Oil Shockwave

Peak oil is the radio sitting on the edge of the bathtub that Americans are soaking in (sorry, can’t take credit for that one – I read it in an old Tom Robbins novel, which covered a lot of the same ground as “The DaVinci Code” but had a lot more fun doing it). Who knows when the rude awakening is going to occur, but there is some foreshadowing of it in “Oil Shockwave”, a wargame recently concluded by the National Commission on Energy Policy (NCEP) and Securing America's Future Energy (SAFE). The story about it can be found at TPMCafé.

The wargame explored what would happen in the coming years resulting from minor disruptions in the global oil supply. The scenarios considered were “. . .absolutely not alarmist; they’re realistic.” These included ethnic unrest in Nigeria, an al-Qaeda attack on a natural gas facility in Saudi Arabia and at the oil terminal in Valdez, Alaska, and further attacks against expatriate workers in Saudi Arabia that results in a mass exodus, hamstringing oil production.

As the scenario played out, the price of a barrel of oil leapt to $80 a barrel then $100, then $150. Price per gallon broke $5, and the cost to fill up your mid-size SUV broke $100. The economic effects were devastating -- more than 2 million jobs lost in 2007 (largest single yearly loss since 1945), average annual gas costs per household spiking to $5,800 a year, a recession, and 28 percent drop in the S&P 500. Not a pretty picture.

The participants in this exercise, Republican and Democrat alike agreed that what’s needed is some real leadership to address this vulnerability to America’s well-being.

From my perspective, it’s ok if the President, Vice-President and all of their little neocon buddies want to be delusional about this issue and jump into the void of oil shock. But we don’t have to let them take us with them.

The oil wars are happening now, only they are being fought with financial statements rather than smart bombs. While it’s good that someone is talking about this issue, the NCEP’s recommendations for enhancing oil security are fairly pedestrian, including “increasing and diversifying world oil production while expanding the global network of strategic petroleum reserves”, strengthening automobile fuel efficiency standards, promoting diesel and hybrid vehicle production, and “developing non-petroleum transportation fuel alternatives, particularly ethanol and clean bio-diesel from waste products and biomass”.

NCEP estimates its recommendations could reduce U.S. oil consumption in 2025 by 10-15 percent or 3-5 million barrels per day. Whether or not that is meaningful remains to be seen. However, it’s flawed from a lifecycle perspective, overstating the potential benefits; for example, ethanol production from corn consumes natural gas in the form of fertilizer. Grain-produced ethanol fuel would probably flunk the sustainability test if it was evaluated fairly with lifecycle analysis. Higher natural gas consumption comes with its own set of problems. And, NCEP’s proposals had not a word about promoting urban mass transit or reversing sprawl.

More information on the oil shockwave exercise can be found here.

Environmental Health Tools – Open Access Journals from biomedcentral.com and PLOS

In addition to the workhorse Environmental Health Perspectives, there are some other open access resources for environmental health information. Two of these are biomedcentral.com and the Public Library of Science (PLOS). Biomedcentral.com is the home of journals such as Environmental Health: A Global Access Science Source, Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, and Population Health Metrics. The journals list can be browsed here.

The Public Library of Science sponsors four journals on biology, medicine, genetics and computational biology. Since the topics are a bit broader, it’s not as easy to pull out information related to environmental health. However you can run across papers such as this one, "Pathways to “Evidence-Informed” Policy and Practice: A Framework for Action", by Shelley Bowen and Anthony Zwi, of the School of Public Health at the University of New South Wales and published in the Public Library of Medicine. This paper may provide a framework for better understanding the concept of “manufactured uncertainty”, which could lead to strategies for counteracting it.

The Enemy of My Enemy

TCE contamination in soil and groundwater seems to have garnered the attention of several representatives in Congress. According to the TCE Blog, it appears to have started with Rep. Sue Kelly (R, NY), responding to concerns of constituents living near the Hopewell Precision site. I can’t locate the letter right now (based on the chronology, it appears to have been written this month), but Rep. Kelly wrote EPA back in January about this issue, complaining about the inconsistency in health-based criteria for TCE across USEPA regions.

Several other legislators appear to have signed on to this issue. According to the TCE Blog, Barbara Boxer (D, CA) wrote to the National Academy of Sciences (TCE Blog has excerpts from her letter – a copy doesn’t appear on her web site). Others who, according to the TCE Blog, reportedly have signed Rep. Kelly’s letter include Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D, NY) , Jerald Nadler (D, NY), Dennis Kucinich (D, OH), Sheila Jackson-Lee (D, TX) (nothing yet on their web sites about TCE), Maurice Hinchey (D, NY), and Rep. Katherine Harris (R, FL).

Katherine Harris? Yeah, that Katherine Harris, remember? Apparently she has constituents living near a contaminated site undergoing voluntary action under the oversight of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and they aren’t satisfied with the progress of the work. So, as a good legislator does, she’s helping them out.

I’m glad to see this kind of constituent services by our representatives, but the conventional wisdom would have had her kind of Republican supporting a strong economy, healthy business climate, regulatory relief, and “sound science”, over hazardous waste cleanup, and telling her constituents to suck it in and get over it. Wonders never cease.

Hey, lefty political bloggers, come and get it. This is more your territory than mine.

Sugar is No. 1

The leading source of calories in the typical American diet may now be from soft drinks and other sweetened beverages, according to preliminary results reported by the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. This study observed that over two-thirds of the respondents to the 1999-2000 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) reported drinking enough soda and/or sweet drinks to provide them with a greater proportion of daily calories than any other food. In addition, the obesity rate was higher among these sweet drink consumers.

Our national tendency to replace water, fruit juices and milk with soft drinks and fruit-flavored beverages, which are devoid of any nutritional value, has occurred over the past three decades. This may be an example of what, in another context, Jared Diamond calls "creeping normalcy" or “landscape amnesia”, or forgetting how different your surroundings were 10, 20 or even 50 years ago because the changes are so gradual that our baseline for what’s considered “normal” also shift imperceptibly.

While this may be welcome news to food manufacturers and their shareholders, it’s scarcely good news that much of our diet has been replaced by empty calories.

At least there shouldn’t be a lot of dioxins associated with them.

No Surprise Here

My statement that PCE use in dry cleaning is probably the most significant source of human exposure for this compound drew the attention of the TCE Blog. They wondered about the contribution from emissions from industrial facilities:

Is that claim true (that dry cleaning is probably the most significant source of human exposure for this compound)? What about PCE used by manufacturers? We have no idea how these exposures compare, just wondering aloud for now because the comment struck us.

This is something that has been known for a long time, based on work from the EPA’s Total Exposure Assessment Methodology (TEAM) study, conducted in the 1980s. The TEAM study was probably some of the best exposure research conducted at the time (in some ways, still is). It questioned the conventional wisdom regarding exposures and health risks from toxic air pollutants, concluding that smoking and passive smoking, visiting the dry cleaners, refueling a motor vehicle, mobile source emissions and various occupations, were more significant contributors to personal exposure to volatile organic compounds than residential proximity to emissions from chemical plants, petroleum refineries, petrochemical plants, drycleaners and service stations. The EPA version of the report is hard to find, but the report on the work in California can be found here.

Besides, you just have to take one look at the TOXMAP to see that the some 27,000 dry cleaners more readily bring people into contact with PCE than industrial emission sources. Finally, if that isn’t convincing, look at this study which measured the exposures of the neighbors of dry cleaners.

Hopefully this answered the mail.

Comparative Risks with Fish Farming

From reading David Niewart, I learn that the Bush administration proposes to massively expand the practice of fish farming to waters as far as 200 miles offshore. David catalogs the impacts associated with fish farming: accumulation of chemical contaminants into the human foodchain; parasite infestations, water quality impacts, and the most significant problem, accidental escapes (or deliberate releases) of farmed fish which represent introductions of exotic species potentially affecting wild populations. Incidentally, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) has a web page addressing the invasive threat of Atlantic salmon. A recent overview of the impacts of fish farming is summarized in this ADFG white paper. According to this white paper, the state of Alaska banned finfish farming in 1990 in order to protect wild stocks from disease, pollution and escaped farm fish displacing wild fish.

This is a tough balancing act. Depletion of wild fisheries is viewed as one of the outstanding problems for nature and ecosystem services, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. At the same time, The Institute of Medicine and the American Heart Association recommend consumption of fish at least twice a week to attain the benefits associated with intake of the omega-3 fatty acids, which are important for cardiac health. Perhaps fish farming, if it is done in a sustainable manner (to the extent that a feedlot can be sustainable) with best management practices, could reduce pressures on ocean fisheries while giving people the health benefits of fish consumption. That’s admittedly a big if.

With regard to the human foodchain issue, recent studies reported that concentrations of contaminants including dioxins, PCBs, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and pesticides such as toxaphene and dieldrin are significantly higher in farm-raised salmon than in wild Pacific salmon. A risk assessment published last month in Environmental Health Perspectives concluded that most farmed salmon should be consumed at rates of < 10 meals/month to limit exposure of dioxin-like compounds (DLC) to the Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) of 1 pg/kg-day (normalized to TCDD - TEQ) published by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Consumption by an adult of farmed salmon at rates that limit DLC intake to 1 pg /kg-day results in a 100% incremental increase over background DLC exposure – where background is considered to be around 65 pg/day, normalized to TCDD. So, the conclusions from this study were that modest consumption of farmed salmon contaminated with DLCs potentially raises human exposure levels above the lower end of the WHO TDI, and considerably above background intake levels for adults in the United States. EPA’s draft dioxin reassessment (currently under review by the National Academy of Sciences) suggests that the upper bound cancer risk associated with 1 pg/kg-day DLC intake could be 1 in one thousand. This is just the estimated risk occurring from fish ingestion alone - not the only source of dioxin intake in humans, and not the only contaminant found in farmed salmon. While the EPA’s dioxin reassessment is controversial and not yet finalized, it was apparently sufficient as a basis for the NAS to look in to approaches to reduce dietary exposures to DLCs.

Those approaches were: reducing introduction of DLCs into the animal production system; reducing DLCs in human foods and modifying food-consumption patterns to reduce intake of foods higher in DLCs (particularly animal fats). The range of options explored included traditional regulatory mechanisms; collaborative and voluntary mechanisms; subsidies and economic incentives; and information and education interventions. Most of these would have institutional hurdles to overcome (food producers will not want to be regulated), but reducing exposure through changing dietary preferences is something that, for many people, could happen right now (healthier diets, particularly ones low in animal fat also could reduce DLC exposure). With regard to changing dietary preferences, the authors of the salmon risk assessment conclude:

Our data provide opportunities to reduce DLC intake and still gain the benefits of ingestion of omega-3 fatty acids by choosing fish, including most wild salmon, that have lower concentrations of DLCs or by eating other foods, such as various nuts, oils, and vegetables that are high in these healthy fats.

Of course the problem there is that wild salmon populations are declining, so while eating wild salmon may be precautionary for reducing DLC exposure, it wouldn’t be precautionary for preserving biodiversity. If it’s important to have salmon in the diet, it may still be worth exploring the possibility of being able to farm salmon in a sustainable manner.

More PCE Phase-Out News

Tuxedo rental company Selix Formalwear settled a lawsuit last week with Oakland-based Center for Environmental Health (CEH) requiring the firm to phase out use of PCE at its Hayward, California facility. The settlement resulted from a March 2004 lawsuit that raised concerns about Selix workers being exposed to potentially cancer-causing PCE emissions. According to CEH, Selix has agreed to eliminate one of its two PCE cleaners by mid-2006, and eliminate all PCE emissions from the facility by the end of 2008.

Until that date, the company will place statements warning that PCE is "known to cause cancer" on dry cleaning bags (note: they should have been doing this already – PCE is listed under Proposition 65 - maybe this was a Prop 65 suit; I'm still trying to find the legal opinion), in mailings to neighbors, and at a noticeable location at the Hayward facility.

Selix wasn’t returning calls to the press, which was a bit strange. This would have been a great opportunity for them to reframe this as a forward-looking green move on their part, even if they had to be clubbed into it through litigation.

Worth Repeating

Left Coaster is surveying its readers about whether it’s acceptable to recycle content (with links and attribution of course) from other blogs, without adding your own commentary. One thought I had was that, from a political viewpoint, it was ok in order to give exposure to an important message or to create the echo chamber.

Which leads me to a public service announcement from my favorite urban planner, James Howard Kunstler. From a recent Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle:

"The [New York] Times's star columnist Thomas Friedman is making hay this season with his new book, The World is Flat, about the global economy. His book asserts that current trends will continue indefinitely -- China will continue to manufacture ever more of America's household products, Americans will continue to enjoy cash-out home equity loans to buy plastic patio chairs made in China, WalMart will keep running its warehouse-on-wheels at a thumping great profit, and all impediments to global trade will be vanquished by telemarketing, computer technology, and confident corporate can-do spirits. I am tempted to ask how Friedman manages to type on a laptop with his head so far up his ass, but this blog is dedicated, above all, to a high-minded brand of politeness so we'll just say that he is not paying attention to a gathering global energy shitstorm that is going to change absolutely everything -- including global economic relations which pundits foolishly maintain to be permanent conditions of life.

"Here in the States, the price of a barrel of oil is back over $55 and we are only one week into the summer vacation driving season. President Bush is running a scam on the public by pretending to push Congress to act on an energy bill that offers nothing to realistically address the nation's oil addiction and, especially, its car dependency. He doesn't dare, I suppose, because he must know that the American economy is about little more than car dependency. But just watch: as the price for a barrel of oil heads north past $60, Bush's abject leadership failure will become self-evident and the public mood will appear to shift overnight. The oval office will become a very lonely place indeed by this coming fall, and its occupant will have three long and terrible years left to suffer there."

Thanks to James Wolcott for the tip.

Postscript (June 9): here's a link to Kevin Drum's series on peak oil, in a handy place where I will be able to find it again.

Making Dust Safer

Recall that some months ago, I said that there isn’t a comprehensive program for helping people reduce their personal exposure to persistent organic pollutants or POPs. In the meantime, I’ve run into some useful resources that may represent part of an answer. From Environmental Health News, I found the “Sick of Dust” report, an indoor exposure study sponsored by the Safer Products Project, a collaboration of several state environmental groups. House dust samples vacuumed up from several residences across the U.S. were composited and analyzed for brominated diphenyl ethers, indoor-use pesticides, phthalates, substituted phenolic compounds, fluorinated organic compounds and organotins. These compounds are released in small quantities from ordinary consumer products to become incorporated into ordinary house dust.

The exposure study was interesting (others are also looking into house dust as an indicator of potential exposure – see here and here), but what I really wanted to write about was the ranking of manufacturers and retailers who are taking steps of making their products more friendly from an environmental health perspective, including the elimination of chemicals ranked for priority action by the OSPAR Commission:

Ikea, the furniture manufacturer, gets a gold star from the Safer Products Project for eliminating brominated fire retardants from their product line, and for signing the Safer Chemicals Pledge.

Interface, the carpet manufacturer, gets a gold star for developing a closed-loop product cycle for its carpeting (customers return to Interface carpeting that is at the end of its design life, for recycling) that is not based on petrochemicals.

There are others that don’t fare so well, as you can see from the site. The key point is that people who wish to use their power as purchasers to mold corporate behavior regarding chemical use have a tool for aiding their buying decisions. Nothing to get too excited over, because we have a long way to go, but it’s a start. For a sense of what that path looks like, check in to the Clean Production Action site, which has a great graphic showing the progression from clean processes, to clean products, to closed-loop systems to the bio-based society.

Food Poisoning

Here’s a study in contrasts. First, another single-topic blog I’ve just run across “Bitter Greens Journal”, a running critique on industrial agriculture, which cites this review discussing how caloric inputs to conventional agriculture, food processing and distribution are substantially greater than the caloric value of the foods themselves. Second, this recent article in USA Today about how restaurants are trying to increase market share with massively caloric and fatty menu items, no doubt enormously popular with massive people. There couldn’t be a more perfect positive synergistic feedback loop of growing the gross domestic product, while depleting resources and threatening public health.

A few slices from the USA Today article:

Burger King went enormous. Since its March introduction of the Enormous Omelet Sandwich — with two slices of cheese, two eggs, three strips of bacon, and a sausage patty — breakfast sales have jumped 20%, says Denny Marie Post, chief concept officer. Never mind its 730 calories and 47 grams of fat.

At the same time, she says, BK sells about 100 Whoppers for every Veggie Burger and roughly 10 Whoppers for every salad. Its fried chicken sandwiches outsell grilled chicken about 10 to 1, she says.

"When someone has $5 to spend for lunch," she says, "it's hard to take the risk of buying something that might not be satisfying."

Pizza Hut got even cheesier. The new triple-cheese 3Cheese Stuffed Crust Pizza is such a hit that it took in 20% of the chain's business within four days of introduction, says Tom James, marketing chief. The chain sells roughly one lower-calorie Fit N' Delicious pizza for every 100 pan pizzas, he estimates.

Ruby Tuesday went colossal. Less than two years ago, Ruby Tuesday led the industry by posting trans fat information on menus. Now the chain's menus no longer mention trans fat, even though it still uses trans-fat-free canola oil. The latest menu change has been to rename its Colossal Burger — two half-pound burgers on a triple-decker bun — the Ultimate Colossal Burger to try to keep up with the grandiose names at the competition. "That's what people want," says Rick Johnson, senior vice president.

IHOP is stuffing food. The pancake chain is converting its limited-time promotion of Stuffed French Toast — filled with sweetened cream cheese — into a full-time nationwide menu item. The promotion had been brought back three times in two years. As for healthier foods, they're barely a blip. Less than 1% of guests "show any meaningful interest" in better-for-you foods, says John Koch, product vice president.

Ben & Jerry's has wider cones. The ice cream chain has dropped all three of its no-carb ice cream flavors and introduced a wider cone that's made to hold two scoops of ice cream instead of one. "We don't have better-for-you customers," says David Stever, marketing director. "We have full-fat customers who may feel guilty once in a great while."

KFC is fried, again. The chicken chain is testing plans to bring back the Kentucky Fried Chicken name, along with new menu items linked to its Southern roots. Among them: candied yams, spicy gravy and sweet potato pie. It's also extending its popular line of chicken Snacker sandwiches to sausage.

"We call it Southern-inspired comfort food," says Gregg Dedrick, KFC president. After months of consumer testing, these were the kinds of foods people wanted, he says.

Andy Pudzer of CKE Enterprises, the creator of the 1,420 calorie Monster Thickburger sold at Hardee’s and Carl’s Junior, looks at it this way:

"These products sell better than health-conscious products," he says. "We don't tell consumers what they want. They tell us."

And if the consumers said they wanted cyanide and white arsenic. . . ?

Perhaps you can’t really fault the restaurant industry for playing to peoples’ hindbrains by focusing on palatability that emphasizes primordial taste preferences for sugar, salt and fat. Obesity lawsuits against fast food vendors may be satisfying to the progressive-minded, but at some level most people must have even a dim awareness that not eating clean has long-term health consequences. We’re not talking about undesirable product characteristics that are not readily apparent, such as the health risks potentially associated with brominated fire retardants or phthalates. The federal government is saying clearly to people that:

[g]ood nutrition is vital to good health and is absolutely essential for the healthy growth and development of children and adolescents. Major causes of morbidity and mortality in the United States are related to poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle.

Lifestyle-related morbidity and mortality is becoming a looming social problem, with healthcare insurance for more Americans descending into crisis. It’s not solvable through market forces, since the restaurant and food processing industries currently don’t bear any of the healthcare costs associated with consumption of its products. But imagine the price for a Monster Thickburger if it included the costs for its contribution to coronary bypasses performed in this country. After that, lunch consisting of a grilled chicken breast with some raw veggies, an apple and a couple of rye crackers would start looking pretty good for your $5.

Phillip Longman published an interesting article in Washington Monthly a couple of years ago, suggesting that the money being used to prop up benefits in a healthcare system that is already financially unsustainable, instead be used to bribe people into acting preventively and taking better care of themselves (sign me up!). The entire article provides an interesting, and from my viewpoint, a sensible perspective on where our healthcare system needs to be heading – it’s well worth reading.

Have to go now, I got to get on my bike and head over to the gym.

Postscript: it sounds like many public health officials are now distancing themselves from the CDC report which concluded that overweight wasn’t associated with significantly increased health risks. Edited slightly from the original to note that food industries other than restaurants don't bear any of the healthcare costs associated with the consumption of low nutritional value foods.

Supporting the Troops?

This isn’t really off-topic, because health effects are associated with the stress from job uncertainty. In today’s Washington Post, we learn that service personnel returning from overseas are having difficulty finding jobs – even Reserve and Guard personnel, who you would have thought should have had their jobs held open for them.

Nearly every day he was in Iraq, Army Staff Sgt. Steven Cummings would get so shaken by mortar round explosions that, even now, a year after his return home, he drops to the ground at the crackle of lightning.

Iraq had a big impact on Cummings in another way _ his finances. In his absence, his wife took out two mortgages on their home in Milan, Mich. They fell $15,000 in debt, as the pay Cummings earned during his 14 months overseas was less than he had made as a civilian electrical controls engineer.

Looking back, those almost seem like the good times.

Cummings has been laid off from two jobs in the year since he left Iraq. While other reasons were given for the layoffs, Cummings thinks both were related to his duty in the Michigan National Guard and the time off it requires.

Like some other veterans who have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq, he is struggling to find work.

"I don't know what I'm going to do now. I'm in the exact position I was when I came back from Iraq," said Cummings, a father of two. "I'm 50 years old and I have a mortgage payment due. I'm tired of it."

Although many employers take pride in hiring veterans and make up any pay an employee lost while deployed, some are reluctant to hire reservists and Guard members who might have to deploy again, said Bill Gaul, chief officer at Destiny Group, an online organization that seeks to match employers and veterans.

Almost 490,000 troops from the Guard and reserve have mobilized since Sept. 11, 2001, overseas or for duty in-country. Of those, about 320,000 have completed their mobilization.

The number of unemployed Guard members and reservists who served in Iraq is unclear because the Labor Department will not begin gathering data specifically on post-Sept. 11 veterans until August. The unemployment rate for veterans of all wars was 4.6 percent last year, the department said, compared with an overall unemployment rate of 5.5 percent.

Some in Congress are sponsoring legislation to give tax credits to employers who hire veterans, which should help. Is it really necessary to bribe businesses to hire returning vets (or for that matter, give them a break on their debts) when they have sacrificed their health, careers and finances in service of their country? As I’ve asked before, are American businessmen really this ethically color-blind?

PCE Substitution Issues

Perchloroethylene (PCE) used in dry cleaning is probably the most significant source of human exposure for this compound. General public exposure to PCE is widespread from people transporting freshly dry-cleaned clothes in their cars and storing them in their homes. Occupational exposures of dry cleaning workers to PCE are more pronounced compared with the general public. PCE is considered by the National Toxicology Program to be reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen, based on sufficient evidence in laboratory animals and limited (and somewhat inconclusive) evidence in humans. There is evidence of reproductive abnormalities in drycleaning workers (spontaneous abortions, menstrual irregularities, but again, the studies are as yet inconclusive. PCE has been found as a soil or groundwater contaminant at nearly 800 Superfund sites.

So, there’s sufficient evidence of adverse effects based on laboratory animals, but inconclusive evidence directly from the human experience. Human exposure to PCE is widespread, and the consequences of low-dose carcinogen exposure to very large groups are uncertain. Exposed workers, though smaller in number, are still a sizeable group.

Substitutes for PCE for professional fabric cleaning exist, and for some, it may appear that PCE is a good candidate for exercising the precautionary principle:

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.

(A copy of the full Wingspread Statement can be found here)

However, anyone who is serious about phasing out PCE in dry cleaning needs to be aware of the realities of the fabric care industry. Dry cleaning remains a mom-and-pop type of operation, the kind of small business that is slowly drying up in this age of Wal-Mart. The profit margin on dry cleaning is slim, and many are probably treading water financially. Attitudes of both workers and owners on chemical hazards have been surveyed, and it appears that health and safety, while on workers’ minds, are not their highest concerns (the study doesn’t call it out, but I have to wonder if their biggest concern is making a living). Telling these folks to just give up perc for the sake of the environment or their health will fall on deaf ears.

In some places, government is taking a hand to move the PCE phase-out along. The South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) has a pretty fearsome set of dry cleaning regulations, including a PCE phase-out, going on now with a completion date of 2020. Dry cleaners are being offered financial assistance by the district to purchase alternate wet cleaning machines. However, in places where the regulatory agencies aren’t quite as progressive as the SCAQMD, there may be other effective methods, combined with the financial assistance, to enable a PCE phase out. This would require consumer pressure applied elsewhere along the supply chain. Most apparel manufacturers do not label their “dry clean only” garments to allow wet cleaning methods, which might make cleaners reluctant to switch over voluntarily. Many retailers selling apparel pride themselves on their corporate environmental stewardship policies (see here and here). Selling the retailers on the idea of providing “no-perc” product lines and pressuring their suppliers to modify their labeling requirements, as a corporate citizenship activity, could be an alternative to governmental action in phasing out PCE.

It might work better than going to war with the corporations.