Governor Signs Legislation Implementing First-in-the-Nation Green Chemistry Program

TOM CASSUTT: Good morning. I'm Tom Cassutt, co-president of Nelson Nameplate Company. Thank you all for being here today. Nelson Nameplate Company has been in existence for 62 years and for over the first 50 years of our existence we were a heavy user of chemicals. We paid a great deal of money to buy these chemicals and again we paid to provide protection to our employees from these chemicals and we paid a third time to dispose of the chemicals.

We became convinced that there had to be a better way. We began testing chemistry that was safer to our environment and to our employees. Sometimes we would have to try 30 or 40 different combinations of safe chemicals to find a combination that worked. But sometimes on the 31st or 41st time we'd eventually find it. In some cases new pieces of equipment had to be bought or custom designed for us and we spent over $120,000 on this equipment. But we found that our solvent bill went down by over $60,000 per year. It's evident to me that environmental protection and economic growth go hand in hand. Over the past decade our revenues have more than doubled but our toxic chemical use has decreased by more than 80 percent.

I would like to thank the people who helped us achieve our goals in reducing chemical use, particularly Katy Wolf of the Institute for Research and Technical Assistance, who is here today, Mike Morris of the Southern California Air Quality Management District and all the employees of Nelson Nameplate Company, especially our process engineer Sam Wong.

Finally, I would like to thank the Governor for his leadership. As the father of an asthmatic 11-year-old daughter, who is here today, I value the Governor's energy and vision which makes California an environmental leader for the nation and the world. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

GOVERNOR SCHWARZENEGGER: Well, thank you very much. What a wonderful introduction, Tom. And it's great to be here today with all of you. And also, thank you very much for the wonderful tour that we have just gotten of this great, great facility. As a matter of fact, I met a man that has been working here for 50 years already, so this is really spectacular. What a great company. So thank you very much for this great tour and for having us here.

I also want to say thank you to our Secretary Linda Adams for being here today with us and Senator Joe Simitian, Assemblyman Mike Feuer and Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee and we have also Bill Magavern, who is with the Sierra Club and then we have John Ulrich with the Chemical Industry Council and so on, so we want to thank all of them for being here.

We do bill signing -- in my office I have signed hundreds of bills and I have actually sat in my house -- there was a short period of time that I had to do the bill signing, so I sat in my house sometimes late at night and I do bill signing.

But sometimes there are bills that are not just regular bills. These are big bills that are major bills that move the state of California forward and the two bills that we are talking about here today are two bills like that. And it's fantastic to be here today at Nelson Nameplate, because this is a perfect company to spotlight watershed legislation for the people of this great state. With the two bills that I will be signing here today in a few moments, California will be on its way to have the most comprehensive green chemistry program in the world. That's why I said these are two major bills, because it makes us again a leader in an area, just like with greenhouse gas emissions.

So let me thank Assemblyman Mike Feuer and Sam Blakeslee and Jared Huffman for their great work on AB 1879 and Senator Joe Simitian for his fantastic work on SB 509. So thank you very much. Let's give them a big, big hand for their great work that they have been doing. (Applause)

Now, this is exactly what I had in mind when we launched our Green Chemistry Initiative in 2007. Week after week we see headlines about consumer products that contain toxic substances, from lead in candy, to lead in children's lunchboxes, to mercury in light bulbs, to arsenic and formaldehyde in wood products and consumers are alarmed about the health and environmental hazards of these chemicals and that those chemicals pose.

Right here at Nelson Nameplate, the company's owners replaced toxic solvents with a more benign process. Workers, neighbors and our environment were safer. And guess what? One of the great things is that it also proved that the company's bottom line has improved because it saved on chemicals and expensive disposal.

With these two landmark bills we will stop looking at toxins as an inevitable byproduct of industrial production. Instead, they will be something that can be removed from every product in the designer stage, protecting people's health and our environment from cradle to grave. Or, like the environmentalists also say, from cradle to cradle.

These measures will transform how we deal with chemicals the same way, as I said earlier, our landmark global warming bill transforms the fight in climate change and global warming. It doesn't take it just from one thing to the next, from one product to the next but this is like a whole, comprehensive approach. We used to address this problem in the legislature on a chemical-by-chemical, or product-by-product basis but we know that that was not the best way to go about it. Now we will deal with the issue in a systemic and comprehensive manner the way it requires.

With AB 1879 we get powerful new tools to identify hazardous chemicals and to find suitable alternatives before they pose a problem and with SB 509 this will establish a toxic information clearinghouse to give consumers valuable and easy-to-find information about chemicals that they are exposed to. These bills will follow a number of steps that my administration has taken to protect consumers from dangerous chemicals. This is a great, great start. I want to congratulate again everyone involved with this.

But now we are going to focus on the big picture from now on and work together on this, so let's add green chemistry to the list of issues California will lead. Thank you very much and now after everyone speaks, we're going to go over there and we're going to sign these bills. Thank you very much. (Applause)

And next I want to call out Senator Simitian, who is one of the great, great authors of 509. Please. (Applause)

SENATOR SIMITIAN: Thank you. I was a little worried when the Governor said he wanted to call me out; that's a high-risk proposition. I want to begin by thanking Governor Schwarzenegger for his signature on SB 509 today. The Governor mentioned this is part of a two-bill package that provides a foundation for advancing the Governor's Green Chemistry Initiative. But I also want to thank the extraordinary coalition that came together to support this measure. Business, environmental groups, Democrats, Republicans, members of the Senate, members of the Assembly, the administration, all worked together, put many long hours in to bring us to this point today.

Some of you will know that these measures have a fairly long history, going back to 2003 when the environmental committees in both the Senate and the Assembly called for a report from the University of California at Berkeley. Then in 2006 the UC report was released and it told us what I think a lot of us had already suspected, which was that federal chemical policies were deeply flawed, do little to protect our environment and the public health and if we were going to get the job done we were going to have to do it ourselves here in California.

Beginning in 2006, as chair of the Senate Environmental Quality Committee, I had the opportunity to conduct hearings on the issue of green chemistry and I was pleased to learn from folks in business and industry that they too were vitally interested in advancing safer products but they needed a common framework for achieving cleaner, greener practices. So SB 509 is the product of those many studies, hearings, conversations across the country.

Governor, I have to tell you that along the way we had a vigorous debate about how far to go, how fast to go and what path we ought to take to get there. Ultimately, however, that debate proved to be productive and is the reason we are here today.

Now, the Governor has done a wonderful job of explaining what these two pieces of legislation do, so I will pass on that portion of my comments. But I do want to say that typically when we are together like this for a bill signing we think of the bill signing as sort of a happy ending to a legislative effort.

But the Governor's signature today isn't the end of our effort; quite the contrary. It's the beginning of a whole new way of doing business, designing chemical products from scratch that are less hazardous to the environment and to the public's health and safety, reusing and recycling chemicals and treating and disposing of those chemicals in a responsible way. That's our future, not just for California but for the rest of the nation as well but only if we maintain the sense of commitment that brought us here today.

Governor, it's been a pleasure working with your administration, including Secretary Adams and Director Maureen Gorsen. I want to thank them and other members of your administration for their work on the Green Chemistry Initiative. I look forward to continued collaboration as we develop the additional programs and resources that will be necessary for regulating both dangerous chemicals as well as identifying safer substitutes.

But the person I also want to extend a special thanks to is my colleague in good works and that's Assemblymember Michael Feuer. Those of you who have not had a chance to work with Mike Feuer should know that he came to the Assembly as a first-term legislator, walked in the door, knew what he wanted to get done and did not rest until it was an accomplished fact. It's rare that we see this kind of leadership from members of the legislature but it is particularly rare and really quite extraordinary to see it in a first-term member of the legislature.

Please join me in welcoming and thanking my friend and my colleague, Assemblymember Mike Feuer. Mike? (Applause)

ASSEMBLYMEMBER FEUER: Senator Simitian, Joe, thank you so much. That was especially gracious. And, of course, Governor Schwarzenegger, thank you not only for your commitment to sign these bills today but for your ongoing commitment to make California a world leader in the most important issues, in particular the most important environmental issues.

I want to start with just a brief moment of history here. You know, California has a toxics policy in place that basically deals with chemicals at the end of the waste stream and tries to protect people once those chemicals have been through their useful lives. That policy fails all of us. It fails workers involved in the inception of the manufacturing process, it fails consumers, it fails our families.

And today we are recognizing how much better we can do. There was a report last year that alarmed all of us. The world's leading scientists concluded that children in the womb are preprogrammed to get cancer and diabetes and other serious illnesses and they concluded you can never unprogram them. The reason this happens, they said, is that their moms are exposed to toxics in everyday life. This legislation, these bills today, set us on a course to break the link between toxics and cancer and other serious illnesses and it puts California again on the cutting edge of the most forward thinking policies to protect our environment, protect our kids, protect all of us.

So I'm so proud to be here today and I want to say a word or two about colleagues just for a moment. In addition to Governor Schwarzenegger, of course, his administration is populated with people who deeply care about these issues and I've been especially proud to collaborate with Secretary Adams and Director Gorsen, with John Moffatt, whose work in the Governor's Office assured that this legislation made its way to the finish line. Senator Simitian is a colleague in the Senate whose leadership is extraordinary and well known to all of us on these and other significant issues.

And I want to say something about my joint author Jared Huffman, who couldn't be here today, a northern California legislator and an environmentalist by profession before he came to the legislature. There is no one more skilled on the intersection between policy and the environment that Jared.

And it's now my opportunity, not just my job, to introduce my colleague Sam Blakeslee and I do so because I wanted to conclude my remarks with this: There is so much that is legitimately said about how starkly partisan our Capitol is and about how the people's work often is hamstrung by folks who get locked into corners and are unable to come together. This legislation today is a model of how we can do so much better and Sam Blakeslee is a key reason why we did better. Sam heads the Republican caucus's E3 Committee -- I'm sure he'll explain that to you in a second -- and he demonstrated tremendous courage in leading the effort on our Floor to assure that Republicans and Democrats could demonstrate to all of California that, instead of putting partisan politics first, we're putting the people's health and safety first. I am so proud to introduce my colleague, Sam Blakeslee. (Applause)

ASSEMBLYMEMBER BLAKESLEE: Thank you, Mike, for these incredibly thoughtful and gracious comments. I came to the legislature with a background a little different from most of the other 119 members with which I serve; I spent most of my professional life as a scientist. Having spent that time struggling with complex data and trying to understand oftentimes very obscure relationships between issues which are not easily connected, I discovered that we were trying to grapple with a very complex issue in the legislature one toxic at a time.

Now, you might think that would work in general, because if you only have lead and mercury and plutonium and a few other toxics to worry about, that approach probably will be effective. But as you know, it's not a matter of two, or three, or five, or 10 or 20, or 50 or 100 chemicals and toxic elements that we're dealing with but it's a matter of thousands upon thousands of chemicals that are in our consumer products and which we interact with each and every day. It is not just those products that have those chemicals but it's combinations of those toxic substances in varying amounts, varying types of exposure for different sensitive populations. And the question quickly becomes, how does California engage in consumer protection when grappling with such a complex issue?

Well, what you see before you today are two bills that establish a framework and a protocol for exactly how you deal with this issue. You deal with it with a science-based approach, a science-based approach which brings to it rigor so we don't just do what feels good, we do what's right. We do what's right, because this is an issue that's not just a California priority, not just a Democrat priority, not just a Republican priority. It's a priority for every one of you, everyone who has a family member and a child, everyone who wants to leave a better future for your children.

I am proud to work with a group known as E3. It's about 13 Republican legislators that have committed to work on environmental legislation that moves this state forward. And I want to thank the Governor, Mr. Feuer, Mr. Simitian and the Governor's team for welcoming us into that process. When the bill finally passed we ended up, remarkably, with a two-thirds majority supporting this bill. And Governor, when it comes to two-thirds majorities I think you would appreciate that's a notable achievement and we're looking forward to working with you next year to see if we can't get some two-third majorities in other issues too.

I'm proud to be here and I now have the distinct opportunity and privilege to introduce the next speaker, a leader in the environmental community, a gentleman who has been at the forefront of this effort, Bill Magavern, the Director of the Sierra Club of California. (Applause)

BILL MAGAVERN: Thank you very much. It's really an honor to be here today to mark the signing of the most successful environmental legislation of 2008.

Why are these bills important? They're important because we need to stop the onslaught of toxic products that have been showing up in California. As the Governor said, we've had lead in toys, arsenic in wood, even harmful substances in food packaging. Californians should be able to go to the store and buy products for our households without having to worry that we're going to be bringing home substances that could be harmful to our families.

In the past, the Department of Toxic Substances Control has been able to say that a lead-contaminated lunchbox would have to be classified as a hazardous waste when it's thrown out but could do nothing to protect our children eating their lunches out of that lead-tainted lunchbox. So we need to go back to look at the front end of the process and these bills will put the experts in our executive branch agencies in charge of protecting Californians from harmful substances in products.

This bill, as the legislators have mentioned, also represents a very successful collaboration. These bills marry the vision of Governor Schwarzenegger, Director Gorsen, Secretary Adams, Director Denton, with the vision of Assemblymembers Feuer, Huffman and Blakeley and Senator Simitian.

And this collaboration, as Senator Simitian said, has not ended by any means, because the real hard work is just beginning. These bills, like AB 32, the Global Warming Solution Act, have wisely delegated authority to the executive branch and that means that much of the important work will be done in the implementation phase. So all of us will need to pay a lot of attention and spend our time making sure that these bills are successfully implemented.

One of the most interesting things about this process for me was that it was the first time when I, representing the Sierra Club, had an opportunity to be on the same side as representatives of the chemical industry. And it's in that spirit of collaboration that I want to introduce the next speaker, who worked with me on passing these bills, John Ulrich, the executive director of the Chemical Industry Council. (Applause)

JOHN ULRICH:   Thank you very much. This is a great day and we're really excited about it. Governor Schwarzenegger, Senator Simitian, Assemblymembers Blakeslee, your distinguished guests, colleagues, employees of Nelson Nameplate -- what a wonderful job you have, what a wonderful story.

I represent a group called the Chemical Industry Council of California. It's a statewide organization of large, small and medium sized chemical companies, multinationals, their activities here in California, the men and the women who live here in California, work here in California and care very deeply about California.

We have repeatedly been on the forefront of the activities associated with the Green Chemistry Initiative and, in fact, in Los Angeles back in May of 2006, we actually had our first forum on green chemistry where we brought national and international experts into Los Angeles to talk about this very issue, that was prompted by the report that Senator Simitian had identified.

So we wanted to stay with this. We believe that the concepts of green chemistry are not at all inconsistent with what the chemistry industry practices as sustainable development or sustainable industry. What we're really looking at when we talk about sustainable development, sustainable chemistry, is excellence in environmental protection, excellence in worker health and safety, excellence in the bottom line. And those of you and your story here at Nelson Nameplate, absolutely hit on those activities. What we have today in the chemical industry is a recognition that this is what we have to do in the future, this is where we're going.

I would like to compliment the Governor on you leadership on the Green Chemistry Initiative and I want to compliment the legislators on the wonderful job that they did on the bipartisan activities, coming together on these pieces of legislation. Agreement was not reached easily but I want to stress that the different points of view were not meant to delay this, they were meant to make it stronger and I think in the ultimate we have made it stronger.

This is science-based activity, as Mr. Blakeslee indicated. It will solve problems. But it should be remembered that green chemistry is a journey, it is not a destination. It's like continuous improvement; there will always be something more that we will have to do. So as we go forward in this -- and in a moment the Governor is going to sign these bills and that will move us in a direction that will take us farther than we've ever been.

But in so doing, as we begin this journey, we have to remember that the next phase, as we work together, is something that we should continue to try to achieve in collaboration. And we should remember this moment as we move forward, because we are all very, very pleased to be here and we're very pleased with this outcome.

Thank you very much. Governor? (Applause)

GOVERNOR SCHWARZENEGGER: And now let's create the action and actually sign the bills. Thank you. (Applause)

All right, everyone has their bills. If you have any questions, beyond of what we have already explained -- remember, we have the authors here of each one of those bills, so if you want to go into details, now is your chance to do it. You can ask them any question, or any question for me, feel free, or if you have any questions for anyone else.

Thank you very much. It's good to have you all here. And I want to say just again, thank you very much to the hardworking people here, because you're not only working hard to make a living but you also work hard to do great work, to produce products that are chemical free but you also do great work because you're producing a lot of great revenues for the state of California. So I just want to mention that and say thank you, thank you, thank you, all of you, for your great, great work. Let's give them all a big hand for the workers here. Thank you. (Applause)

We do have a little late reaction over here.

QUESTION/ANSWER:

QUESTION:              I don't know if you can hear me or not, Governor but I'd like to ask you about the bills you haven't signed, the ones you vetoed. I was reading somewhere that you're at like a 33 percent veto rate. You've vetoed 259 measures of the 896 bills. Are you trying to get even with people? What's your motivation for such a high veto rate?

GOVERNOR:            First of all, as you know, the rule is that if you want to get attention to a specific thing like this here, where we came up with a comprehensive way of dealing with toxics, you don't talk about other bills, because otherwise you take news away from this very important subject. So you will not get any information out of me on anything else, if that's what you're trying to do. (Applause)

Number two: No, in our business it's never about getting back at anyone. It's all about moving the state forward and trying to work together, Democrats and Republicans working together. And as you could see, some great work has been done by both parties. Even though we were not happy with the budget situation, how long it took but there was great other work that was done. And I think this is one of those things where we can truly celebrate of how Democrats and Republicans came together and did a great, great job and I'm very proud of them.

So thank you very much. Thank you all.