NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT ACT--Resumed

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, today, the Senate will finish its work on the Natural Resources Management Act. This is a bipartisan package addressing over 100 public lands, natural resources, and water. It will provide protection for a number of historical sites and treasured landscapes across the country.

One of those sites is in my home State of Illinois. This lands package would include a bill I have cosponsored with my colleague Senator Tammy Duckworth to expand the Lincoln National Heritage Area. It would expand the heritage area to include several areas in Central Illinois that were a critical part of President Abraham Lincoln's life, including the site of Lincoln's legal career within the eighth judicial district, as well as the sites of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates.

By expanding the Lincoln Natural Heritage Area, we can give more Illinois residents and visitors a chance to learn more about President Lincoln's legacy to our State and Nation.

In addition, this lands package contains legislation that Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah introduced in the last Congress to protect over 700,000 acres of land in Emery County, UT.

I have worked for many, many years to protect the stunning, fragile, and amazing desert landscape in Utah through the Red Rock Wilderness Act, which I have introduced and reintroduced over a period of time. While I would like to have seen the Red Rock Wilderness Act included in this package, Senator Hatch and I worked together to protect some of the land covered by my bill in a bipartisan compromise that is, in fact, included in this bill.

This lands package also contains an important tool for conservation and recreation throughout the country, permanently reauthorizing the Land and Water Conservation Fund, also known as LWCF.

In Illinois, the Land and Water Conservation Fund has invested more than $213 million to protect outdoor spaces, public access to trails, parks, and historic sites. Permanent reauthorization of this critical program should have happened a long time ago, but I am glad we have finally reached a bipartisan moment of achievement in passing it as part of this legislation.

I look forward to the enactment of this legislation to protect these important areas in Illinois and across the Nation. Sterigenics and Ethylene Oxide

Mr. President, there is often kind of a casual debate about regulation and the power of government. Some basically start with the premise that all regulation is bad, eliminating regulation is always good, and the role of the government needs to be challenged and questioned regularly.

I guess there is some truth in those statements, but there comes a moment when we put things in perspective. Let me tell you that the people who live in the community of Willowbrook in Illinois are putting things in perspective when it comes to regulation.

Most people are not familiar with Willowbrook. It is a village west of Chicago with a population of 9,000. It is in DuPage County, just west of the downtown Chicago area. It is a middle-income community with a lot of hard-working families, and many of them work hard to make sure their kids have a better life than they do, as so many American families do.

In the middle of this village at Willowbrook is a business known as Sterigenics. It is a sterilization plant that uses a chemical, ethylene oxide, to sterilize medical equipment, and they do it in great volume.

On any given day, they will be sterilizing thousands of catheters that are being used across the country and certainly in the Midwest for stents and for investigative medicine--absolutely essential to the health of those who are being treated. They will approve over 1,000 surgical kits each day through their sterilization process. They put through the sterilization process such things as knee replacements and defibrillating devices that are implanted in people, so it is an essential part of the medical picture in the Midwest at this moment, but it also turns out that the chemical they are using, ethylene oxide, is problematic, and that is where the issue of government regulation becomes front and center.

I didn't know much about ethylene oxide. I was a liberal arts lawyer, so I skipped all of those hard chemistry courses and tried to understand other aspects of education. When it came to ethylene oxide, I needed to be educated. Here is what we found.

We have learned that ethylene oxide is a dangerous toxin. It is carcinogenic. To put it in layman's terms, it causes cancer. We learned that ethylene oxide, a chemical in the form of gas, is more carcinogenic to humans than we previously thought, and this facility has been releasing ethylene oxide into the surrounding Willowbrook community for 34 years.

Then we found out last August that the Willowbrook community is an area with higher cancer risk due to ethylene oxide emissions from Sterigenics, and we know that cancer-related ethylene oxide exposure includes lymphoid cancer, breast cancer, stomach cancer, and others.

After we were told that this company, Sterigenics, was doing everything it could to reduce the emissions of this carcinogenic toxic gas and that it had installed pollution control measures, a local television station--CBS in Chicago--revealed a few days ago through interviews that this wasn't the case at all.

Ex-employees of Sterigenics came forward and reported to this television station that ethylene oxide was often released directly into the air surrounding the plant through open doors and vents, and, instead of being directed through pollution control measures, it was simply released.

According to these whistleblowers, employees at Sterigenics were instructed to dump a toxic liquid byproduct of ethylene oxide called ethylene glycol directly into the water drains that lead to the public sewer system. Ethylene glycol is a chemical that is used in antifreeze.

Then, in the middle of last week, came a stunning revelation. We were told by the Environmental Protection Agency--an Agency that is often derided here in Washington by many--that the level of ethylene oxide measured outside of the Sterigenics facility in Willowbrook, IL, was 350 times higher than what the EPA finds to be an acceptable risk and 50 times higher than what was found in the surrounding area.

Saying that the families--some of whom have lived in Willowbrook for decades--are concerned is a dramatic understatement. Imagine for a moment, if you will, that you have been raising a child in Willowbrook, that your family has lived within sight of this Sterigenics plant, and now you are learning that they were releasing this toxic gas into the air at a level of 350 times beyond what is deemed acceptable for human exposure. To say that the residents are concerned is a dramatic understatement. They are demanding action, and they want answers.

For the record, this is not about Democrats making noise. This is a bipartisan response. Dan Cronin is a friend of mine. He is the chairman of the county board at DuPage County and a proud Republican. Both he and Jim Durkin, who is the Republican leader of the Illinois House, have come out publicly with the strongest possible statements about this Sterigenics emission and the danger it poses to their community. The same thing is true for the Democratic side of public service in that county.

All of us have come out together, Democrats and Republicans, decrying this terrible situation, this dangerous situation.

Members of this community should not have to divert time away from their lives and their loved ones to try to research a chemical release and to piece together answers. That is the responsibility of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, an Agency which, sadly under this administration, has been led by people who don't have sympathy for families before business. They tend to lean toward the business side before they look at the public health aspect. That is unfortunate.

The Clean Air Act was one of the first and most expansive environmental laws ever created in the United States, but, as with most laws, the Clean Air Act is enforced by a Federal Agency--in this case, the Environmental Protection Agency--with broad power and authority to act or to refuse to act.

In this case, the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to use the new information that came off its own monitors--new information about the concentrations and danger of ethylene oxide--to develop new rules around the use of that chemical, including when it is used for commercial sterilization in plants like Sterigenics. The EPA has the authority to do this.

The EPA should quickly promulgate rules to establish safe limits for ethylene oxide used in manufacturing and commercial sterilization. This would protect not only the people in Willowbrook but also the people in Gurnee and Waukegan, IL, which also have plants that use ethylene oxide--plants that are located smack dab in the middle of these populated communities.

Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA is 4 years overdue to begin the process of promulgating new rules for ethylene oxide commercial sterilization. Yet when I called the Acting Administrator, Mr. Wheeler, at the EPA last Friday, there didn't seem to be any sense of urgency to take action on this issue beyond the further collection of data over the next several weeks.

The EPA is under court order to review ethylene oxide emission standards for manufacturing by 2020, but there is no official timeline for commercial sterilization review--exactly what we have asked of Mr. Wheeler and the EPA over and over again.

Waiting 1 year is unacceptable for the families who are affected by these emissions. The health and safety of these families and their children are at stake in this decision by the EPA. That is too long to ask someone to wait when they sleep near this plant, work near this plant, or take their kids to school near this plant. That is why today I join my colleague Senator Duckworth, who has been my trusted ally in this effort, and my colleagues in the House of Representatives, Congressmen Schneider, Foster, Casten, and Lipinski. We are introducing legislation requiring the EPA to promulgate these rules within 180 days on the use of ethylene oxide in this manner. There is no excuse and no logical explanation for delaying this kind of establishment of a rule.

But the EPA has to do a lot more than simply start a 6-month process toward promulgating a rule for ethylene oxide. The EPA needs to treat this matter like the public health crisis it is. Today Senator Duckworth and I are calling on the EPA to immediately require Sterigenics to work with an independent, third-party environmental engineering firm to identify the source of these emissions and reduce these emissions coming from that facility. We want a third party on the scene. We don't trust Sterigenics to do this by themselves.

For their own credibility, they should invite a third-party environmental engineering firm to do this work. If Sterigenics cares about this community as much as they say they do, they shouldn't wait for the EPA to issue an order for them to have this sort of inspection and to make the repairs and changes necessary to protect the people in the surrounding community. They should immediately hire an independent, third-party expert to identify the source of the emissions and reduce them as quickly as humanly possible.

The EPA should commit to continuous monitoring around the facility instead of ending the monitoring as planned later this week. The EPA should remain as a presence in this community to make sure we restore the faith to the people living nearby that the situation is no longer dangerous and threatening.

The EPA should commit to continuing to analyze and share the data they collect with the public. No one should have to live in fear that simply breathing the air around their home, their school, or their workplace will give them cancer.

I am calling on the EPA to treat this with the urgency it deserves. I am ready to work with them, and I am sure Senator Duckworth is as well.

Let me close by saying that there are many people who mock the EPA and say that we would be better off if they stopped harassing businesses like Sterigenics. Tell that to the people who live in Willowbrook. Tell that to the people who live in Gurnee and Waukegan. They are counting on us--those in Washington who work with the Environmental Protection Agency--to keep this community safe for their families. They are counting on us to understand the concern they feel for themselves and their children. They are counting on us not to come with bureaucratic delay but to come up with a timely response, to put Sterigenics on the spot when it comes to the emissions that are coming off their plant, and to put us as a government on the spot to respond as quickly and as humanly as possible.

It is not a matter of bureaucracy; it is a matter of common sense. If this were your family living next to this facility, would you want business as usual, or would you want to make sure the government responds in a timely fashion? I think the answer is obvious.

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