Legal

Environmental Health & Safety Considerations for Business Operations

Extensive responsibilities and potential liabilities

by Todd W. Rallison

Comprehensive U.S. laws to protect the environment and worker health and safety (collectively EHS laws) date from the 1970s and 1980s, with numerous state or industryspecific antecedents. Most of those original laws have since been amended or expanded in the 1990s and beyond, the most recent being the 2016 revision to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA, which, despite its name, regulates almost all chemicals in use in the U.S.). Most of these environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA, which regulates hazardous and solid wastes), were initially designed to regulate large industries that posed a particular threat to the environment. Similarly, the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) was designed primarily to protect workers in certain hazardous industries or carrying out hazardous activities, such as energized electrical work or working in confined spaces. The majority of these laws are implemented at the state level in conjunction with minimum standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for environmental laws and the Occupational Safety & Health Administration for health and safety laws.

Most environmental laws are implemented through permits, which specify maximum discharge limits and require regular monitoring and reporting. However, some laws — like RCRA and OSHA — are implemented through regulations that apply regardless of whether the business requires an environmental permit. These regulations focus on the activities engaged in by the business or industry. Moreover, OSHA includes a “general duty” on businesses to ensure worker and workplace safety. Essentially, OSHA focuses on the environment within the business perimeter; environmental laws focus on the environment outside of the business perimeter, which may be adversely affected by the business activity.

While EHS laws generally apply to large industries, over time the types of businesses potentially impacted by EHS laws have expanded, and that expansion continues today. For example, in the 1980s Congress enacted and amended the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA or Superfund) to cleanup inactive hazardous waste sites. CERCLA retroactively created liability for past and current owners of facilities where hazardous substances were disposed and anyone who arranged for and transported hazardous substances. Moreover, CERCLA requires reporting of hazardous substance releases. As a result, many small businesses that managed hazardous substances in accordance with the standards of the day became liable for their past activities.

Ongoing businesses must also understand and comply with the reporting requirements, which continue to expand. On August 25, 2022, EPA proposed designating perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) as CERCLA hazardous substances. PFOA and PFOS repel water and oil and have been used in a wide variety of products, including non-stick cookware, food wraps, stain repellents and fire-repellent foams. Importantly, the reporting requirements apply to whomever “releases” the chemical into the environment, which means both manufacturers and users of the chemical can be subject to these reporting requirements.

Beyond these “standard” EHS considerations, there are new and evolving requirements or expectations that can impact a business or its products. In 2002, the European Union began regulating hazardous substances in electronic products, then followed up with a take-back scheme for waste electronic products, including batteries and other similar products. These EU directives set minimum standards for marketing products, which have driven — and continue to drive — product manufacturing decisions in the U.S. and elsewhere, since no business wants to limit where its product can be sold. The EU then took aim at the energy efficiency of electronic products and is now focused on the “material” efficiency of products (e.g., minimizing raw material inputs and other harmful impacts during the product life cycle).

Moreover, climate change and responses to the COVID pandemic continue to increase the EHS challenges for businesses. Businesses now must be aware of their manufacturing and product carbon footprints, as well as that of their suppliers. Similarly, businesses must be better prepared for the next pandemic to protect worker health and ensure business continuity. Environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations also must be contemplated as investors and governments increasingly focus on whether the business exercised adequate “due diligence” or oversight on its supply chain, workplace practices and environmental footprint.

EHS considerations are more important today than ever before, whether buying real estate, constructing a building, merging/acquiring a business or just trying to operate and manufacture a product. EHS issues must be considered to both comply with laws and meet customer expectations.

Todd W. Rallison is an attorney at the Phoenixbased law firm of Gallagher & Kennedy with 35 years of environmental health and safety legal experience. For the past two decades, Rallison worked as an in-house local, national and global advisor at Intel Corporation. This broad corporate experience enables him to provide a holistic, strategic approach to serving clients’ environmental health and safety needs, including hazardous waste, water quality, air quality, chemical regulation, litigation, ESG, and mergers and acquisitions. gknet.com

The nonprofits that Fresh Cravings supports have wideranging philanthropic missions, including food insecurity, literacy, suicide prevention, supporting domestic violence survivors, environmentalism, animal welfare and more. freshcravings.com/ salsabrate

Tyler Butler is a chief social impact officer for a publicly traded corporate portfolio where she leads programs that positively impact humanity. She is also the founder of 11Eleven Consulting and she is often cited as a subject matter expert by Forbes, SHRM, Entrepreneur, U.S. News & World Report and more. linkedin.com/in/tylerbutler

Fresh Cravings to Salsabrate™ Goodness

The charitable platform focuses on food insecurity and education

by Tyler Butler

Collaboration is among the most powerful methods to unite communities and make positive change possible. When Mike Parker and his family launched Next Phase Enterprises in 1995 and FoodStory Brands in 2015, they elevated standards and put purpose in focus. While Next Phase specializes in sales and marketing of food and beverages to merchants such as Walmart and Sam’s Club, FoodStory Brands came about as an incubator to thoughtfully curate unique food, beverage brands and licensing programs.

Fresh Cravings is a member of FoodStory Brands, and its brand mission is to “Crave Goodness” — for the individual and for that person’s friends, family and community at large. As Fresh Cravings applied this vision to its community outreach program, several partnerships for good were forged. One such campaign created by the Parker-Dorr-Davison family benefitting St. Vincent de Paul was the Dream Center, a learning and resource center for the city’s most vulnerable children. It offers a variety of activities to help children excel at school, learn new skills and increase their self-esteem — all with the goal of helping them achieve their dreams.

Together with St. Vincent de Paul, the company created a program that involved the Fresh Cravings team planting a “salsa garden” in the nonprofit’s community/urban garden, which will provide fresh produce for the families it supports. Fresh Cravings also devised a gardening program to provide indoor gardening options for all the Dream Center students during their summer school.

Giving back is intrinsic to Fresh Cravings’ core DNA and has been a driving force behind many successful campaigns. This community-focused culture came to fruition with the creation in 2021 of Fresh Cravings’ Salsabrate™ The Good giveback program, its most expansive giveback platform. The goal is to amplify goodness and support unsung heroes who make meaningful contributions in their communities via a public nomination process. The company then chose 50 nonprofits, donating $5,000 to each, for a total of $250,000.

To further amplify the work these incredible charities carry out, the company partnered with UpWorthy and, internally among Fresh Cravings’ team, it invested hundreds of hours to film, produce and post weekly episodes, for 50 consecutive weeks, to the Fresh Cravings social channels, thus leveraging both its treasure and expertise to help worthy causes.

“Our family is deeply humbled to have built two businesses that provide a platform for us to give back in numerous ways,” says FoodStory Brands and Next Phase Enterprises founder and CEO Mike Parker. “From our work, locally in Phoenix with partners like St. Vincent de Paul, Phoenix Children’s Hospital and more, to Fresh Cravings’ national giveback campaign Salsabrate™ The Good, we are able to promote and spread an inherent purpose of servant leadership — to each other, to our communities and to our customers.”

The spirit of service that permeates the two highly successful businesses FoodStory Brands and Next Phase Enterprises relates not only to charitable giving but to how both companies work with their customers, suppliers, employees and partners — a spirit that has also been integral when building and launching new brands. Furthermore, the continuous demonstration of giving from the companies’ founder and his family has led to an internal culture of finding unique ways to serve, especially in the local Phoenix community.

Fresh Cravings carried the Salsabrate™ The Good platforms momentum into 2022. Thus far, the causes of choice have focused on food insecurity and education. The Salsabrate™ The Good giveback campaign in 2021 provided the opportunity to give back beyond the company’s home city of Phoenix, leading to tangible impacts like providing meals to the Navajo Nation, purchasing 25 new guitars for veterans, the procurement of a van to shuttle underserved children to after-school programs and 1,000 blessing bags to Chicago’s homeless, among dozens of other ripple effects.

This fall, Fresh Cravings plans to host its second annual charitable Salsabrate™ The Good event, in partnership with St. Vincent de Paul, which entails a Mystery Basket cooking challenge modeled after the popular cooking competition “Chopped” on the Food Network. The challenge features three chefs, paired with a St. Vincent de Paul-supported youth, who will receive multiple mystery ingredients and race against the clock to create a balanced, delicious meal.

Last year, the competing chefs were the executive chefs from Salad and Go, Fry’s, and St. Vincent de Paul. The goal of this cooking contest is mentorship for the participating youths — as both sous chefs and judges — and to raise awareness that food pantry chefs live and breathe a “mystery basket” challenge daily as they rely on food and beverage donations to create meals for large numbers. Now with a strong signature community initiative and support from team members, Fresh Cravings will continue to grow new opportunities to benefit those who need support most.

Fresh Cravings freshcravings.com

HERE’S WHAT THE 2015 SUPER BOWL MEANT TO THE OVERALL ECONOMY:

• $720 million economic impact to the Valley • $2 million in grants to 27 Arizona nonprofit agencies • 5,500 visiting media members • More than 120,000 visitors to Arizona • 175,000 passengers through Sky Harbor International Airport • A 53% hotel occupancy increase across the Valley compared to the year prior Source: Seidman Research Institute at W. P. Carey School of Business

Don Henninger, executive director of Scottsdale Coalition of Today & Tomorrow (SCOTT), spent more than 30 years in the newspaper business in the Valley with The Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette, where he served in numerous roles, including managing editor, and at the Phoenix Business Journal, where he was publisher for 14 years. SCOTT is a nonprofit group of business and civic leaders who work to educate and advocate for issues important to the city’s economic health and quality of life. scottnow.com

Will Rudeness Slam the Upcoming Tourist Season?

It’s a big question as the State lines up for a ‘super season’

by Don Henninger

A national survey recently asked residents in the 30 largest metro areas to rate their cities in a way that could give potential tourists a glimpse of what to expect if they decide to visit there.

It asked them to evaluate the rudeness levels of their cities to give travelers a sense of what kind of attitudes they might encounter. Phoenix did not fare well in the Preply study, and was ranked as the 11th-rudest metro region in the country.

Ordinarily it would be easy to shrug off the survey. Studies like this, it seems, can be a dime a dozen.

But this is not an ordinary year for Arizona tourism. The state is about to put out the welcome mat for visitors from around the world in what could be an epic tourism season, and the survey was a reminder that everyone in the state can play a supporting role in how our visitors are received.

After a couple down years of struggling through the symptoms of the COVID pandemic, state tourism officials are hoping for a full recovery as it lines up for a “super season.”

There’s a lot at stake. The industry has been a steady, reliable economic driver for more than 100 years. While many industries have come and gone as the state has evolved, tourism has been steady as a rock.

The industry’s best year ever was 2019, when the state hosted 46.8 million overnight stays and took in in $25.6 billion in direct spending from travelers. Then COVID arrived, and the dollars took a nose dive in 2020, dropping to $15 billion. It began to rebound in 2021, improving to $23.6 billion, with a lot of that spending from in-state leisure travelers. Even in a down year, it generated $3.4 billion in tax revenue and supported more than 167,000 jobs.

The state’s high season is getting under way now as the weather improves and people start traveling again. About 88% of travelers in the U.S. reported in August that they plan to travel in the next six months, and that’s good news for destinations like Arizona.

The hotel industry could use the boost. The state tourism office says its most recent lodging reports show that hotel occupancy was 67% from April to June, up 7% from the same time a year earlier.

This all comes in a year when the ultimate attraction returns to the state — the Super Bowl — which will be here in just about four months.

The economic impact of the game is huge and benefits all segments of the tourism economy. When it was last here in 2015, the resorts in Scottsdale and Paradise Valley recorded their second-highest daily occupancy rate ever the night before the game — 97.5%. In essence, the market was sold out.

The Super Bowl is the main attraction but not the only one in the “super season” year. The WM Phoenix Open, BarrettJackson Auto Auction and the Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show also draw huge numbers of visitors from around the world. And right after that comes the Cactus League, and this could be the first year since the pandemic that features a full slate of games with no interruptions.

The tourism industry benefits everyone in the state, from the economy at large to individual residents. The state’s tourism office, for example, says tourism-related revenues have cut the annual tax burden per household by an average of $738.

That should be incentive enough to encourage everyone to embrace visitors this year, or at least be polite to them. So back to the survey. Preply, a language-learning app and e-learning platform with operations in the U.S. and 30 countries, surveyed more than 1,500 residents in 30 metro areas over the summer.

Here are 10 factors that respondents said were signs of rude behavior: • Being absorbed by phone in public • Drivers not letting other cars merge in traffic • Drivers not slowing down around pedestrians • Being noisy in public • Not acknowledging strangers • Watching videos in public • Talking on speaker in public • Closed-off body language • Not respecting personal space • Being rude to service staff

As citizen ambassadors for Arizona, this would be a prime year for everyone to practice behaviors that embellish the visitor experience, encouraging them to return to Arizona in the future, bringing their leisure dollars and perhaps business investments back to the state.

Actually, shouldn’t we all be treating each other like that anyway?