EPA Issues Compliance Guide for Methylene Chloride Risk

Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a compliance guide for the 2024 methylene chloride risk management rule issued under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The compliance guide will help industry, workers and other interested stakeholders understand and comply with the new regulations to prevent injuries, long-term illnesses and deaths.

In April 2024, EPA finalized a ban on most uses of methylene chloride, a dangerous chemical known to cause liver cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, brain cancer, cancer of the blood, and cancer of the central nervous system, as well as neurotoxicity, liver harm and even death. This regulation will protect people from health risks while allowing key uses to continue safely with a robust Workplace Chemical Protection Program (WCPP). The regulation went into effect on July 8, 2024.

The compliance guide helps entities understand the rule’s requirements and their responsibilities under the rule. For example, the guide provides detailed information on prohibitions in the rule and associated compliance timeframes, as well as information on the WCPP, recordkeeping requirements, downstream notifications, and other requirements applicable to those few entities that may continue use of methylene chloride with strict workplace controls.

The compliance guide is useful for entities that manufacture (including import), process, distribute in commerce, use, or dispose of methylene chloride or products containing methylene chloride. This includes the use of methylene chloride in laboratory settings. The compliance guide includes special attention to the interests and needs of small businesses.

Potentially exposed persons, such as workers and others in the workplace, may also want to refer to the compliance guide to understand the risks from methylene chloride exposure and protections that are required in the workplace. The guide will also be beneficial to consumers, community members, or anyone else that may be affected by exposure to methylene chloride.

Additionally, in June 2024, EPA released a fact sheet on the rule containing information on who is subject to the rule along with a summary of compliance timelines.

Learn more about the regulation of methylene chloride under TSCA.

If you liked this post, you’ll love our daily environmental newsletter, EnviroPolitics. It’s packed daily with the latest news, commentary, and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond. Please do not take our word for it, try it free for an entire month. No obligation.

EPA Issues Compliance Guide for Methylene Chloride Risk Read More »

Enviro-Events Calendar – ANJEC 2024 Environmental Congress

2024 Environmental Congress
Friday, September 27th
9am-4pm
Rowan University
Burlington Campus, Votta Hall
Mt. Laurel NJ

Visit our 2024 Environmental Congress website.

Want to learn the latest environmental/strategies/techniques? 

Workshop topics include: Zoning, Wildlife Management, Invasive Plants, Stormwater Management, Waste Reduction, Offshore Wind, Environmental Legislation, Greenways, Municipal Ordinances, Energy Master Plan, and more.  

Come join Featured Speaker NJDEP Commissioner Shawn LaTourette and Keynote Speaker NJ State Climatologist David Robinson and learn how New Jersey is positioning itself to weather climate change.

Join us at ANJEC’s 51st Environmental Congress!

If you liked this post, you’ll love our daily environmental newsletter, EnviroPolitics. It’s packed daily with the latest news, commentary, and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond. Please do not take our word for it, try it free for an entire month. No obligation.

Enviro-Events Calendar – ANJEC 2024 Environmental Congress Read More »

Appeals court blocks attempt to block methane pollution rules

From the Clean Air Council (Philadelphia)

PENNSYLVANIA (July 9, 2024) – Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit blocked the attempt by several states, along with oil and gas trade associations, to stay, or block, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) methane standards for the oil and gas industry.

Methane, more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the short term, is a critical target for climate pollution emissions reduction efforts. Human-caused methane emissions currently account for about 30 percent of global warming, with the oil and gas industry being one of the largest sources of methane emissions.

The EPA standards would prevent millions of tons of climate warming methane from being emitted. In Pennsylvania, nearly 2 million residents live in proximity to oil and gas operations.

Matt Walker, Clean Air Council Advocacy Director, issued the following statement:

“The court’s decision ensures that EPA’s much-needed methane standards can continue to move forward, better protecting the health of Pennsylvania residents living close to oil and gas operations, and cutting methane at a time when our country is experiencing the dire effects of climate change.”

If you liked this post, you’ll love our daily environmental newsletter, EnviroPolitics. It’s packed daily with the latest news, commentary, and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond. Please do not take our word for it, try it free for an entire month. No obligation.

Appeals court blocks attempt to block methane pollution rules Read More »

In Louisiana, a natural gas fortress rises on sinking land

An aerial view of the ongoing construction at the Plaquemines LNG export facility in Port Sulphur, La.


By Steven Mufson, The Washington Post

PLAQUEMINES PARISH, La. — The marshes that blanket this pancake-flat parish south of New Orleans stretch for miles, strewn with small streams that flow into the Gulf of Mexico. A lone four-lane road goes south past a Navy air base, an idle industrial site, a coal export terminal and a handful of small storm-battered communities.

Then, suddenly, a gigantic facility rises from the wetlands. Cranes dot the skyline. They hover over crews that are installing a jumble of pipes, pumps, storage tanks and two 720-megawatt power plants — equipment needed to freeze natural gas into a liquid form so it can be shipped around the world.

It might seem like a risky location for a $21 billion liquefied natural gas plant, given this region’s ferocious hurricanes and sea levels that are rising faster than almost anywhere else on the planet. But the company building this plant, Arlington, Va.-based Venture Global, says it has an answer to these threats: a 26-foot-high steel sea wall that surrounds the 632-acre site, twice the size of Washington’s National Mall.

An $80 million reconstruction project of the Shell Island barrier island, pictured, at the southern end of Barataria Bay has added several hundred acres of new land off the coast of Plaquemines Parish. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The fortress highlights a crucial tension for this region of the country. The sea is rising here and the land is rapidly sinking, in large part driven by decades of oil and gas drilling and the planet-warming emissions that come from the burning of those fossil fuels. That is accelerating the destruction of wetlands, which serve as a critical barrier, and speeding up flooding across the coast, often with less advantaged communities most vulnerable.

Read the full story here

In Louisiana, a natural gas fortress rises on sinking land Read More »

UPDATE: NJ political power broker Norcross pleads not guilty

A close-up portrait of George Norcross, who wears a suit and looks off to the side, smiling slightly.
Though he never held elective office, George E. Norcross III gained notoriety as a powerful Democratic fund-raiser. Credit…Hannah Beier for The New York Times


By Jeremy Roebuck, Philadelphia Inquirer, July 9, 2024, 11:16 a.m.

George E. Norcross III entered a not guilty plea Tuesday morning to racketeering charges alleging he illegally muscled rivals out of property deals in Camden to take advantage of millions of dollars in state tax breaks.

Smiling as he arrived in Mercer County court, the 68-year-old Democratic power broker sat silently throughout a brief hearing before Judge Peter E. Warshaw as his attorney, Michael Critchley, entered his plea.

Repeatedly during the proceedings, Norcross turned toward news media cameras arrayed in the jury box offering a clenched smile.

In a statement, Critchley maintained his client had done nothing wrong and that he expects Norcross will be fully exonerated.

“As will be shown, everything he and his codefendants did was for the benefit of the city of Camden and Cooper University Health Care,” the attorney said, adding: “Anyone reviewing the indictment will see these are charges in search of a crime.”

Read the full story here

Related: Norcross, co-defendants plead not guilty to corruption allegations (Politico)

Earlier story below


By Elise Young, New York Times July 9, 2024, 3:00 a.m. ET

George E. Norcross III, a longtime kingmaker in New Jersey politics, is scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday morning to face charges that he manipulated property deals to benefit from millions of dollars in government tax breaks.

Mr. Norcross and five co-defendants were named in a 13-count racketeering indictment unsealed last month. They are accused of unlawfully obtaining property and development rights along the Delaware River waterfront of Camden, a Philadelphia suburb that for decades ranked among the nation’s poorest and most violent cities.

Mr. Norcross, 68, a career insurance executive, emerged as a powerful Democratic fund-raiser in the early 1990s, without ever holding elective office. Backed by a network of political allies whom he helped send to the state legislature, Mr. Norcross cast himself as Camden’s savior. Upon a landscape of industrial blight, he envisioned gleaming campuses for the life sciences, biotechnology and manufacturing industries in the city of his birth.

At the heart of Mr. Norcross’s advocacy, though, wasn’t high-minded civic duty, but a 12-year scheme of personal greed, according to Matthew J. Platkin, the New Jersey attorney general. Together, the defendants conspired to influence government officials, develop the Camden waterfront and collect government-issued tax breaks that shaved millions of dollars off project costs, state prosecutors have said.

Also charged with racketeering in the first degree were: Mr. Norcross’s brother, Philip A. Norcross, 61, of Philadelphia, the chief executive of a Camden-based law firm; Dana L. Redd, 56, of Sicklerville, N.J., a former Camden mayor; William M. Tambussi, 66, of Brigantine, N.J., George Norcross’s longtime personal lawyer; Sidney R. Brown, 67, of Philadelphia, the chief executive of NFI, a trucking and logistics company; and John J. O’Donnell, 61, of Newtown, Pa., an executive of the Michaels Organization, a residential development company.

The crime is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Read the full story here –

This is a developing story and will be updated later

If you liked this post, you’ll love our daily environmental newsletter, EnviroPolitics. It’s packed daily with the latest news, commentary, and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond. Please do not take our word for it, try it free for an entire month. No obligation.

UPDATE: NJ political power broker Norcross pleads not guilty Read More »

A greener Avenue of the Arts is in the works for Philadelphia

Starting with Broad Street in 2026, a decadelong $100-million project is expected to be set in motion
Looking north to City Hall, a digital rendering from OJB Landscape Architecture shows the proposed new Avenue of the Arts streetscape between Pine and Spruce Streets.

By Peter Dobrin, Philadelphia Inquirer,  Jul 9, 2024

A greener, art-infused streetscape is expected to debut on a single block of South Broad Street in 2026 — setting the stage for a more ambitious, decadelong $100-million makeover of the entire stretch of Avenue of the Arts south.

“It’s moving along, it’s going to happen,” said Avenue of the Arts, Inc. executive director Laura Burkhardt of the beautification initiative, to be announced Tuesday.

More than three decades have passed since Broad Street from City Hall to Washington Avenue was branded as the Avenue of the Arts, bringing retro light poles, planters, and checkerboard pavers along with hundreds of millions of dollars in new arts facilities.

Now (left) and Render (below, right)

A perspective of the proposed streetscape looking north on Broad Street from a spot in front of Dorrance Hamilton Hall at the former University of the Arts. The Broad Street overhang of the Kimmel Center is seen on the left.

The new streetscape proposes next-generation concepts like traffic-calming devices and lush plantings, but the overarching objective is the same as the first:

“To get more people excited about South Broad and to attract more economic development,” said Burkhardt. “That’s the goal — to make it more beautiful and livable, to support the arts and to give people a reason to come down and visit.”

Read the full story here

If you liked this post, you’ll love our daily environmental newsletter, EnviroPolitics. It’s packed daily with the latest news, commentary, and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond. Please do not take our word for it, try it free for an entire month. No obligation.

A greener Avenue of the Arts is in the works for Philadelphia Read More »