Illogical and often unattainable remediation clean up standards are putting hundreds of drycleaners out of business and imperiling the livelihoods of thousands of drycleaners, employees and property owners. The drycleaning process creates waste water as a by product. In the past, drycleaners were encouraged and sometime mandated, to dispose of waste water from the drycleaning process into the sanitary sewers. Unbeknownst to drycleaners, and most of the public, these sewers are often cracked and in some cases even have been designed to leak. As a result, the ground around many drycleaning stores is often "contaminated" with minute levels of drycleaning solvents.
Although this contamination was usually caused by drycleaners operating according to the law, these cleaners are now responsible for clean up for the contamination. .A clean up, or a lawsuit alleging the need for clean up, is usually triggered by the sale or lease of a property. Under current : environmental laws, liability is retroactive, joint, strict and several. With such liability laws in place, people can be responsible for clean up if they simply buy a site where there is or used to be a drycleaning store, or they can be responsible for the full clean up of a property if there is a chance that they may have contributed even a tiny bit to the "contamination."
Clean up has become such a serious problem for cleaners and property owners because EPA and others, in the absence of a federal or even a state clean up standard, have set clean up levels at 5 parts per billion (ppb). This is standard set for drinking water under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). Although the 5 ppb standard is feasible and reasonable for drinking water, It is prohibitively costly and, some argue, technologically impossible, to clean up dirt .or groundwater that is not part of the drinking supply to such a level where the risk of exposure is low and the level of exposure is extremely unlikely. This illogical and some say unachievable remediation level of 5 ppb is causing many cleaners and property owners to go bankrupt.
H.R. 1711, the Small Business Remediation Act, was introduced by Representative Joe Barton (R-TX-6) in the 105th Congress, on May 22, 1997. H.R 1711 seeks to alleviate this problem by using the OSHA workplace exposure limit as a base for soil and non-drinking-water exposure limits. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) permissible exposure limit for "perc" is 100 parts per million. This is a rigorous standard required by law to protect workers adequately from any potentially harmful effects from long time exposure. H.R. 1711 asserts that if the OSHA standard protects an estimated 99 percent of those exposed to drycleaning solvents, then it makes sense to apply that standard to non drinking water groundwater or dirt which account for less than 1 percent of exposures to these solvents.
Using OSHA's standard as its base, H,.R. 1711 would set the soil and groundwater remediation standard for drycleaning solvents at one-tenth the equivalent exposure of the OSHA work place standard. Although the OSHA 100 ppm standard covers practically all exposure, H.R. 1711 would set remediation at one tenth this level to account for sensitive populations such as children and the elderly. Therefore. If the OSHA standard remains at 100 ppm, the remediation standard would be 10 ppm. It should be noted that H.R. 1711 stresses that the level for drinking water will not be changed: H.R. 1711 states explicitly that it would not affect existing federal standards under the Safe Drinking water Act.
This new standard for remediation would significantly ease the burden on cleaners. The costs of clean up to such unnecessary, impossible levels are so harsh that a lifetime of savings can be quickly eaten up and plans for a secure retirement or for handing the business to the next generation are lost. If passed, H.R 1711 will protect the community and help the neighborhood cleaner to survive. Urge Congress and your fellow cleaners to support H.R. 1711.