Sixteen AGs Filed Comments Criticizing EPA’s Supplemental Analysis for Risk Evaluation of 1,4-Dioxane

DECEMBER 10, 2020

New York Attorney General Letitia James led a coalition of 16 attorneys general in submitting comments on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) supplemental analysis for its risk evaluation of 1,4-dioxane, a widely used solvent that is one of 10 high-priority substances selected by the agency for review following the 2016 Lautenberg amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The AGs raised serious concerns with the EPA’s unexpected decision to expand the scope of the evaluation to include eight consumer applications in which 1,4-dioxane occurs as a byproduct at potentially harmful concentrations, and the agency’s conclusion that none of these uses pose an unreasonable health risk. The agency’s decision appeared to have been made at the urging of the American Cleaning Institute and the Grocery Manufacturers Association for the explicit purpose of preempting state regulations to protect consumers from exposure to 1,4-dioxane. The attorneys general also called attention to several errors that the EPA made in its initial draft risk evaluation—including failing to analyze risks to high-exposure subpopulations, excluding numerous exposure pathways and improperly assuming universal use of personal protective equipment—that the agency failed to correct and threaten to “fatally compromise the agency’s final risk evaluation and any subsequent risk management of 1,4-dioxane.”