Can't Teach an Old Law a New Risk: The Awkward Application of Traditional Environmental Laws to the Problem of Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products in the United States’ Drinking Water Supplies

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Drinking Water ◽  
Personal Care Products ◽  
The United States ◽  
Personal Care ◽  
Water Supplies ◽  
Environmental Laws

Safe until Sorry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norah MacKendrick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Precautionary Principle ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Personal Care Products ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Framework ◽  
Personal Care ◽  
Regulatory Oversight ◽  
Agriculture And Food

This chapter outlines the United States’ uneven and contradictory relationship with the precautionary principle as a policy ethic, and, more specifically points to how the safe-until-sorry model at the regulatory level helps to explain why precaution has flourished as an individualized, consumer principle. In outlining this relationship, it documents the serious gaps in regulatory oversight in what is a vast, fractured policy framework that oversees chemicals used in agriculture and food production, and in the manufacturing of cosmetics, personal care products and consumer goods.

scholarly journals Reactive organic carbon emissions from volatile chemical products

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 5079-5100
Author(s):  
Karl M. Seltzer ◽  
Elyse Pennington ◽  
Venkatesh Rao ◽  
Benjamin N. Murphy ◽  
Madeleine Strum ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Organic Carbon ◽  
Personal Care Products ◽  
Monte Carlo Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Personal Care ◽  
Key Species ◽  
Printing Inks ◽  
Chemical Products

Abstract. Volatile chemical products (VCPs) are an increasingly important source of anthropogenic reactive organic carbon (ROC) emissions. Among these sources are everyday items, such as personal care products, general cleaners, architectural coatings, pesticides, adhesives, and printing inks. Here, we develop VCPy, a new framework to model organic emissions from VCPs throughout the United States, including spatial allocation to regional and local scales. Evaporation of a species from a VCP mixture in the VCPy framework is a function of the compound-specific physiochemical properties that govern volatilization and the timescale relevant for product evaporation. We introduce two terms to describe these processes: evaporation timescale and use timescale. Using this framework, predicted national per capita organic emissions from VCPs are 9.5 kg per person per year (6.4 kg C per person per year) for 2016, which translates to 3.05 Tg (2.06 Tg C), making VCPs a dominant source of anthropogenic organic emissions in the United States. Uncertainty associated with this framework and sensitivity to select parameters were characterized through Monte Carlo analysis, resulting in a 95 % confidence interval of national VCP emissions for 2016 of 2.61–3.53 Tg (1.76–2.38 Tg C). This nationwide total is broadly consistent with the U.S. EPA's 2017 National Emission Inventory (NEI); however, county-level and categorical estimates can differ substantially from NEI values. VCPy predicts higher VCP emissions than the NEI for approximately half of all counties, with 5 % of all counties having greater than 55 % higher emissions. Categorically, application of the VCPy framework yields higher emissions for personal care products (150 %) and paints and coatings (25 %) when compared to the NEI, whereas pesticides (−54 %) and printing inks (−13 %) feature lower emissions. An observational evaluation indicates emissions of key species from VCPs are reproduced with high fidelity using the VCPy framework (normalized mean bias of −13 % with r = 0.95). Sector-wide, the effective secondary organic aerosol yield and maximum incremental reactivity of VCPs are 5.3 % by mass and 1.58 g O3 g−1, respectively, indicating VCPs are an important, and likely to date underrepresented, source of secondary pollution in urban environments.

scholarly journals Depth of groundwater used for drinking-water supplies in the United States

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Degnan ◽  
Leon J. Kauffman ◽  
Melinda L. Erickson ◽  
Kenneth Belitz ◽  
Paul E. Stackelberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Drinking Water ◽  
The United States ◽  
Water Supplies
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