Shining a (partly shaded) light on nanomaterials that present “substantial risk”

Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Senior Scientist.

Section 8(e) of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) requires any company that manufactures, imports, processes or distributes chemicals in the U.S. to notify EPA within 30 days if it obtains new information that “reasonably supports the conclusion that such substance or mixture presents a substantial risk of injury to health or the environment.”  Are there Section 8(e) notices for nanomaterials?

EPA posts “sanitized” versions of Section 8(e) notices on its website, stripped of any information deemed confidential by the submitter – which, as allowed under TSCA, frequently includes the identity of the substance, the submitter or both.

So how many of these “substantial risk” notices have been received for nanomaterials?

EPA provides no ability to search for such documents on its Section 8(e) notice website, so we had to do examine each of EPA’s month-by-month listings.  These postings extend from September 2008 back to January 2004 – excluding, for some strange reason, the second half of 2004.  (A note that has been on the site for a long time now optimistically states:  “Attention: The 2000-2004 submissions will be posted on this page in the near future.”)

Our search found eight Section 8(e) notices that were identified as pertaining to nanomaterials (though there may be others that claimed the nanomaterial identity confidential).  Here they are:

In my next post, I’ll look more closely at the Section 8(e) notices EPA has received for carbon nanotubes.