Talking points for the Barton bill

Information from FLARE

Thousands of small businesses, jobs, personal savings, and livelihoods are threatened by illogical clean up standards for drycleaning solvents.

In the past, drycleaners were encouraged, and sometimes mandated, to dispose of waste water from the drycleaning process into the sanitary sewers. 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 "contaminated" with minute levels of drycleaning solvents.

Although it goes against the fundamental principles of American law, retroactive, strict, joint and several liability is part of current environmental law. As a result of this twisting of the legal system, all potentially involved parties are liable for clean up, regardless of actual degree of contribution to contamination, regardless of whether the contamination was caused by mandated practices (eg: waste water disposal in sewers) and regardless of any logic. (Those who unknowingly buy property contaminated by a previous owner are liable.)

Clean up is such a serious problem because EPA and others, in the absence of a federal clean up standard, have set clean up levels at 5 parts per billion (ppb). This is a standard set for drinking water under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA).

It is prohibitively costly and, some argue, technologically impossible, to clean up to such a level.

The clean up, in most of these cases, is for soil and non-drinking water groundwater which account for less than 1 percent of all exposures to drycleaning solvents. The soil in question is usually under the asphalt of the drycleaning store's parking lot where exposure is highly unlikely.

It is estimated that 99 percent of exposure to drycleaning solvent occurs in the work place. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) permissible exposure limit for perchloroethylene, the most common solvent, is 100 parts per million. This is a strict limit designed to fully protect those exposed to drycleaning solvents on a long term, daily basis.

Using OSHA's standard as its base, H.R 1711 would set the soil and non-drinking water groundwater remediation standard for drycleaning solvents at one-tenth the equivalent exposure of the OSHA work place standard. This lower level is designed to account for sensitive populations such as children and the elderly.

H.R. 1711 would not affect existing federal standards under the Safe Drinking Water Act. H.R. 1711 would save businesses, jobs and livelihoods. It would allow resources to go to those sites where clean up is actually needed.

H.R. 1711 needs cosponsors.

H.R 1711 NEEDS YOUR VOTE!