10 Spray December 2015 Pressure Points Doug Fratz CSPa aerosol Products Division Staff executive Revised EPA Ozone Standard: Impact on the consumer products industry is bigger than you may think This October, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lowered the National Ambient Air Quality Standard for Ozone from 75 parts per billion (ppb) to 70 ppb. Actually, EPA published a proposed rule late last year to set the new standard in the range of 65 to 70 ppb, and sought comments on a standard as low as 60 ppb. CSPA and a NAA-led industry coalition worked rigorously throughout this year to seek to deter EPA from setting the standard so low. Many industry stakeholders commented, testified and met with officials from EPA, the Office of Management & Budget and Members of Congress. Others in the coalition funded numerous television and radio advertisements. Having achieved partial success now raises the question: what is the impact of this new 70 ppb ozone standard on our products and industry? All of the consumer product regulations seeking reductions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) adopted by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and other agencies over the past 25 years have been aimed at lowering ozone formation. Tropospheric (ground-level) ozone is formed from complex photochemical reactions involving VOCs and nitrogen oxides (NOx). Our industry has spent billions of dollars reformulating products to lower VOCs, and additional standards remain to be met in the next few years. CARB estimates that we have reduced our VOC emissions by 220 tons per day in California. However, all of these reductions have been aimed at meeting ozone standards set before 1997. When I began to work on air quality issues in the mid-1980s, the ozone standard was 0.12 parts per million (ppm) or 124 ppb due to rounding; but this was a “one-hour standard”—i.e., one hour above the standard in a three-year period caused ozone non-attainment. That was a very unstable standard. When EPA reviewed the standard in the 1990s, we favored a more stable form of the standard and successfully advocated having a new standard be “eight-hour-average,” with the fourth highest level each year averaged over three years. Therefore the 0.08 ppm (84 ppb due to rounding) adopted in 1997 was not significantly more stringent than the 0.12 ppm one-hour standard. More importantly, it was much more stable. One very hot afternoon would not, in and of itself, create three years of ozone non-attainment. A decade ago, the EPA began another review of the ozone standard, and after much deliberation, with very active industry involvement, it lowered the eight-hour standard to 0.075 ppm (75 ppb) in 2007. Implementation of that standard was delayed in 2010 by an aborted attempt of the new presidential administration to lower the standard again; and EPA just this year finalized the implementation policy. The 75 ppb ozone standard will be implemented in the State Implementation Plan (SIP) that CARB must finalize by July 2016. Further VOC reductions from consumer products could be targeted in that SIP, but our continuous science-based policy arguments over the past 15-20 years appear to be getting some traction. Current air modeling shows that only about 10% further VOC reductions are needed, and much of those might come from measures aimed at the massive reductions in NOx that are required to attain 75 ppb. Now EPA and states will need to implement a 70 ppb standard. If the standard is not delayed by litigation—the first lawsuit, incidentally, was filed the very next day—the implementation schedule should look like this: EPA will work with states to designate non-attainment areas by late 2017, non-attainment states must submit SIPs in 2020 and 2021, and those SIPs must include measures to be taken between 2020 and 2037 to reach attainment. It would seem that there will be no short-term impact on our industry. However, that would be a very wrong assumption. Large regions of the country now know that they will be in ozone nonattainment and many areas for the first time. One example of the profound impact of this relates to the New Source Review (NSR) requirements for new industrial facilities or expansions of old ones. In non-attainment areas, NSR must demonstrate that the facility will not “cause or contribute” to a violation of the ozone standard. This is basically a de facto ban on new or expanded industrial facilities for our industry and most others. In a very real sense, the new ozone standard will affect our industry long before it affects the products we make. Spray Image from www.instituteforenergyresearch.org
Spray December 2015
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