Well, let's hope the legal liabilities rise big time for employers including those colleges and universities that have been failing to teach good hazard communication about the products their teachers and students use. I'm referring specifically to the industrial talc issue covered in the EPA report.
I've been retained in over 20 mesothelioma cases in which teachers, artists, and hobbyists were only exposed through using industrial talc in their ceramic products. (And more cases of workers in commercial ceramics and paint manufacture.) The first big jury award against RT Vanderbilt was in 2006 and the victim studied ceramics at Harvard and then set up a studio as a potter for a few years after graduation. I can talk about this case in detail because it went to trial. Most of the others settle with gag orders. One was a rather famous woman sculptor/professor who settled with a confidentiality agreement to keep her name out of the news because she could get more money that way to leave for her kids when she died.
You are talking about students and teachers in your own colleges and universities. You are talking about the liability of your own employers whose EH&S people need to keep up on this kind of information and provide training and information to the faculty and students. As for the talc companies, they have been fibbing about their products for over 50 years. The data was clear even in the1960s and 1970s that these industrial talcs could cause lung cancer and mesothelioma.
The legal issues caused one of the talc companies (RTV) to close their mines in upstate NY in 2009. But schools, uninformed by their EH&S departments stockpiled the talc when they heard the mines were going to close. In 2017 I still found 50# bags of the talc in two universities I was consulting at. This past year, 2021, year I was preparing a powerpoint for a faculty training at a well-known university using the photos of the art department supplied by the architect (I can't visit the sites now), the picture of the stock room showed a 50# bag of the talc.
And you should worry about this yourselves in your home renovation products. A famous major paint manufacturer added 20-40% of this talc as the filler in their indoor wall paints for 30 years. So that paint dust during renovation should not be considered safe just because it doesn't contain lead.
And the only thing that bothers the hell out of me is why EPA, in this document below, says they will look at the asbestos contaminated talcs in crayons where the exposure is probably negligible and finger print kits where exposure is small, and omits many other hobby products that are full of talc in powdered form that create heavy exposures.
Monona
-----Original Message-----
From: CHAS membership <membership**At_Symbol_Here**DCHAS.ORG>
To: DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU
Sent: Thu, Jun 30, 2022 7:49 am
Subject: [DCHAS-L] EPA Finalizes Scope for Part Two of Asbestos Risk Evaluation
I have some sympathy for EPA's new found unwillingness to accept OSHA compliance as a basis for assessing potential health risks, but it feels like significant scope creep for the agency. I know that this is a speculative question, but I wonder if there will be new employer legal liabilities that arise as a result of this trend?
- Ralph
| Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is releasing the final scope document for the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Risk |
