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THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY released a letter to Denka Performance Elastomer last week refusing the chemical company’s request to change its assessment of a chemical called chloroprene. Denka, which owns and operates a chloroprene-emitting plant in Louisiana’s St. John the Baptist Parish, had asked the EPA to revise its 2010 assessment of the chemical, arguing that the model used to estimate human cancer risk based on experiments in which mice were exposed to chloroprene wasn’t “sufficiently rigorous.”
But the EPA wrote that it would not be changing its assessment, which found that chloroprene was “likely to be carcinogenic to humans” and set a safety threshold for inhalation based on the chemical’s effects on the nervous, immune, and respiratory systems. The letter also suggested that Denka had misused the agency’s process for making requests for correction, or RFCs.
“The RFC process is intended to provide a mechanism to correct errors where the disseminated product does not meet information quality standards,” wrote Maureen R. Gwinn, acting assistant administrator in the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, which contains the Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, the division of the agency that does independent chemical assessments. “But the Denka submission does not identify errors in the 2010 IRIS assessment.”
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