Chemicals

"Key players in the long-dormant effort to make companies pay for toxic site cleanups notched a big win in the recently enacted infrastructure bill. Now, they’re hoping for a similar payoff in the massive reconciliation package."

"Billions of these tiny plastic pellets are floating in the ocean, causing as much damage as oil spills, yet they are still not classified as hazardous".

"The EPA can shield some records regarding a former official’s role in pesticide policymaking from a conservation group, a divided Second Circuit ruled Monday. Messages between staff about how the agency should communicate its policies are protected by the deliberative process privilege, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit."

"The Biden administration’s oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico last week doesn’t just lock in decades of future drilling and greenhouse gas emissions, it also opens up more extraction in an area where chemical companies dumped tons of hazardous industrial waste."

"A smelting company has poisoned rivers, killed off boreal forest and belched out more sulfur dioxide than active volcanoes. Now it wants to produce more metal for the “green economy.”"

"ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST PARISH, La. — As white smoke wafted from a massive oil and gas refinery that sits near his backyard, Michael Coleman reminisced about the sweet days of his childhood, before sugar cane fields that stretched for miles were sold and replaced by chemical companies that wiped out the “nice little community we had here.”

"For the first time, hundreds of natural gas processing plants will have to publicly report emissions of benzene and other hazardous air pollutants."

"The quest for Congo’s cobalt, which is vital for electric vehicles and the worldwide push against climate change, is caught in an international cycle of exploitation, greed and gamesmanship."