Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. I apologize for our last-minute substitution. Getting the president rather than the vice-president may be a step down in the world.
I would like to take a moment to talk with the committee about our views on the science assessment and focus on the use of the science assessment as a basis for the toxics determination under CEPA.
My industry has been involved in this issue since the mid-1990s with a priority substances list proposal, a PSL, to evaluate road salt and ammonia in the aquatic environment as CEPA-toxic. So our experience on this is very real and very directly affected our industry, which manufactures plant nutrients for use by farmers to grow food.
The proposal for ammonia in the aquatic environment hinged on a problem that we have with municipal waste water treatment plant effluent. The challenge with road salt was a concern that municipalities were exceeding the necessary requirements for public safety. And when they decided to define the package for road salt, they included three chloride-based products: sodium chloride, which is of course salt; potassium chloride, which is potash, which is a fertilizer; and another one. Now, the reason that there was an inclusion of potassium chloride was simply because it was a residual product, you might say an impurity when the refining of the salt process was completed. Nevertheless, potash was included in the proposal to declare toxicity on road salt.
The need for a science assessment probably is viewed as a process to establish federal jurisdiction in order to regulate a substance. The assessment process in the case of salt and ammonia did not add any scientific knowledge to the equation. When a science assessment is used in legislation as a measure to define constitutionality, then we end up with the difficulties of whether or not you can remove the word “toxic” from CEPA and still have legislation that is constitutional. This politicizes the science assessment and effectively destroys its validity as an effective tool for decision-making. If the only way you can establish jurisdiction is to declare something toxic, then every word in the science assessment that's going to be written down is going to be one that intends to drive the decision in that particular direction. Whether or not the assessment is meaningful in any peer-reviewed science meaning of the word effectively becomes irrelevant.
We had weak science assessments for road salt and ammonia in the aquatic environment because of the politicized process. Early on, CFI did a literature review on the ammonia issue and showed the science assessors what everybody in the world already knew: that if you put excessive quantities of ammonia in water it will kill fish. It's also a life-giving substance that is absolutely essential to make plants grow. It's an issue not of inherent toxicity but one in which a certain quantity is necessary for life and very beneficial, and too much can cause harm to certain species.
I would like to conclude my brief comments by suggesting that the one thing the science assessment does not do is ask what a meaningful risk management for a substance would be. Rather than focusing efforts on risk assessments or on risk management, we spend years politically fighting over what the risk assessment should say on a substance. This is a huge misallocation of public resources within the Department of the Environment. It's a huge waste of economic resources on the part of the affected industries. It is detrimental, in my view, to effective public policy development.
Mr. Chairman, thank you.