Well, anyway, we can debate. I believe in Canada most dry cleaning is perchloroethylene. It's actually an issue I once worked on quite extensively. I know that in just the last two weeks California came up with a phase-out of perchloroethylene in dry cleaning. There are a number of alternatives. The most interesting are various water-based systems, but the example that was given here was carbon dioxide, which maybe is too expensive for certain uses.
The important thing about carbon dioxide is that in fact Coca-Cola would be very surprised to find out that the manufacture of carbon dioxide is a very dangerous method. A lot of the carbon dioxide that's used commercially is captured as carbon dioxide by-product in distillation and so forth, which delays its release to the environment. It's not actually new manufacture.
In general, there are often burdens placed in the sunrise. That is part of the difficulty in coming up with alternatives. It is often the case that if it's not just like the one that caused the problem--which the industry then likes--and it's a really different solution, then the sunrise problem is raised, with all kinds of reasons suggesting you don't know enough about that one to follow it.
That's reflected in CEPA. Any chemical introduced after 1986, as CEPA now stands, requires a very rigorous process to be approved; for any chemical grandfathered in before 1986, you don't even need any information on it; you can delay it. The effect of that is to inhibit innovation. There is a trend toward green chemistry, but the current situation is that the burden of coming up with a substantially new alternative approach is subject to enormous regulatory hurdles for the purpose of buying more time for what exists.
One correction I would strongly urge is that you put old chemicals and new chemicals on a par. New chemicals should not be given a higher hurdle than old chemicals; in that way, we can encourage green chemistry. We can encourage the development of alternatives that are safer and less hazardous without its becoming something that is unintentionally discouraged.
It would mean you'd need to have good data on all of them. I don't want to lower the burden on the new chemicals, but unless you bring the same burden up for all chemicals, you are discouraging innovation.
Thank you.