Publisher's Synopsis
The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAA) required the EPA to take specific actions to reduceemissions and risks from air toxics. Air toxics (also known as hazardous air pollutants or HAPs) arepollutants known to cause or suspected of causing cancer as well as respiratory, neurological, reproductive and other serious health effects. Air toxics are emitted by mobile sources (e.g., cars, trucks and construction equipment); large or major sources (e.g., factories and power plants);smaller, or area, sources (e.g., gas stations and dry cleaners); and background sources (e.g., longrangetransport of pollution and natural emissions sources such as wildfires). Examples of air toxicsinclude benzene, found in gasoline; perchloroethylene, emitted from some dry cleaning facilities;and methylene chloride, used as a solvent by several industries.Congress expressed under CAA section 112(k) that emissions of air toxics, individually or in theaggregate, may present significant risks to public health in urban areas and directed the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop a strategy to reduce these risks. Consideringthe large number of persons exposed and the risks of carcinogenic and other adverse healthimpacts from HAPs, the EPA believed that to reduce public health risks in urban areas, aggregatedexposures from all sources had to be addressed. Therefore, it developed the Integrated Urban AirToxics Strategy in 1999, using all available authorities, for reducing cumulative public health risks inurban areas posed by the aggregated exposures from all sources, including major stationarysources, smaller area stationary sources and mobile sources. The EPA also recognized that nationalregulations alone would not be enough to address all of the issues, particularly those affectingurban area
