AQMD Tightens Rules of Car Scrapping Program
The Southland’s air quality board Friday repaired its flawed car scrapping program after reports that the effort was eliminating old, undrivable junkers without reducing large amounts of pollution.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District also took a step to improve protection of low-income, minority communities in industrial areas, adding to a list of toxic chemicals restricted in the Los Angeles Basin more than 100 compounds that can cause cancer or other serious health problems.
Under the scrapping program, the AQMD lets businesses pay to junk pre-1982 cars, usually the dirtiest ones on the road. In exchange, the businesses get pollution credits that allow them to avoid reducing emissions at their own facilities. More than 22,000 cars have been scrapped since the program began in 1993.
Last fall, evidence emerged from an AQMD inspector that the scrapping was failing to eliminate as much pollution as the millions of pounds claimed.
The inspector, Bruce Lohmann, said many vehicles that were being purchased and junked were in such severe disrepair that they were barely roadworthy--meaning that spending public money to scrap them cleans up little, if any, pollution. The cars are supposed to have at least three years of life left, at about 5,000 miles a year, to offset the pollution credits that firms get.
On Friday, the board voted to put a series of safeguards in place. Cars now must meet more specific criteria to ensure that they function. For example, they will not qualify if they give off excessive smoke or noise, or have leaking fluids, faulty brakes or transmissions, broken windows or missing seats or doors. Inspectors will be required to examine every car.
The goal of the program is to promote early retirement of highly polluting cars by letting businesses pay into a fund that buys old vehicles from motorists for about $500 or $600 apiece. In exchange for helping scrap the old cars, the companies are granted credits exempting them from AQMD requirements for employee ride-share programs or pollution controls at manufacturing plants.
Lohmann’s charges came in a deposition in a lawsuit against the AQMD filed by Communities for a Better Environment. The group says the program, which it wants to halt, lets industries scrap cars instead of cleaning up pollution they cause in neighborhoods largely inhabited by Latinos and African Americans. The AQMD board plans to take up that “environmental justice” issue next year.
Under the state’s smog plan, 75,000 cars are supposed to be scrapped a year in the Los Angeles Basin.
In the separate move designed to protect people living near industrial areas, the board quadrupled the number of chemicals--currently 40--whose use is restricted by the AQMD. The new rule covers only companies that move into the basin or expand their operations. Those that use the compounds must ensure that pollution from them does not expose people living nearby to more than a prescribed level of risk of cancer, birth defects or other serious health problems.
The newly listed chemicals include lead, ammonia, a compound used by dry cleaners called perchloroethylene, and dioxins. The AQMD predicts that the overall cost of the new rule will range from $5 million to $25 million a year, largely for metal plating plants, electronics firms and oil production facilities.
Fewer than 75 pieces of polluting equipment at industries are expected to be affected annually in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, out of about 30,000 in the basin.
Saying they are getting ill from inhaling toxic fumes, people from low-income communities urged the AQMD board Friday to make businesses cut pollution to lower levels than currently allowed.
In a new analysis, Communities for a Better Environment said residents of a southeast Los Angeles County area that includes Bell Gardens, Huntington Park and South Gate are exposed to a high risk of cancer and birth defects because the area accounts for 18% of all toxic emissions in the county.
The AQMD board plans to consider changes next year that would make individual firms face tougher pollution limits in areas where industries are concentrated.
