BUTADIENE CHAIN

PAINTS

METHANE CHAIN

Periodic table of the elements

18

Note: Atomic masses shown here are the 1983 IUPAC values (maximum of six significant figures). a Symbols based on IUPAC systematic names.

Mr. SWIFT. Thank you very much.

Mr. Mark Hopkins.

STATEMENT OF MARK D. HOPKINS

Mr. HOPKINS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

My name is Mark Hopkins, and I'm the waste management coordinator for the Chevron Corp. I am here today on behalf of the American Petroleum Institute-which represents more than 250 companies engaged in the production, refining, marketing and transportation of crude oil and petroleum products-to present our views on pollution prevention and toxics use reduction and how those are articulated in H.R. 2880.

API is firmly supportive of what is becoming a national consensus, that the U.S. policy should be to prevent pollution rather than to control it after the fact. This policy objective in H.R. 2880 is one we agree with.

Unfortunately, we don't agree on how the bill proposes to achieve it. We believe it is not a step in the right direction but, rather, will be counterproductive and unduly burdensome. This is more than just a reporting bill.

Preventing pollution has a lot in common with the total quality management movement sweeping business. Both ideas are based on working to do the job right in the first place and, thus, you avoid the inherent inefficiencies in fixing preventable problems.

As discussed in API's written testimony, our industry has taken specific steps to put this total quality management approach of pollution prevention into practice.

Why do we believe that H.R. 2880 will not get us on the path to preventing pollution? Its premise is that there's only one tool, toxic use reduction, or TUR, to do the job. Toxic use reduction is only one part of a pollution prevention strategy. Total emphasis on TUR forecloses the use of other, equally important options.

This sole emphasis on TUR leads to other concerns. First, TUR is the wrong way to measure progress. The goal is to protect the environment from harm. TUR focuses on chemical use, regardless_of whether the chemical harms the environment by entering it. Releases are what harms the environment, not use.

The material accounting provisions of the bill would require a facility to compile information on the amount of chemical produced, used, generated as a byproduct, consumed, recycled on site but out of process, transferred to the product, or transferred as a constituent in a product, information potentially more useful to a facility's industrial competitors than to the public at large.

Not only will this create trade secret problems, but we will divert the debate for environmental protection and enlist the debate on how we should define these use parameters and how one should measure and report process flows within facilities. Simply put, the environmental scorecard should be emissions reduction, not chemical use reduction.

Second, the performance standards of the bill are a major concern. An example of where the bill goes beyond reporting, EPA would be authorized to mandate how efficiently certain industry segments use chemicals. A government agency, namely EPA, would