Life Cycle Thinking Blog

Walmart issues new product disclosure and ban rules.

EPA withdraws two draft proposed TSCA rules from OMB.

Spring 2013 EPA Regulatory Agenda predicts a lot of action coming up on SNURs and cbi.

EPA declassified chemical identities in a few more health and safety studies and made some pretty graphs: http://www.epa.gov/oppt/existingchemicals/pubs/transparency-charts.html

If I’m reading the numbers right, they have declassified about 20% of the 4,025 claims made. 3,242 claims were deemed actually legitimate. Another 11, 508 studies had made no claims in the first place. Only 532 of the chemicals were made over 25,000 lb per IUR reporting. Play whatever games you want with the numbers.

Make sure confidential claims have been appropriately made (and paid for) in REACH dossiers and Safety Data Sheets – because ECHA is going to publish REACH registrants and chemical identities using the logic that if it’s on the SDS, it doesn’t matter what is claimed in the REACH dossier. See announcement and Q & A

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Certainly there are some old claims out there that are no longer valid (many on what was at the time R&D activity that has either gone commercial or died).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.