Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Public Right-to-Know About Chemicals



For the first time, the U.S. EPA is providing web access, free of charge, to the Toxic Substances Control Act Chemical Substance Inventory. This inventory contains a consolidated list of thousands of industrial chemicals maintained by the agency. The EPA is making this information available on http://www.epa.gov/tri/ This action represents a move by the EPA to increase the transparency of chemical information while the agency continues to push for legislative reform of the 30 year old Toxic Substances Control Act, (TSCA). Currently, there are more than 84,000 chemicals manufactured, used, or imported in the United States listed on the TSCA Inventory, yet the EPA is unable to publicly identify nearly 17,000 of these chemicals because the chemicals have been claimed as confidential business information by the manufacturers under the TSCA.