Many Late in Filing Disclosures on Toxic Chemicals : County Firms Complain That EPA Gave Them Inadequate Instructions

If the county’s response to a new federal toxic disclosure law is a representative example, building a national data bank on manufacturing firms that use sizable amounts of toxic chemicals will be a slow and painful process.

Friday was the deadline to file reports required under the so-called right-to-know law, which requires annual disclosure of emissions and disposal of any of 328 chemicals classified as long-range toxins by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Of more than 200 companies in the county that will probably be subject to the disclosure rule, about 100 had filed by Wednesday.

Statewide, of 3,000 to 7,000 companies expected to be covered, just 700 had filed by the deadline, according to a spokesman for the state Environmental Affairs Agency, the designated repository for reports filed by California companies.

Companies that must comply with the law are manufacturers with 10 or more employees that use at least 10,000 pounds or process or manufacture at least 75,000 pounds annually of one or more of the chemicals on the EPA list. The law requires an annual report.

A major snag in compliance, according to officials at several county companies, is that many people have not heard about the rule, passed by Congress as part of the toxic-waste cleanup ordered under the Superfund Amendments Reauthorization Act of 1986.

The operations manager of one large county company that did file a report under the law, SARA Title 3, called the process of obtaining and filing the report forms “a comedy of errors.�

And an executive of a major paint manufacturing company in the county said he had no knowledge of the new federal requirements. The company, he said, already posts a list of toxics used on the premises, as required by state law, and has provided the city fire department and the county health department with lists of the hazardous chemicals it uses and stores.

That executive, as well as officers of several chemical and textile firms who said they do not know about the new law, asked not to be identified. They were interviewed only because their companies are in the industries most likely to be subject to the new federal reporting law.

California already requires most businesses to report on inventories of toxic and hazardous chemicals. Under the recently passed Proposition 65, California will require every business in the state to report on emissions of such chemicals and compounds, beginning in 1990.

The confusion that results from the multiple state and federal filing reporting requirements has prompted Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) to introduce an Assembly resolution asking Congress to let the reports California companies have been filing under existing state laws satisfy the federal reporting requirement, as well.

A spokesman for the Merchants & Manufacturers Assn. in Los Angeles, which represents about 1,200 manufacturing companies statewide, said there are “so many regulations and agencies, state and federal, and so many divisions of those agencies, that the employer today has to report to that it is hard to keep track of them all.�

The association, he said, “is not getting any inquiries about the EPA rule from our members, so apparently not too many are aware of it.�

At the California Manufacturers Assn. in Sacramento, a spokesman said most of the large companies that belong to the association are aware of the law because they maintain environmental staffs in charge of making sure they are in compliance with myriad regulations.

“But I doubt that many of the smaller manufacturers know about it,� he said.

The EPA said it realizes that not every company subject to the law knows about it, but the agency maintains that its outreach program was exhaustive.

“It was more extensive than anything I’ve seen in the 18 years I’ve been here,� said Charles Elkins, director of the EPA’s Office of Toxic Substances in Washington.

“We think we reached more than 500,000 businessmen who needed to be reached. But it is obviously very difficult in a population of 220 million for the federal government to communicate with everybody, and I’m sure there are some we missed.�

But ignorance of the law is no excuse, Elkins said, “so when people who didn’t know find out that they should have filed, they need to file right away.�

The law established fines of up to $25,000 per day for late filings, but levying such fines is up to the EPA, Elkins said.

The agency would prefer to “concentrate this year on finding and getting reports,� he said.

Ron Bissel, a spokesman for Fluorocarbon, a major high-tech plastics manufacturer with headquarters in Laguna Niguel, suggested that some companies might have been discouraged from filing because of the official EPA estimate, printed on each report form, that it will take the average company 400 man-hours and cost $12,000 to fill out the forms.

Learned From Trade Journal

Fluorocarbon did file a report, Bissel said, but learned about the filing requirement just six months ago from an article in a trade journal.

He said company officials never received anything directly from the EPA and obtained the proper EPA phone number in Washington from the National Assn. of Manufacturers.

Bissel said that the company had to file its report both with the EPA and the state but that the filing instructions were not very accurate. Fluorocarbon had to get the address for the local EPA office from the state Environmental Affairs Agency in Sacramento.

“But they gave us the wrong address,� he said. “We finally got the right one from the Anaheim Fire Department.�

While Fluorocarbon’s executive offices are in Laguna Niguel, its only county manufacturing facility is in Anaheim. The company has plants in other parts of California, in several other states and in Canada, Belgium and England.

Used Just 1 of 328 Chemicals

Bissel said the filing for the Anaheim plant showed that Fluorocarbon used just one of the 328 EPA-listed chemicals in the last year--slightly more than 10,000 pounds of trichlorine. The compound is used as a solvent and cleaning fluid for plastics.

The primary goal of the new federal reporting requirement, the EPA’s Elkins said, is to compile a data base available to the general public. The reports are on file at government offices in each state--in California at the Environmental Affairs Agency in Sacramento--and at the EPA headquarters in Washington.

A computerized data base is expected to be available by next spring, Elkins said, accessible through home and business computers and computers at public and academic libraries.

The information will enable people, he said, to determine which chemicals are being released into their neighborhood environment or stored in local dumps, which companies are doing the emitting and even how one company or neighborhood stacks up against others across the country.

Reasons for Criticism

The program has been criticized because it asks companies to report only an annual lump-sum estimate of their chemical emissions, without details about conditions under which emissions were allowed or the quantities emitted at any one time.

“That is a major concern of ours, too,� Elkins said. “We wanted some indication of highest levels, or the number of days that substances were emitted, but we couldn’t come up with something that was technically sound in the short time we had. We will be developing a proposal (for a more accurate breakdown of emissions) over the next few years.

“But this is a national data base. It’s a mile wide but only an inch deep because you can’t have it a mile wide and a mile deep. It already is costing $500 million (for businesses to prepare the required first-year reports).�