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Superfund and toxic substances
Q: So do you think Superfund legislation in general, and the Love Canal incident in particular, were net gains or net losses for EPA?
MR. COSTLE: I think it did a lot to force us all -- the Agency, the environmental community, business and industry -- to mature in our perspective of what many environmental problems are all about. There was a legacy out there. It is one thing to deal with gross pollution you can see, where rivers catch on fire, or there's a heavy plume from a smokestack. Everybody can visually understand that. What is much harder to understand is the ubiquitous presence of toxins in the environment, where you don't know what the long-term health effects or the mechanisms are. The ordinary, reasonable man using common sense would say our job is to reduce risk by reducing exposure and by making sure that we are not just simply creating new problems that we will have to deal with later.
I'll give you a graphic illustration. Steve Gage and his R&D people wanted to build an activated carbon filtration plant at our Cincinnati laboratory, which was EPA's major drinking water lab. They needed $40 million. That was a lot of money in those days. When I asked why, they said, "We've been sampling drinking water, using newer technologies of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. We can detect things now that we couldn't a while back. We have found over 700 synthetic organic chemicals in finished drinking water, of which eleven are either known or suspected carcinogens, based on animal studies. Well over 20 or 30 percent of these chemicals are relatively new inventions." That is, they were substances that hadn't existed 20 years earlier but were just showing up now in sediments. I said, "Are you telling me that water is not safe to drink?" They said, "No. We don't know that. It will take several thousand mice, a team of technicians, and several years to analyze, chemical-by-chemical, and even then we don't have the methodology to determine what effects two or more of these chemicals interacting might produce, as opposed to each acting individually. By the same token, we are not telling you that the water is safe to drink. What we're telling you is that we don't know, and there is no scientific silver bullet that is going to give us the answer. So we want to build this laboratory to see how effectively it can strip these chemicals out of this water."
About that time, we had been having a real knock-down, drag-out fight with the American Waterworks Association, which was opposing the testing of drinking water. Water suppliers were afraid that, if they found high chemical levels, they would then be required to do something about it. Gage said, "We want to set up an activated carbon unit, treat the water, cost it out, and figure out how efficacious and costly the technology is, whether it is perhaps an affordable insurance policy against our ignorance on the larger question of whether this water is safe to drink." I immediately approved the project, even though it was a bit of a reach in the budget that year. The Reagan people canceled it, but I think EPA eventually went ahead with the testing.
This experience encapsulated for me the essence of the issues that this new generation of pollution control was going to encompass. Substances show up, not just in one place, but across many media -- air, water, land -- often simultaneously. The public health concern then becomes the total body burden: what exposure are you getting?
The experience also illustrated the dilemma with the science of risk assessment, which is both factually- and assumption-driven. It is driven as much by the assumptions that you incorporate in the risk models as it is by whatever numbers you can plug into those models. Either way, you are frequently going to be arguing about things over which reasonable men could disagree.
At the same time, we are saddled with a legal system which basically presumes that the framework for dealing with a problem is that there must be a number above which you are all right and below which you are in trouble. Since the laws are written largely by lawyers, the authors want a bright line for ease of enforcement and implementation. EPA is supposed to set a number that will both protect and reassure the public. It is clear from examples like that of the drinking water that the odds are, the minute you pick a number, it is arguably wrong. I saw this phenomenon again in setting air standards. When we convened an outside panel of scientists to advise us on air standards, we had studies that were clustered all over the lot. Even if we had done another twenty studies, we would probably still be in the same position. We had finally drawn a band, with upper and lower limits somewhere within where we thought the standard ought to be set. We then had this independent panel of scientists look at the characterization studies and agree on the upper and lower bands. Then we set the standards within those bands.
This reflects the nature of dealing with what I characterized then as the chemical revolution, dealing with uncertainties about which people are going to disagree, and where anybody will be able to quarrel with whatever number we pick. Nonetheless, we have to reduce risk somehow by reducing exposure, so we have to start somewhere.
So what is the nature of our job? It is to use common sense to reduce risk by reducing exposure, to take a harder look at new substances before we introduce them into commerce. But let's not kid ourselves that we are smart enough to know how to draw the bright line, or that there is a single scientifically sound way to do that.
In some ways it was an intellectual coming-of-age for the Agency to find itself suddenly dealing with a different universe of problems. It was never intended that we would drift away from the original environmental quality-of-life issue, but we did become preoccupied with health concerns. I don't think we are going to get a good resolution of this quantitative risk assessment debate until we face up to the reality that what we are doing is reducing risk by reducing exposure. It is legitimate to look at the cost-effectiveness of the ways in which to do that. That requires the politics to follow the facts. It is when you try to make the facts stand for more than they do that you get into long-term problems of credibility.