Policy Concentrates INDUSTRIAL SAFETY
Congress considers revoking chemical safety rule Chemical makers asked for overturn of EPA regulation Congress is considering legislation that would nullify a recent regulation on industrial chemical safety. Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) introduced the legislation, H.J. Res.59, on Feb. 2 at the urging of 21 business groups, including several chemical industry organizations. In a recent letter to Congress, the groups—which include the American Chemistry Council and the Society of Chemical Manufacturers & Affiliates—say Congress should block the regulation. The rule modifies EPA’s 25-year-old risk management plan program to reduce chemical plant accidents and protect communities, workers, and emergency responders. The Obama Administration finalized the rule in late December. Under the Congressional Review Act, lawmakers have 60 legislative days to review the
regulation and can vote to overturn it. Echoing the chemical industry groups’ letter, Mullin says the regulation is unnecessary and burdensome and may make businesses less safe. EPA made the changes in response to a 2013 executive order from then-president Barack Obama. That directive ordered a broad multiagency safety review and came in the wake of a warehouse explosion involving ammonium nitrate that killed 15 people in West, Texas. The EPA regulation was the only regulatory response to emerge from the executive order. The new regulation aims to encourage better communication among emergency responders and requires independent third-party accident audits and company consideration of inherently safer manufacturing methods. If Congress blocks the regulation, the ex-
Chemical manufacturers are asking Congress to nullify an EPA safety regulation issued in response to the 2013 explosion and fatal fire at a West, Texas, warehouse. ecutive branch can’t reissue it in the same form or in any other variation that is substantially the same. Congress has successfully used the 1996 Congressional Review Act against a regulation only once.—JEFF
JOHNSON, special to C&EN
PEOPLE
Chemist among Quebec shooting victims CREDIT: MARK WINGARD/CSB (EXPLOSION); LAVAL UNIVERSITY (BELKACEMI)
Khaled Belkacemi researched green chemistry and functional foods A chemistry professor was among six peothe same university in 1990. He also earned a ple killed during a shooting on Sunday at a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the AlgeQuebec City mosque. Khaled Belkacemi, rian Ministry of Higher Education in 1995. 60, was a professor in the Faculty of Agri“He firmly believed that his work in food culture & Food Sciences at Laval University. engineering should result in concrete ap“He was a cultured and passionate man plications for the industry,” says Sylvie Turand very involved within the faculty,” says geon, director of the Institute of Nutrition Jean-Claude Dufour, dean of the Faculty of and Functional Foods, which Belkacemi Agriculture & Food Sciences at Laval Uniwas a faculty member of. “All those who versity. “His remarkable contriknew him will remember him as butions will endure despite his an eminent researcher, but also sudden passing, which deeply as a man of great kindness.” saddens us all.” Belkacemi was also a memBelkacemi’s research focused ber of the Center for Green on the use of heterogeneous Chemistry and Catalysis catalysis in food chemistry and in Quebec. “We are deeply in the conversion of biomass and shocked by this vicious attack food waste. He earned an M.S. in and saddened for the loss of chemical engineering from the a great colleague,” say Andre University of Sherbrooke in 1986 Charette and Chao-Jun Li, coand later earned a Ph.D. from Khaled Belkacemi directors of the center, in a joint
statement to C&EN. “Professor Khaled Belkacemi provided valuable contributions on the subject of heterogeneous catalysis for the conversion of renewable biomass into high-valued chemical products, and he was a very cheerful and supportive member of the center.” “Khaled believed a lot in green chemistry,” says Paul Angers, a professor at the Food Sciences Department at Laval University. “He developed catalysts to do chemical transformation on molecules of dairy transformation residues, for example. He then modified those molecules into polymers that would be turned into biodegradable plastic.” Belkacemi, who immigrated to Canada from Algeria, is survived by his wife, Safia Hamoudi, who is also a professor of the Faculty of Agriculture & Food Sciences at Laval University, and their three children. On Facebook, his son Amir Belkacemi wrote that his father “left his country to give a chance to his family to live far away from the horror.”—LINDA WANG FEBRUARY 6, 2017 | CEN.ACS.ORG | C&EN
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