Fundraiser Denies Link Between Money, Access (Bush EPA advantages donor)

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1802&ncid=1802&e=4&u=/washpost/20040517/ts_washpost/a31714_2004may16

Fundraiser Denies Link Between Money, Access (but 97 Clinton proposed clean-water rule requiring industrial laundries to pretreat their wastewater to remove chemical solvents dies under Bush for cloth - but not paper - towels....so follow the money?)Mon May 17

By James V. Grimaldi and Thomas B. Edsall, Washington Post Staff Writers Second of two articles

MASON, Ohio -- Richard T. Farmer is one of America's richest men and a Bush Pioneer by virtue of having raised at least $100,000 for the 2000 campaign. Over the past 15 years, he and his wife have given $3.1 million to Bush campaigns, the Republican Party and Republican candidates.

Farmer's family controls Cintas Corp., a $2.7 billion company that rents and launders uniforms and industrial shop towels. For years, Farmer's industry has been at odds with the Environmental Protection Agency over increased regulation of shop towels, particularly a Clinton administration proposal that, though not fatal, "would have cost us a lot of money," Farmer said.<snip>

The Clinton proposal would have required that woven shop towels contaminated with chemical solvents be wrung dry for them to be treated as laundry, not hazardous waste. Last November, the EPA changed its position, adopting a more lenient proposal for the woven towels. Farmer and his industry were overjoyed, because the change promised to save them millions and preserve their advantage over the competition -- paper towels. "It would have been a big problem," Farmer said....laundry lobbyists with an advance copy of a portion of the proposed rule...edited (the proposed rule) and the agency adopted (as edited).

That same opportunity (to see an advance copy) was not given to the rule's opponents -- environmental groups, a labor union, hazardous-waste landfill operators and paper towel manufacturers who argue their product should be treated as environmentally equal to laundered towels. The opponents say industrial laundries send tens of thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals to municipal sewage treatment plants and landfills where toxics can get into groundwater, streams and rivers. Labor unions contend that the towels expose workers to cancer-causing fumes.<snip>

Also, the EPA opted not to require the towels to be wrung out. "The point of that is not to make it harder to do than what you would do through your normal course of business," Dellinger said. However, he told the group, the paper towel industry would have to wring out its towels to make sure they had no more than five grams of solvent on them before being dumped.<snip>

Paper industry officials say that the EPA is ignoring its own studies showing that laundries create 30 percent more waste than paper towels in the form of sludge -- lint, debris, toxics and other substances extracted from laundry wastewater -- sent to municipal landfills.<snip>