Thank you, Madam Chair.
With respect to the first issue and leaving a part of it in, with respect, that would continue to be problematic from the point of view that it again would duplicate what already exists in CEPA and where CEPA goes beyond that to look at all uses of a particular substance and all their releases into the environment, not just from the product. Their assessments also consider all exposure pathways, not just from the product but all potential exposure pathways, to deal with it. So CEPA provides a more comprehensive set of protections.
The other challenge the department would face is the products. The way we work with products is post-market, not pre-market. How would we do this in a post-market world, where there are literally hundreds of thousands of products coming in every day, and verify this? The cost of that would be quite significant to us. I'm not able to suggest what those might be, but I would anticipate they would be quite large for us.
With respect to how CEPA responds to those risks, CEPA has quite a broad range of tools available to it whereby it can prohibit, call for the phase-out of a substance, and require pollution prevention plans to limit the amount that is released into the environment. These tools are precise, so they can allow for use in one environment and not in others. There are examples. It will get a little technical, and I apologize in advance, but polybrominated diphenyl ethers are flame retardants; they save 300 lives a year. We looked at those and found they were problematic for the environment. We asked that they be phased out of a number of product categories where they were not appropriate, but left in firefighter foams and others where there was not an available replacement that would provide the same protection to both the firefighters and the lives of those saved. We indicated we would be back to revisit that, which is essentially a signal to the industry to develop new replacement technologies as it moves forward.
So those are the sorts of things that happen under CEPA.
The other thing that happens under CEPA is that all new products must be approved. So there is a new product process that is not post-market, where those chemicals are assessed by the government. So it's not in a post-market, pre-market environment.