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The Environmental Protection Agency has banned two commonly used chemicals, including one essential to electric vehicle battery manufacturing (The New York Times). 
 
What’s going on: On Monday, the EPA issued a final rule prohibiting “all uses of” trichloroethylene, or TCE, a chemical that has been employed for decades in the manufacturing of cleaners, glues and lubricants. The agency “also banned all consumer uses of perchloroethylene [PCE], used in dry-cleaning and in automotive-care products.” 

• The move, made under the Toxic Substances Control Act, does allow continued use of PCE in “a range of industrial uses, including in aviation and defense, with the provision that strict rules must be in place to protect workers.”  

Why it’s problematic: As written, the final rule makes the continued production of many everyday products “impossible to manufacture in domestic supply chains,” the NAM told the EPA last year following the agency’s proposal of the ban.  

• “Manufacturers rely on TCE to manufacture numerous products that make modern life possible,” the NAM said, adding that TCE is used to make battery separators, a “critical component in all vehicle batteries.”
• A 10-year exemption in the final rule for industrial and commercial uses of TCE in battery-separator applications “is too short and creates a de facto ban on an essential TCE use,” the NAM continued.

However … “Rules that have been put in place in the final stretch of the Biden administration, like this one, are also vulnerable to the Congressional Review Act, which allows an incoming Senate to overturn any regulation finalized near the end of a presidential term,” The New York Times notes.