ChemRisk
ChemRisk was a Delaware Limited Liability Company, a for-profit scientific consulting firm headquartered in San Francisco, California, that was part of Cardno until Cardno was acquired by Stantec in 2021. ChemRisk founder and former president, Dennis Paustenbach, "has long been an expert witness and top consultant" to "scores of companies in the chemical, energy and medical products industries" facing lawsuits over products or environmental practices or product safety. Historical clients of ChemRisk included San Francisco-based utility Pacific Gas & Electric and BP. ChemRisk uses toxicology and risk assessment to measure the hazards of chemicals in soil, air, water, food, sediments and consumer products.
Background
Paustenbach, who earned his PhD in environmental toxicology from Purdue University in 1982, created ChemRisk in 1985, with its headquarters in San Francisco, as an environmental consulting firm. Using assessments models regarding health risk, ChemRisk quantified risks of chemicals in "foods, water, air, sediment, soil, and consumer products". He worked at Eli Lilly in Indianapolis for two years before taking a masters in industrial hygiene. The new field of risk assessment was emerging in 1982, which integrated environmental toxicology and industrial hygiene. While working for Stauffer Chemical in Connecticut in the early 1980s, he "gained expertise in how chemicals were regulated" as he interacted with federal agencies through his job. He then worked for Syntex Pharmaceuticals in California's Silicon Valley. For three years Paustenbach worked on a project related to hexachlorophene, and dioxin which is its toxic byproduct. Hexachlorophene had previously been manufactured at a production facility in Times Beach, Missouri. "Large amounts of dioxin, a toxic byproduct of hexachlorophene, had been accidentally mixed with motor oil and sprayed on roads and land throughout the town, creating a huge liability as it became the country's most visible toxic waste site and forcing the town's entire population to re-settle elsewhere."His 1986 Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology co-authored article, "A Critical Examination of Assumptions Used in Risk Assessments of Dioxin Contaminated Soil" was written in response to the Times Beach, Missouri crisis. In it the authors concluded that there were "flaws and shortcomings" in the original Times Beach risk assessment. Paustenbach noted that since 1984 studies had replaced previously held assumptions with new "quantitative evidence" about the estimation of exposures to 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin, more commonly known as dioxin. The article found flaws in the EPA studies and concluded that much higher levels of dioxins were "acceptable for residential and nonresidential areas." ChemRisk cited this article in their September 5, 1990 report commissioned by Hercules Inc.
In the early 1990s, ChemRisk operated as a division of the environmental engineering and consulting firm Rancho Cordova-based McLaren/Hart Environmental Engineering. Paustenbach was appointed as McLaren/Hart President and CEO in 1993. By 1998, McLaren/Hart—which operated from 1977 to 2000—had become the 11th largest environmental engineering firm in the area.
Paustenbach moved ChemRisk to Exponent from 1998 to 2003. In "mid-to-late 2003", he re-established ChemRisk. At that time some of operations that had been handled by Exponent were moved to the newly re-formed ChemRisk.
In his August 1, 2018 article in New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, David Egilman said that the role of scientific consulting firms such as ChemRisk and Exponent, was litigation. These firms use "dose-reconstruction studies and policy arguments" in legal defenses using "multidisciplinary" teams that they include "scientists, physicians, engineers, and regulatory consultants". ChemRisk has described its role as one in which its "scientists and engineers" served as "technical advisors to lawyers in all aspects of environmental, occupational, toxic tort, and product liability litigation, including technical strategy development, providing scientific advice, expert testimony, selection and preparation of expert witnesses, assistance in cross-examining opponent's expert witnesses."
In his presentation to the March 1, 2007 Senate Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions hearing Examining Asbestos, Focusing on Efforts to Better Protect the Health of American Workers and their Families entitled "Asbestos: Still Lethal/Still Legal", veteran environmental consultant Barry Castleman, whose PhD was on asbestos, described how ChemRisk "seeded literature" on asbestos. He drew attention to the $120 million a year worth of asbestos brake linings and brake shoes" imported into the United States from "countries such as Brazil, China, Colombia, and Mexico, that use a lot of asbestos. Castleman said that by 2007, annually there were 10,000 Americans that died from the way asbestos was used in the past. Since 1972 Occupational Safety & Health Administration standards have required warning labels on brake and clutch parts made with asbestos. Ford Motor Company began to use them in 1980; Chrysler in 1984. General Motors had not documented when it started to use labels warning consumers of their brake parts about asbestos. OSHA never cited "any seller of these unlabeled products for violation of the standard." On July 26, 2006 OSHA posted a factsheet by industrial hygienist Ira Wainless on its website which explained the "mandatory appendix" of the 1994 OSHA "asbestos standard applicable to mechanics doing brake and clutch repair. Former OSHA chief John Henshaw, whose daughter Shannon Henshaw Gaffney had been hired by ChemRisk after she "obtained her doctorate in environmental science in 2004" was also listed as a "teaming partner" at ChemRisk in early 2005. John Henshaw had acted as an expert witness for a leading defendant, Honeywell International in their Bendix brakes lawsuit in 2004. Soon after Wainless' factsheet was posted, Henshaw contacted his former subordinates at OSHA urged his "former subordinates at OSHA to retract the factsheet and possibly redo it with additional references". On November 6, 2006, OSHA threatened to suspend Wainless for not including articles that had been "commissioned jointly by General Motors, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler, starting in 2001". Castleman said that "Shannon Henshaw Gaffney's services appeared 21 times on Chemrisk asbestos litigation bills to the Big Three in 2004, totaling around $10,000." The Baltimore Sun reported that the OSHA brakes warning "survived the challenge." Castleman described how ChemRisk and Exponent provided litigation services as a "key" part of the defense strategy used by General Motors, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler. Castleman said that Exponent and Chemrisk authors' work has "technical shortcomings, such as selectivity in what was included in these reviews and what was not." He said their work was "solicited for the purpose of fighting personal injury claims brought by mechanics and their family members" as part of a "strategy of corporate defense lawyers, approaching and generously supporting the scientist-authors, most of whom had previously published little or nothing on asbestos. These publications were created to provide evidence that mechanics' asbestos exposures do not cause asbestos diseases. They were to be published by the best scientists money could buy."