Emission limits set for vinyl chloride The Environmental Protection Agency has promulgated final standards limiting air and water emissions of vinyl chloride from existing and new plants that manufacture vinyl chloride, polyvinyl chloride, and ethylene dichloride. The standards are no different than those proposed last December. At that time the agency predicted that four of the 58
PVC plants, such as Goodrich's at Louisville, must meet vinyl chloride limits
existing plants may close as a result of its proposal. EPA now says no plant will be adversely affected by the final standards. Plants have until Jan. 21, 1977, to meet the standards, but waivers of up to two years may be granted if additional time is necessary for installation of controls. Vinyl chloride emissions will be
limited to 10 ppm under the final standards. Plants will be required to use best available technology, such as incinerators, solvent absorbers, carbon absorbers, and process changes to control point source emissions. EPA expects the standards to reduce vinyl chloride emissions more than 90% from levels emitted in 1974. EPA anticipates only one adverse environmental impact from the standards, in that incinerators used to control vinyl chloride emissions can increase hydrogen chloride emissions severalfold. The agency says it will evaluate the problem further. It does not expect the standards to deter construction of new ethylene dichloride-vinyl chloride plants or most types of new PVC plants. For one type of PVC plant using the dispersion process, and representing 13% of industry production, EPA predicts that the standards could deter the construction of smaller units. Existing plants are expected to spend about $198 million in capital costs to meet the standards, of which $15 million will be for ethylene dichloride-vinyl chloride plants and $183 million for PVC plants. In addition, these plants are expected to spend $70 million per year in operating costs. EPA says that the costs will overlap to some degree with the costs for industry to meet occupational safety and health standards. It estimates that the price of PVC resins will rise about 7.3%. This translates into an average maximum consumer price increase of about 3.5% in goods fabricated from PVC resins. •
JACS page charges called advertising The Journal of the American Chemical Society has now been added to the list of scientific journals that the U.S. Postal Service claims are in conflict with its rules governing second class mail. JACS, like many other scientific and scholarly journals, asks authors to pay page charges to defray costs of publishing research papers, and, in the opinion of Postal Service lawyers, this practice is a form of paid advertising. Earlier, two other scientific journals were notified by the Postal Service of the same problem (C&EN, Oct. 18, page 6). ACS received notice on Oct. 22 from the local post office in Washington, D.C., which said: "Articles appearing in copies of issues of [JACS] for which payment (monetary or other valuable consideration) has been made, accepted, or promised are considered advertising matter. Therefore, such articles must be marked 'advertisement' and charged the advertising mailing rate."
This action presents two problems. The first is increased postal rates. The second is the impact such a ruling could have on page charges themselves. Since few authors would care to see their research articles labeled advertising, voluntary payment of page charges could collapse overnight. In 1975 47% of JACS's pages were covered by page charges. These charges amounted to $233,000, or about 18% of total revenues. Although JACS has only now been cited by the Postal Service for the alleged violation of its rules, the journal is apparently the reason the whole issue has been raised in the first place. The regulation the Postal Service seeks to enforce has been on its books for more than 60 years, but has never been applied to page charges. This past summer, however, an unspecified postmaster noticed the reference to page charges in an issue of JACS and asked Postal Service attorneys to check into the law.
Postal Service lawyer Arthur S. Cahn says that so far he has been asked for legal opinions concerning only "about five or six" journals, and this, he claims, doesn't represent a concerted campaign against scientific journals. Cahn affirms that his office only looks at the journals "case by case," when such specific requests are submitted to his office by Postal Service mail classifiers. Meanwhile, ACS, which has 15 days to respond to the Postal Service notice, has turned the whole matter over to its attorneys for study, particularly since there is a possibility that the Postal Service may seek retroactive payment of the higher postal rates. •
Low-tar cigarettes may, indeed, eliminate risk If smokers were willing to use lowhazard cigarettes, the intake of dangerous cigarette components might be lowered to limits that "could make the resulting risk of disease virtually undetectable." So said Dr. Gio B. Gori, deputy director of the National Cancer Institute's division of cancer cause and prevention at the annual meeting of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., last week. Gori defines these limits as the smoke intake dose at which the risk of disease for a smoker becomes about the same as that for a nonsmoker. From dose response analyses of several epidemiologic studies, Gori has estimated daily intake limits for certain components of smoke. These daily limits are about 150 mg tar, 10 mg nicotine, 950 micrograms nitrogen oxides, 1500 micrograms hydrogen cyanide, and 450 micrograms acrolein. Carboxyhemoglobin values— which relate to the intake of carbon monoxide—should not exceed normal baseline values of 4.8%. To achieve these intake limits, most smokers would have to reduce their consumption of regular cigarettes to one third to one eighth of their present daily intake, depending upon their brand, observes Gori. The actual number of cigarettes, however, would vary tremendously with the type of smoke component as well as brand. For example, one could smoke 86 cigarettes of one relatively mild brand before exceeding the estimated average daily critical value for tar intake, but only seven of that same brand before surpassing critical nitrogen oxide values. For a somewhat stronger brand, the number of cigarettes would be reduced to only 16 before meeting critical tar levels, and Nov. 1, 1976 C&EN
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