Joint Labor and Environmental Networks' Chemical Disaster Prevention Recommendations to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board

More than 180 preventable incidents at hazardous chemicals facilities occur each year, resulting in deaths, injuries, evacuations, shelter in place orders, environmental contamination, and facility shutdowns with permanent job loss. As of June 17, 2021, the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) had nineteen open site investigations of incidents that in total killed thirty-two people, injured at least eighty-seven people, led to thousands of residents sheltering in place or evacuating, and resulted in many millions of dollars in property damage. This document outlines twenty-one practical and measurable actions that the CSB can take to rebuild its investigative and recommendations capacity; set clear priorities for agency action; reform its governance policies; and increase public transparency and engagement. The proposed actions address incident investigations, safety studies, safety recommendations, agency governance, and public transparency and engagement.

Improving the reliability of chemical manufacturing life cycle inventory constructed using secondary data

This study proposes methods to improve data mining workflows for modeling chemical manufacturing life cycle inventory. Secondary data sources can provide valuable information about environmental releases during chemical manufacturing. However, the often facility-level nature of the data challenges their utility for modeling specific processes and can impact the quality of the resulting inventory. First, a thorough data source analysis is performed to establish data quality scoring and create filtering rules to resolve data selection issues when source and species overlaps arise. A method is then introduced to develop context-based filter rules that leverage process metadata within data sources to improve how facility air releases are attributed to specific processes and increase the technological correlation and completeness of the inventory. Finally, a sanitization method is demonstrated to improve data quality by minimizing the exclusion of confidential business information (CBI). The viability of the methods is explored using case studies of cumene and sodium hydroxide production in the United States. The attribution of air releases using process context enables more sophisticated filtering to remove unnecessary flows from the inventory. The ability to sanitize and incorporate CBI is promising because it increases the sample size, and therefore representativeness, when constructing geographically averaged inventories. Future work will focus on expanding the application of context-based data filtering to other types and sources of environmental data.

The association of the original OSHA chemical hazard communication standard with reductions in acute work injuries/illnesses in private industry and the industrial releases of chemical carcinogens

BACKGROUND

OSHA predicted the original chemical Hazard Communication Standard (HCS) would cumulatively reduce the lost workday acute injury/illness rate for exposure events by 20% over 20 years and reduce exposure to chemical carcinogens.

METHODS

JoinPoint trend software identified changes in the rate of change of BLS rates for days away from work for acute injuries/illnesses during 1992-2009 for manufacturing and nonmanufacturing industries for both chemical, noxious or allergenic injury exposure events and All other exposure events. The annual percent change in the rates was used to adjust observed numbers of cases to estimate their association with the standard. A case-control study of EPA's Toxic Release Inventory 1988-2009 data compared carcinogen and non-carcinogens' releases.

RESULTS

The study estimates that the HCS was associated with a reduction in the number of acute injuries/illnesses due to chemical injury exposure events over the background rate in the range 107,569-459,395 (Hudson method/modified BIC model) depending on whether the HCS is treated as a marginal or sole factor in the decrease. Carcinogen releases have declined at a substantially faster rate than control non-carcinogens.

DISCUSSION

The previous HCS standard was associated with significant reductions in chemical event acute injuries/illnesses and chemical carcinogen exposures.

TOXMAP: a GIS-based gateway to environmental health resources

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has an extensive collection of environmental health information, including bibliographic and technical data on hazardous chemical substances, in its TOXNET databases. TOXNET also provides access to the United States Environment Protection Agency (EPA)'s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data, which covers release of specific chemicals via air, water, and land, and by underground injection, as reported by industrial facilities around the United States. NLM has developed a Web-based geographic information system (GIS), TOXMAP , which allows users to create dynamic maps that show where TRI chemicals are released and that provides direct links to information about the chemicals in TOXNET. By extracting the associated regional geographic text terms from the displayed map (e.g., rivers, towns, county, state), TOXMAP also provides customized chemical and/or region-specific searches of NLM's bibliographic biomedical resources. This paper focuses on TOXMAP's features, data accuracy issues, challenges, user feedback techniques, and future directions.