Great Lakes Binational Toxics Strategy

IMPLEMENTING THE BINATIONAL TOXICS STRATEGY
Implementation

Stakeholders Forum
November 16-17, 1998 - Chicago, Illinois

Presentation
Dave Ullrich, Acting Regional Administrator for Region 5 EPA

Comments at Binational Toxics Strategy Stakeholders Meeting

Good Morning. I’m David Ullrich the Acting Regional Administrator for Region 5 EPA.

I would like to warmly welcome you to the Second BNS Stakeholders Forum and thank you all for taking the time to attend today.

Our agenda for today is very ambitious -- and exciting, diverse, and eclectic.

After my distinguished colleague from Canada, John Mills, speaks, we will be hearing from Ron Shimizu and Gary Gulezian. Ron and Gary, representing Environment Canada and EPA respectively, head up the Canadian and U.S. government teams responding to the Binational Strategy challenges.

The governments will first be reporting out on the progress-to-date of the reduction/virtual elimination challenges under the Strategy, as well as briefly describing some of the highlights of the substance specific workgroups.

Next, we will hear from several of our Great Lakes partners about actual on-the-ground activities that they are undertaking to reduce toxics in the Great Lakes. For example, we will hear from Art Dungan of the Chlorine Institute on the Institute’s commitment to reduce mercury releases from the chlor-alkali sector.

I had the privilege to sit in on one of their recent meetings and I was very impressed with the Institute’s innovative, can-do attitude, as well as the depth and quality of the industry-government cooperation. I hope we can like to use them as a model for future partnerships.

We will also have the distinct honor and pleasure of welcoming Chuck Fox, our Assistant Administrator of Water for USEPA. Chuck has chosen the Binational Strategy Forum meeting to announce the USEPA’s new Persistent, Bioaccumulative and Toxic (PBT) Strategy.

The PBT Strategy is a national toxics reduction effort that encourages us to draw on all the tools in our toolbox -- voluntary or regulatory - -to advance toxics reductions beyond the Great Lakes Basin, to the rest of the country.

The PBT recognizes the seminal work that the Great Lakes community has been doing over the past 25 years, and explicitly seeks to build off of it through the Binational Toxics Strategy.

As Chuck will describe, the PBT Strategy will help us to meet the national reduction commitments made in the Binational Strategy for such substances as dioxins, mercury and PCBs. It will also help us with the long-range transport issues. This kind of focused, national attention is especially critical in the Great Lakes Basin, where we estimate that a large percentage of pollutants may be coming from out-of-basin sources.

After lunch break, we will break up into our substance-specific workgroups to plan our course of action over the next 3-6 months.

I know that some of you in the audience are frustrated by the pace of the reductions, or by the structure of the BNS process, or by the lack of glamour in pursuing reductions.

We understand your frustration -- we are here to listen to how we can do better. Although we are indeed making progress -- please see the Progress Report -- we know that there is always room for improvement, for positive changes.

One of the commitments that we made at the very beginning of the Strategy -- at its inception really-- was that we were committed to a full and open dialogue with our stakeholders.

This continues to be a fully transparent, participatory process. We made a commitment that we would be open to suggestions, comments, and change-- that if we are on the wrong course of action, we will make mid-course corrections. We intend to honor that commitment.

Later today, we will be asking you to fill out a "Partner Feedback Form" telling us what works, what doesn’t, and how to change things in the current structure.

Thus, one of the most important jobs here today is to be good, active, empathetic listeners. We want to receive your feedback. We want to assess where we are in meeting the challenges, to listen to you about what we are doing right, what we can do better, and what changes need to be made.

In sum, I would like to reemphasize how strongly we are committed to making this Strategy work. We have devoted and are continuing to devote substantial monetary and personnel resources to ensuring that we live up to our commitments under the Strategy.

I ask that you, too, do your part and look at this Strategy as a terrific opportunity to achieve real reductions. We ask that you be also open to participating fully, openly and actively.

As the Strategy itself states, "the Governments cannot by their actions alone achieve the goal of virtual elimination. ....all sectors of society must participate".