Methylene Chloride Is Legal Again. Now Find Some.
The Fifth Circuit vacated EPA's 2024 methylene chloride rule on September 15, and with it all forty of the prohibitions the rule wrote. Every one of its five prohibition dates had already passed, the newest by 140 days. The molecule itself never went anywhere: US imports hit 14,345 tonnes in 2025, the highest of the seven years we pulled, in the same calendar year the import ban took effect.
If you run methylene chloride through anything in a US plant, you stopped being allowed to do that on April 28.
On September 15 the Fifth Circuit erased the date.
The panel vacated EPA's 2024 methylene chloride rule and the unreasonable-risk determination underneath it, in East Fork Enterprises, Incorporated; Epic Paint Company v. EPA, No. 24-60227, consolidated with No. 24-60256.
That rule had prohibited forty of the fifty-three conditions of use EPA identified for the chemical. All forty prohibitions went with it.
The newest one, the ban on industrial and commercial use, had been law for 140 days.
"Does a vacated prohibition put the drum back on your dock?"
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