why? More on that here and here.)

Finkel developed the initial analysis that estimated the cancer risks at OSHA limits and TLVs. He shared that with us and advised us as we fact-checked the underlying figures, pulled in California data and tweaked the method with input from him and other experts.

California conducted an analysis similar to ours in 2007 when it looked at workplace health hazards at legal exposure limits. Julia Quint, who launched and co-managed the project before retiring from the California Department of Public Health, was among the experts who reviewed a sample of our analysis. She said it is consistent with California’s method, which that state uses as it considers tighter exposure limits.

For some substances, OSHA has produced its own cancer risk estimates. In those cases, we show the agency estimate alongside our calculations. Sometimes they’re about the same; in other cases, they’re far apart. OSHA calculates risk based on a 45-year career rather than a 40-year one, which explains some differences. In addition, the agency’s assessments delve more fully into risk quantification, particularly the specific way a substance’s risk varies as exposure levels change. On the other hand, most of OSHA’s estimates are more than two decades old, so the science underpinning them can be out of date.

OSHA’s calculation for o-toluidine, as an example, is from the 1980s and suggests the exposure limit (unchanged since 1971) carries far less risk than one cancer case in 1,000. But the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, later implicated the chemical in a cluster of bladder-cancer cases among workers at one plant — people exposed to levels well below the legal limit. The inhalation risk figure California’s EPA produced in 1992 suggests the cancer risk at OSHA’s workplace limit is 197 in 1,000, nearly two in 10.

The country needs modern, full-blown risk assessments for workplace chemicals, said Andrew Maier, an occupational toxicology and risk assessment scientist who is an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. The method we used for our analysis is likely to produce “upper-bound” estimates, he said, but he considers it a useful approach to prioritize the chemicals “that need the most attention.”

Finkel, who has a doctorate in environmental health sciences and has worked on the cutting edge of risk assessment for more than 30 years, said there’s been a “raging debate” that entire time about whether risk estimates such as the EPA’s are really at the upper end of the spectrum, and if so, how much. He says there’s underestimation issues at work, too, and he believes risk is much less likely to be overstated when exposures are higher — like at OSHA’s legal limits.

Quint, for her part, thinks OSHA should take a page from California’s book and convert the risk work the EPA has already done so it’s relevant for workers.

“OSHA, frankly, does not have the personnel … to do detailed risk assessments for each one of these chemicals that need to be assessed,” said Quint, a toxicologist. “You don’t have to repeat all that work. You can use existing information, tweaked as we do for occupational health.”

Not included in our analysis: Risks from carcinogens that don’t have EPA or CalEPA risk factors. Non-cancer risks aren’t accounted for, either. Many substances, such as beryllium, can cause other types of diseases that are serious or even lethal.

We wish we had more comprehensive details about the chemicals’ uses, including all the sectors and industries where exposures occur. Such information is spotty. (One frequently cited source is NIOSH’s survey of workplace exposures — from three decades ago. The agency says it has not had the funding for an update.)

We relied on information from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the EPA and other government sources, including the New Jersey Department of Health, to explain how chemicals are used and to give insight into which sectors (such as manufacturing or construction) come into contact with them. But much of the sector information, and all of the detailed industry information, came from a Center analysis of OSHA sampling data taken by inspectors at workplaces.

That’s a limited snapshot: OSHA can sample at only a fraction of workplaces. But the sampling results offer details we couldn’t find anywhere else. We looked at chemicals detected from 2000 to 2013 and, in cases where a substance was found in more than five different industries, included a varied selection in our graphic.

We also analyzed the sampling data for a separate look at overexposures. Read on for details about that.

EXPOSURE DATA

When OSHA conducts health inspections at workplaces, investigators can sample the air for potentially dangerous substances. All the samples collected by federal inspectors, and some of those taken by state OSHA inspectors, are analyzed at OSHA’s lab near Salt Lake City.

OSHA made a database of those samples, dating back to 1984, available online after Finkel — the former OSHA official — won a lawsuit in 2007 to get the agency to release it.

We analyzed the database through 2013 to see how often the levels of certain substances topped legal limits. Why not all substances? Because there’s no handy “over the limit” data point. You need to find the limits yourself and delve into their history to see if they were once looser. The samples also require work before comparison is possible. (More on that in a moment.) We ultimately looked at several chemicals and metals that are well-known hazards, including lead and formaldehyde.

Our analysis focused on the types of samples that characterize potential inhalation exposures: “personal” samples — air grabbed by sampling devices attached to workers — and “area” samples that measure air in a workspace where multiple people might labor.

We knew we couldn’t find out what the average U.S. worker, or even the average worker in a select industry, gets exposed to. That’s because OSHA doesn’t have nearly enough staff to sample every workplace. If federal OSHA inspectors were to try, the AFL-CIO calculated this spring, it would take 140 years to get to each workplace under their jurisdiction a single time.

So the samples are, quite literally, a sample. And they’re not a random one, because inspections can be launched by complaints, accidents and OSHA’s determinations about which industries or employers are high-hazard, not only by chance selection.

So instead, we asked an answerable question: When samples test positive for a substance — the lab’s equipment detects it — how often do levels exceed legal limits? We also wondered how sample results would compare with exposure recommendations from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, often tighter than OSHA’s hard-to-update limits.

But, as OSHA’s Salt Lake City experts explained, you can’t simply compare sample results to the agency’s limits. That’s because inspectors will often change sampling devices on workers through the day, so a single worker might produce two, three or more samples that together represent a full workday. You need to combine all the related samples to compare to OSHA’s eight-hour-average limits. (How? Multiply the individual samples’ results by the amount of time sampled, add the related ones together — they have a unique ID — and then divide by 480, the minutes in an eight-hour day.)

The Salt Lake technical staff walked us through those steps and looked at key results to check that we hadn’t tripped ourselves up. We appreciate their patient assistance.

You can see our results in several places: hexavalent chromium and lead in this story, mercury vapors in this piece and formaldehyde in this list of eye-popping facts. Lead was striking because samples, taken at workplaces ranging from construction sites to foundries to indoor shooting ranges, frequently exceeded the legal limit. Formaldehyde samples, by contrast, rarely did — but most with detectable levels topped the amount NIOSH recommends employers not exceed.

Side note: OSHA enacted stricter industry-wide limits for two of the substances after 1984. That puts them among the relatively few changed since the agency adopted its thresholds in 1971, a sign of how very well-established the dangers are. We looked at samples for the relevant years: 2006 onward for hexavalent chromium (OSHA’s most recently tightened exposure limit), and 1988 onward for formaldehyde.

The lead limit for most industries was set in 1978, but an exception was made for construction until mid-1993, when that sector’s limit was brought in line with the one for other businesses. We analyzed lead samples for 1984-2013, with construction firms compared to their looser limit, as well as 1994-2013 and found approximately the same percentage of overexposures for both periods.

The post Methodology of Unequal Risk investigation appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

June 19: This article has been updated.

Home-improvement giant Lowe’s is phasing out paint-removal products with methylene chloride, responding to petitions in the wake of deaths caused by the chemical.

The company’s decision, announced today, will get the products off store shelves by the end of this year. As their fumes build up in bathrooms, basements and other enclosed areas, they can kill: A Center for Public Integrity investigation in 2015 found that more than 50 people died since 1980 using methylene chloride — often in paint strippers — for work or personal projects.

Since last year, at least four people have been found dead midway through projects in which they used such paint removers. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had been slow-walking a would-be ban, proposed shortly before President Donald Trump’s inauguration. But earlier this month, the agency said it would push forward with a rule targeting the chemical, a turnaround after officials there came under pressure from members of Congress and survivors of recent victims.

Lowe’s has faced pressure as well. Relatives of Drew Wynne, 31, who died in October while removing paint from a walk-in refrigerator at his South Carolina coffee business, joined with consumer and environmental groups to press the company to stop selling paint-stripper brands with methylene chloride. Wynne purchased his product from Lowe’s, they said. The groups said more than 200,000 people signed petitions asking the company to take action.

Lowe’s, which already sells some paint removers without methylene chloride, said it is working with suppliers to get more alternatives on the shelves.

“We care deeply about the health and safety of our customers, and great progress is being made in the development of safer and more effective alternatives,” Mike McDermott, Lowe’s chief customer officer, said in a prepared statement.

Lowe’s said it also plans to stop selling paint removers with another chemical, N-Methylpyrrolidone, that has been linked to miscarriages and other harms to unborn children.

Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, an advocacy group that asked Lowe’s more than a year ago to take both types of paint strippers off the shelves, said in a statement that the retailer is the first “to take action on this critical consumer and worker safety issue.” The group urged other companies to follow suit.

“When facing federal inaction on vital issues facing the American public—some of which are matters of life or death—retailers have a responsibility and an opportunity to do right by their customers,” Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families’ Mike Schade said in a statement.

(Update, June 19, 10:38 a.m.: The Home Depot announced on June 18, 2018, that it would also stop selling paint strippers containing methylene chloride and N-Methylpyrrolidone by the end of 2018.)

The post Lowe’s says it will stop selling deadly paint removers appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

This story was updated at 3:17 p.m. with additional interviews.

In a surprise reversal, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said today it would enact a rule targeting a widely available type of paint remover that has killed people for decades — including at least four since last year.

It’s unclear whether the regulation would ban retail sales of these products, as the EPA proposed in the final days of the Obama administration. The agency would not clarify when asked. Today’s announcement was a turnabout for the EPA: Officials there said several weeks ago that they did not anticipate they would take final action on the issue this year, but they have come under increasing pressure from families who recently lost relatives and from members of Congress.

The products, paint removers containing methylene chloride, can kill on the spot as the chemical’s fumes build up. A 2015 Center for Public Integrity investigation, co-published with Slate, found that more than 50 people died since 1980 using methylene chloride — often in paint strippers — for work or consumer projects. To this day, Americans can purchase cans of these products at home improvement stores and other retailers, risking asphyxiation or a heart attack if they use it in enclosed areas.

At least four men died while the agency was deciding whether to enact the proposed ban, dragging out the process rather than acting swiftly — part of a pattern of deregulatory decisions by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. But on Tuesday, families of two of the men killed in recent months got a sit-down meeting with Pruitt. The mother of a third joined them for meetings with multiple members of Congress or their staffs this week.

Brian Wynne, whose brother Drew, 31, died using the product to refinish a floor in his business’ walk-in refrigerator in October, said senators and congressmen from both parties are helping push for action. Wynne was among the group that talked to Pruitt at EPA headquarters.

“I want to see that they’re going to do what they proposed,” Wynne said. “I’m not seeing the word ‘ban’ out there, and I want to see a ban. But we remain cautiously optimistic.”

Faye Graul, executive director of the Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance, a trade group whose members include makers of methylene chloride, said she too has “absolutely no idea” what the EPA intends to do — or how quickly it will act.

“It’s very vague,” she said.

Graul and others in the industry have said that methylene chloride is more effective than the alternatives and should not be banned. The solvents alliance petitioned the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to approve stronger warning labels for the products instead — a move that occupational-safety experts have said is not sufficient to protect lives.

In today’s announcement, the EPA said it would “shortly” send the methylene chloride rule to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, a gatekeeper for new regulations.

“EPA is working diligently … to ensure the safety of existing chemicals,” the agency said.

However, the EPA did not specify whether its rule would include restrictions on another chemical common in paint removers, N-Methylpyrrolidone, known as NMP. The agency’s original proposal suggested either banning NMP in paint strippers or requiring lower amounts of the chemical in mixtures because it is linked to miscarriages and other harms to unborn children.

“If the NMP products stay on the shelf, they’ll replace the methylene chloride products, and that’s simply replacing one set of health risks with another,” said Liz Hitchcock, acting director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, an advocacy group.

Her group, along with the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, is pressing both the EPA and retailers to get the products off shelves.

The most recent publicly announced death from a methylene chloride paint stripper occurred in February. Joshua Atkins, 31, was refinishing part of his BMX bicycle when he succumbed to the fumes, his mother wrote in a letter to key officials on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Lauren Atkins said her son was visiting her in Pennsylvania at the time, and she found him slumped by the paint-remover can. Her anguish only grew as she read about methylene chloride’s tortured history.

“I learned that family after family across the country had lost loved ones to this chemical,” she wrote. “I learned that the Environmental Protection Agency had proposed banning it in paint strippers but hadn’t followed through. I learned that advocacy organizations had urged top retailers to stop selling this deadly chemical but they had refused.”

Wendy Hartley’s 21-year-old son, Kevin, died on the job last year while using a methylene chloride paint remover to refinish a bathtub. Like Wynne, Hartley was at the Pruitt meeting this week. She wants to make sure no one else dies.

“This product does not need to be on store shelves. It does not need to be in consumers’ hands. It needs to be banned,” said Hartley, of Nashville, Tennessee. “I don’t know why it hadn’t been banned before.”

READ MORE:

Members of Congress to EPA: Act now on deadly chemical

The EPA planned to ban a deadly paint-stripping chemical. Will it follow through?

EPA restricts sales of deadly paint strippers after years of delays

The post Reversing course, the EPA will regulate a deadly paint stripper appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

South Carolina’s two U.S. senators and one of its congressmen are urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to stop delaying a decision to largely ban a toxic chemical in paint removers — calling the proposal an “urgent matter” after the death of a constituent last year.

The letter, sent to the EPA last week and made public today by consumer advocacy groups, was signed by U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott and U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford, all Republicans. The lawmakers expressed alarm that more than 50 people have died since the 1980s while using the chemical methylene chloride, a fact uncovered by the Center for Public Integrity in a 2015 investigation.

More have died in the two-and-a-half years since then, including Drew Wynne, 31, a small business owner in Charleston, S.C.

“Given the apparent danger of this chemical, we urge the [EPA] Secretary to immediately and fully address the already identified risks of methylene chloride … and prevent any further harm from coming to the American public,” the three members of Congress said in the letter.

In an email to the Center for Public Integrity, the EPA said it would “respond to the letter through appropriate channels.” The agency did not comment further.

The EPA spent years delving into the hazards of methylene chloride to determine whether restrictions were necessary. In mid-January 2017 — in the final days of the Obama administration — the agency proposed to ban sales of methylene chloride paint strippers to consumers and most other users.

But in December, while promoting its deregulatory efforts, the Trump administration EPA downgraded the would-be ban from “Proposed Rule” to “Long-term Action.” The agency said in an emailed statement to the Center for Public Integrity that officials “felt that more time was needed to consider how best to analyze and address any risks from these chemicals.”

EPA officials did not answer questions about how long this work would take or whether the agency still intended to finalize the proposal. The European Union, by contrast, pulled  methylene chloride paint strippers from general use in 2011.

Methylene chloride is an anesthetic. At high doses, it knocks victims out, stopping their breathing.

It can also trigger heart attacks in smokers and people with certain health conditions because the chemical turns into carbon monoxide in the body.

And research links it to some long-term health problems, including cancer.

Wynne died in October as he was refinishing a floor in his new business with a methylene chloride paint stripper he bought from Lowe’s, his family said.

Months before his death — in February of that year — Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, a consumer advocacy group, sent Lowe’s a letter  warning of the products’ dangers and urging the home-improvement retailer to stop selling them.

Wynne’s parents joined with Safer Chemicals and other advocacy groups today to call on the EPA to act and to press Lowe’s to take methylene chloride products off its shelves.

“Our family suffered an unimaginable loss,” said his mother, Cindy Wynne. She said the family decided to focus on the effort because to them, the chemical presents exactly the sort of unreasonable risk from which the EPA is supposed to protect Americans.

Lowe’s did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company said in a recent email that it is “committed” to nearly doubling the number of methylene chloride-free paint strippers it sells by the end of the year. But it did not address whether it plans to phase out sales of products that contain the chemical.

The post Members of Congress to EPA: Act now on deadly chemical appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

It might be surprising to learn that simply removing paint could be fatal, but the key ingredient in many paint-stripping products has felled dozens of people engaged in this run-of-the-mill task. In the waning days of the Obama administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed to largely ban paint strippers containing the chemical methylene chloride so they would no longer sit on store shelves, widely available for anyone to buy.

What’s happened since should be no shock to close observers of the Trump administration’s pattern of regulatory rollbacks. The EPA, after hearing from both Americans in support of a ban and companies opposed to it, pushed back its timeline for finishing the rule to an unspecified date, saying it needed more time to weigh the issue.

Consumer advocates fear the proposed rule has been effectively shelved, even as people continue to die while using methylene chloride paint strippers on bathtubs and other items — including at least three last year.

“There literally are bodies stacking up,” said Erik Olson, who directs the health program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. If the EPA won’t act on a chemical that’s undisputedly killing people, he said, “what are they going to act on?”

The NRDC is among the advocacy groups that plan to intensify their efforts to get these products off shelves another way — by ratcheting up pressure on home-improvement retailers such as Lowe’s and the Home Depot to stop selling them. Lowe’s said in an email to the Center for Public Integrity that it is working with suppliers on alternatives and is “committed” to nearly doubling the number of methylene chloride-free paint strippers it sells by the end of the year, to seven total.

A doctor who serves as a Maryland legislator, meanwhile, wants his state to institute the ban the EPA hasn’t finalized. And California regulators are working on a proposed rule that would require manufacturers to look for safer alternatives to methylene chloride in paint strippers. (Some such options already are on the market but don’t sell well, manufacturers say, because they don’t work as quickly.)

Even if these efforts bear fruit, they represent a patchwork approach that Congress seemed intent on avoiding when it amended the Toxic Substances Control Act in 2016. That legislation gave the EPA clear authority to ban chemicals presenting an “unreasonable risk” to health or the environment.

Often, chemical harms are hard to grasp because they’re not immediate. But methylene chloride, which research suggests carries risks of cancer and other long-term health problems, can also kill on the spot. It’s been linked to more than 50 deaths in the U.S. since 1980, a 2015 Center for Public Integrity investigation found — among them a few consumers and a wide variety of workers on the job. Teenagers. A mother of four. A 62-year-old man. An Iraq War veteran.

Using the product in enclosed areas, where fumes build up, puts people at risk of asphyxiation because methylene chloride is an anesthetic at high doses — knocking victims out and stopping them from breathing. Because it turns into carbon monoxide in the body, it can also trigger heart attacks in smokers and people with certain health conditions.

“It’s too toxic to use indoors,” said Dr. Robert Harrison, an occupational medicine physician at the University of California, San Francisco.

Over the decades, methylene chloride — also called dichloromethane — has struck down people removing paint or other coatings in bathrooms, tanks, basements, even in a church baptismal pool. The public appears mostly unaware of the danger. Clerks in hardware stores didn’t seem to know, a California agency found in a 2013 survey. But experts linked the chemical to deaths as far back as the 1940s. Criticism that the EPA hadn’t done something began in the 1970s, in the agency’s early years.

The European Union pulled methylene chloride paint strippers from general use in 2011. When the EPA proposed a rule in mid-January 2017, it wanted to ban sales to consumers and most other users.

The proposal was years in the making. It came over the sustained objections of paint-stripper manufacturers and their trade groups, which argued that job losses would follow. In 2016, after the EPA’s work on its proposed rule was well underway, the Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance petitioned the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to strengthen the products’ warning labels — then argued last year that this obviated the need for sales restrictions on the “most efficient and cost-effective paint remover products.”

“We certainly recognize that some people have been harmed when using methylene chloride without the appropriate safeguards, and we are committed to being a part of the solution,” Faye Graul, executive director of the alliance, said at a recent legislative hearing in Maryland.

The group, speaking on behalf of methylene chloride manufacturers and users, also said in comments on EPA’s proposed rule that the agency failed “to take into account the documented greater flammability risk posed by alternative products.”

Benzyl alcohol, recommended by some state agencies as a safer option for paint stripping, poses what the National Fire Protection Association calls a “fairly insignificant” fire hazard. The EPA noted in its proposal that methylene chloride is often mixed with flammable solvents in paint strippers on the market.

The EPA also considered whether better instructions would be enough to render methylene chloride safe. But dozens of studies “found that consumers and professionals do not consistently pay attention to labels for hazardous substances,” the agency said in its proposed rule, adding that proper safety precautions for methylene chloride are too complex for most users to successfully carry out.

In December, however, while trumpeting its deregulatory efforts, the EPA changed the categorization of its would-be ban from “Proposed Rule” to “Long-term Action.” The agency said in an emailed statement last week that officials “felt that more time was needed to consider how best to analyze and address any risks from these chemicals.”

In fact, the EPA has done that already — as part of its original proposal. Asked for an estimate on how long additional work on the rule would take and whether the agency still intended to finalize the proposal, the EPA did not respond.

Maryland Delegate Clarence Lam, a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health physician with a specialty in public and occupational health, saw the EPA’s handling of this chemical as a call to action. In February the Democrat sponsored a bill to ban methylene chloride paint strippers in his state. The legislation isn’t going anywhere this legislative session, but he’s hopeful about its chances next year.

“I didn’t think further risk assessments needed to be done,” Lam said. “This chemical probably should have been banned long ago.”

Industry representatives testifying against his bill argued that a ban would be premature because the EPA is on the job. They pointed not to the languishing proposed restrictions but to a separate toxics review the agency is undertaking. Methylene chloride is one of the targeted chemicals.

But relying on that effort to get action on paint strippers could delay restrictions for years because it’s an opportunity for the agency to retrace all the steps it already completed, said Liz Hitchcock, who heads Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, a group that works to get toxic substances out of products.

“In the absence of EPA taking action, we are urging — and definitely increasing our efforts to persuade — the largest home-improvement retailers to take action on their own,” she said, and get “these dangerous products off their store shelves.”

The post The EPA planned to ban a deadly paint-stripping chemical. Will it follow through? appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.