The EPA has banned all uses of tricholoroethylene (TCE) and most uses of perchloroethylene (PCE). Those are cancer-causing chemicals used in a variety of consumer products and industrial processes.
The new rules will ban both chemicals from all consumer products (TCE is used in spray coatings for arts and crafts, for example). Most of these will be banned within a year, according to the EPA. Some products, like cleaners for aviation parts, will take longer to phase out.
Only a few industrial uses for PCE are still allowed. Those include manufacturing refrigerants and electric vehicle batteries. And those uses are subject to increased workplace safety regulations, called a Workplace Chemical Protection Program.
Banning these chemicals has been an issue for workplace safety advocates for decades, said Jeff Gearhart, research director at the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor.
“It's taken 50 years to get to this point of banning many of the uses of them and establishing worker safety standards for any of the remaining uses,” he said. The best approach is to focus on prevention, Gearhart said.
“My hope is any of those workplace safety standards that are required will build in much more stringent controls on the use of the chemicals,” he said. “So that it's not possible for a worker to even accidentally get exposed.”
Workplaces have 30 months to implement the plan.
Exposure through environmental contamination, like spills into residential drinking water sources, is another reason the ban is necessary, said Michal Freedhoff, who runs the EPA Office for Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.
“We had spent decades cleaning the TCE out of the air, cleaning the TCE out of the water, cleaning up these sites that were contaminated with TCE,” she said. “But EPA didn't have the authority to write rules like the rule we finalized [Monday] that regulated the way TCE was made and used in the first place.”
Consumers can also be exposed through using products like furniture cleaner and glues that use TCE or PCE. Manufacturers can make the same products with different chemicals, Freedhoff said.
“Ultimately, consumers will be much safer and already have dozens of commercially available alternatives that work just as well but use safer chemicals,” she said. The EPA plans to publish resources for small businesses to help them phase out the chemicals. The agency will host a public webinar to explain the new rules on Wednesday, January 15, 2025.
Regulators and industry need to change how they approach chemical exposure, Freedhoff said.
“We shouldn't be waiting to find out what goes wrong with the way chemicals are made and used and only handle the problem after it's already been made,” she said. “Instead, we should be looking at the way chemicals are made and used from the outset.”
That means assessing new chemicals before they hit the market, Gearhart said. And if they’re dangerous?
“We either don’t let them on the market or severely restrict what they’re doing,” he said. Those changes are more protective, Gearhart said.
“When we do better policy, we can reduce harm to people and the environment,” he said. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
