Illinois lawmakers will consider a requirement that ambient air in or around five cities be monitored for ethylene oxide levels during a meeting of the the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (JCAR) Tuesday morning.
Ethylene oxide is a gas used to sterilize a range of surgical tools and other medical devices. Last year, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed into law a bill imposing stringent new rules on companies operating plants in Illinois which use the gas.
The new law bars such facilities from operating in Illinois unless 100 percent of all EO emissions are kept within the facility, and emissions tests reveal EO emissions of 0.2 parts per million. Testing will be conducted annually.
Failure of any test would result in immediate shutdown.
The cities identified for monitoring include Alton, Bondville, Nilwood, Northbrook and Schiller Park under authority of the Illinois Pollution Control Board.
Monitoring would be required for a period of six consecutive months during which the Pollution Control Board would collect a sample every 12 days. Each sample would be collected over a period of approximately 24 hours, according to the proposal outlined in the JCAR meeting agenda. The six-month monitoring period would begin no later than a year after the rule's effective date.
The JCAR meeting will be held at 11:30 a.m. in Room C-1 of the Stratton office building in Springfield. The committee is comprised of a special Illinois legislative panel of 12 members split evenly between Democrats and Republicans from the Illinois House of Representatives and the Illinois State Senate.
An EO sterilization facility located in a western suburb of Chicago, Sterigenics, was shuttered in February 2019, after the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, under Gov. Pritzker, ordered the plant to cease operations.
Sterigenics later sued accusing Pritzker and the IEPA of acting illegally and unconstitutionally, arguing that it was never accused of violating emission limits and operating under a permit the state itself had approved and renewed for years.
The business secured a deal with the state to resume operations under terms even more restrictive than those imposed under the new state law. Sterigenics then announced it would not seek to reopen its Willowbrook facility.
Bolstered by the state's campaign against the facility, personal injury lawyers have mounted hundreds of lawsuits against Sterigenics in Cook County Circuit Court, and more recently a food supplier that operated a sterilization plant in the 1980s and 1990s, Griffith Foods, over alleged toxic emissions.
And, amid Sterigenics' battle with the state, COVID-19 arrived in the U.S., establishing new demands for sterilized personal protective equipment. Faced with PPE shortages, the FDA applied pressure on local officials to back off their efforts to shutter EtO sterilization plants in Georgia and elsewhere. While sterilization plants reopened in places like Georgia, the Willowbrook plant has remained closed.
(Jonathan Bilyk contributed to this report).