Life Cycle Thinking Blog - TSCA

As follow on to its Chemical Action Plan on Bisphenol A (BPA), EPA published an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking July 26, 2011, to develop environmental effects and exposure testing. EPA is not addressing human health effects in this notice as there is ongoing testing work already with other agencies. (See a pointed Trevor Butterworth blog about that work here.)

Current and recent events and articles

EPA revealed another set of chemical identities in health and safety studies June 8, 2011, here. I think most of them were “voluntary” by companies, but EPA is claiming some were not.
Protect what is legitimate and be ready to back up your claim. Provide meaningful generic names. Let it go if you can protect your trade secrets by protecting your company name or if historical information is no longer trade secret. Quit jeopardizing the ability to protect real trade secrets by being lazy and claiming everything confidential.

EPA declassified confidentiality claims in a batch of 42 health and safety studies (mostly 8(e) notices of substantial risk) March 24, 2011, following through on their promise of transparency.
Certainly there are some old claims out there that are no longer valid (many on what was at the time R&D activity that has either gone commercial or died). And some claims were pretty bogus to begin with. But the idea of going back and having to re-substantiate the thousands of claims that have been made over the last 35 years – holy cow! Believe it or not, some of the claims will still be valid (just like the secret ingredients of Coke).

EPA announced it has rejected confidentiality claims for chemical identity of 14 chemicals in health and safety studies under TSCA. The agency is narrowly interpreting TSCA to only allow limited claims of confidential business information (CBI) especially for chemical identity in studies. It remains to be seen if companies can justify some of their claims.