TOSCA. Sounds like the name of an opera doesn't it? Well it's not. TOSCA is just the way you pronounce a shorter acronym: TSCA, which stands for Toxic Substances Control Act, a 1975 U.S. federal law that affects how industry and others handle substances such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). An amendment in 1986 brought asbestos under TSCA. Other substances could be controlled under TSCA if the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) felt like it. TSCA is thus a sleeping dragon that EPA could waken if it wanted to.
PCBs, which are carcinogenic (cancer-causing) chemicals, were used to cool electrical equipment such as a power company's transformers and certain industrial machinery. TSCA required that the production and sale of PCBs be phased out by 1979. Probably most power company transformers on utility poles throughout the country no longer have PCBs in them because they were removed. But PCBs are still present in industrial settings, particularly in old equipment, although this too has been slowly replaced. Where it has not been replaced, law-abiding industries take government-defined precautions to safeguard machinery that contains PCBs and on handling PCBs if it spills.
Asbestos, as some people might be aware, is a fibrous mineral with useful insulation qualities. In the good old days, products containing asbestos were used to insulate heating pipes, ceilings, floors, roofs and machinery, among other things. The 1986 Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act was what made schools across the country rip out their ceiling tiles if they contained asbestos. Public and other buildings also were laboriously stripped of their asbestos products. This wasn't easy because workers had to be specially trained to protect themselves from inhaling asbestos fibers that float in the air during renovation. Other precautions had to be taken to keep asbestos fibers from escaping into areas where the public might enter, such as adjoining rooms and hallways. Workers, for example, would work in a room removing asbestos products. Then, when they wanted to leave the room, they had to enter a special room where they could remove their protective work suits and dispose of them. This kept the fibers from escaping form the work area into the general environment.
On small asbestos-removal jobs, a trained asbestos remover might wrap an asbestos object in disposable plastic that has a pair of gloves sticking through it. By putting his or her hands in the gloves from the outside, the worker is able to work on removing the asbestos while it is enclosed in the plastic. Then the asbestos, plastic and gloves are simply removed, properly bagged and disposed of in a government-approved landfill.
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