Century Foundation: EPA Foot-Dragging on Methylene Chloride Is Endangering Workers and Consumers

Check out my commentary on The Century Foundation’s website on EPA’s foot-dragging on banning the use of methylene chloride as a stripper — and the needless deaths it’s causing.  Another gift to the American people by Scott Pruitt.

To see for myself how appropriate the labels were, I headed down to my neighborhood hardware store and studied the label on a large can of “KleanStrip Premium Stripper,” manufactured by W.M. Barr, the largest manufacturer of paint stripping products. For a chemical that kills users so regularly, the label’s warnings were shockingly subdued. It mentions the risk of death only twice—if you swallow the chemical, or if you deliberately sniff the stripper to get high. Neither Drew Wynne nor Kevin Hartley were drinking it or trying to get high—they were just doing their jobs.

More on methylene chloride:

Methylene Chloride Deaths: “All Preventable”