Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz

“You have this chemical that is causing severe health risks to workers, consumers and surrounding communities and those risks have not been adequately regulated under any other law.”

“The rule allows more than 50 percent of current methylene chloride production and use to continue, subject only to workplace exposure limits that EPA lacks the resources to enforce and that do nothing for the communities where methylene chloride is released.”

“We have an agricultural system where everybody eats and everybody wears clothes made from cotton, but the people who pay the cost for that are overwhelmingly immigrant and Latino farmworkers who are just bearing unbelievable harm. Our society tolerates levels of risk in California’s Central Valley that it would never tolerate in the neighborhoods that ring Central Park. That has everything to do with race and class. And it is completely unacceptable.”

“There is an incredibly overwhelming body of evidence on this that has been accepted by scientists across the globe, and the EPA’s decision really placed it at odds with the best available science.”

"This is the broadest and most direct assault on the 2016 TSCA amendments since they were passed."

“The initial paraquat risk assessment was scientifically and legally baseless. The key question now is whether EPA uses this new opportunity to follow the science and protect the public from this incredibly dangerous pesticide.”

"None of the first 10 risk evaluations satisfied EPA’s statutory obligations or provided a complete and accurate picture of the chemicals’ true risks."

"There is this kind of circular nature of this contamination. There's very little that we have discovered to effectively manage the PFAS-contaminated waste that we are surrounded by."

"The EPA has broad authority under the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Air Act and other laws to aggressively regulate PFAS, and it will be important for this administration to bring all of that authority to bear on this problem."

"It's a logistical nightmare."