The Louisville Charter for Safer Chemicals: Newly Available Policy Papers and SEHN’s Longtime Participation
In May 2004, organizers in Louisville, Kentucky convened a broad coalition of grassroots, labor, health, and environmental justice groups whose common goal was to promote government policies that protect human health and the environment from exposure to unnecessary harmful chemicals. This initiated a year-long collaborative process to create the original Louisville Charter For Safer Chemicals, which served as a shared platform for change.
In the ensuing years, the original Louisville Charter has undergone revisions to more explicitly confront the chemical industry's massive contribution to the climate crisis and provide principled guidance for advancing environmental justice in communities disproportionately impacted by harmful and cumulative chemical exposure, while avoiding false solutions.
The Policy Papers that comprise the Louisville Charter are available here. The most recent revisions are papers #4, Use Scientific Data to Support Health-Protective Policies and Practices and #6, Act with Foresight to Protect Health and Prevent Pollution.
Act with Foresight to Protect Health and Prevent Pollution was originally written primarily by Nancy Myers and Katie Silberman, who were on SEHN’s staff at that time. SEHN’s science director, Ted Schettler, is the primary author of the recent revision, now available here. We’ve reprinted the Summary below.
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Chemical policies and practices in the United States – in both government and business – have failed to keep many hazardous chemicals out of widespread use, even after overwhelming evidence of exposure and harm is clear. If examined at all, early signals of toxicity are often ignored or questioned. Against the urging of environmental health and justice organizations, under the 2016 amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act it remains extremely difficult to restrict production, transportation and use of even the most harmful and most studied chemicals already in commerce.
In addition, new chemicals are commonly approved for commercial production without full independent safety testing, such as chemical-specific toxicity testing, which is not legally required in most instances. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) relies heavily on information submitted by the chemical manufacturers requesting approval of their products. Risk assessments conducted by the Agency for proposed new chemicals are primarily based on extrapolation from chemicals that are believed to be analogues, combined with modeling. Inevitably, some of the new chemicals that enter the marketplace based on this limited data turn out to be harmful to humans and the environment.
Louisville Charter for Safer Chemicals plank 6—Act with Foresight to Protect Health and Prevent Pollution—calls for action to prevent harms. The goal of this background paper is to identify criteria and considerations to guide the timing of protective actions that should be taken to safeguard communities, workers, and others from exposure to a chemical or class of chemicals before serious or irreversible harm has occurred. As the background paper for plank 4 of the Louisville Charter for Safer Chemicals (Use Scientific Data to Support Health-Protective Policies and Practices) notes, “we now understand that we have more than enough information on many types of hazardous chemicals to limit or eliminate their use now, and do not need the type of comprehensive data required for a risk assessment to take protective action.”
Chemical management policies and practices should be transformed at all levels to identify hazards proactively and require quick action to prevent exposures, when credible evidence shows that harm is likely to occur, even when information about the exact nature, scope or distribution of harm is incomplete. New policies and practices are especially needed to protect communities and populations from ongoing harm due to multiple, cumulative, and disproportionate hazardous exposures.
Regulatory agencies should have, or be linked to, programs that can detect / predict possible harm and entities that can report and develop responses to emerging problems. Most importantly, processes should not only be able to gather ‘sufficient information’ but also enable wise and timely decisions. This goes beyond data gathering and warning transmission to encompass decision making that explicitly addresses the needs of the groups and individuals most overburdened by pollution by varying the level of evidence required to take an action based on 1) the nature and distribution of the costs and impacts of being wrong, 2) the current necessity of the chemical in its application, or 3) availability of known safer alternatives.