Document 2qJ12q5VxgJpmwnmRJ9dYn6pR

(ftp Etttnbis HkShm EmQENC&ttl D. 140.481 > MAR 3 1976 ^ Testing toxic substances Four years ago, the Council on Envlraimcnti! Quality warned that hundreds of new chemicals are marketed each year without adequate testing ot their effect oa health and safety. The Nixon administration responded by Introducing a bill to control toxic substances. .. last week, sffer reputed failures of the House and Senate to agree on a , control measure, the CEQ sounded a new note of urgency. Calling for. a greatly expanded system of screening chemicals for lethal properties, the council noted that cancer takes 1,000 lives every day In the United States and that between 60 and 90 percent of cancer is authoritatively attributed to environmental causes. - Fortunately, there are signs the long congressional Impaste may be ending. Shocked by disclosures relative to the hazards of vinyl chlorides, fluorocarbons, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and other toxic substances, the public hu gained a more sophisticated attitude toward advance warning and protection. Actually, disagreement In Congress over Senate-passed Mill In 1972 and 1973 fbcuaed not on the need for controls, but oo the amount of authority - to grant the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In strong contention hu been the extent to which EPA should have the power to order pre-testing of new compounds. A leading industry spokesman argues that "really What we ought to be doing Is testing only thou things which need to be tested." | But that view sharply contradlcta the Ivory purpose- of laboratory analysis. As John R. Quarles Jr., deputy EPA administra tor, testified last December, "There are Important advantages in bring able to look across the board at all of these (sub- stancesVond then bring able to look closely Into certain ones that for one technical reason tor another raised some warning 'flag.1 ; ' . Pre-market testing Is essential to this legislation. There must be built-in safe guards to protect commercial trade secrets. But EPA ought to have the flexibility to prevent wholesale contamination from hap pening. A classic example wu dted by Russell E. Train, EPA administrator. "There are hundreds of millions of pounds of PCBs out there In the environment -- in landfills, soils, and bottom sediments of rivers, lakes and estuaries -- which will be there for years, like a delayed-action time bomb, and which we have no way to keep from moving into life systems. Including human." A strong toxic substances law could have prevented such Irreversible pollution. It Is time to move ahead. MONS 032861