EDF comments at EPA’s public meeting on identifying chemicals for prioritization stress legal requirements and urge adoption of sound and fair policies

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

EPA held a public meeting today on “Approaches to Identifying Potential Candidate Chemicals for Prioritization” under last year’s reforms made to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) by the Lautenberg Act.

EPA provided brief opportunities for stakeholders to provide comments.  Four of us from EDF gave oral comments at the meeting.  Below we provide links to those comments in written form and briefly describe them (in the order in which they were presented).

EDF Senior Attorney Robert Stockman’s comments argue that, under the law, EPA:

• must use its broad information-gathering authorities under section 4, 8 and 11 of TSCA to collect all “reasonably available information” to inform the prioritization process;
• should exercise those authorities in the processes leading up to and including prioritization; and
• should start immediately to develop additional information on chemicals in its Work Plan.

EDF Project Manager Lindsay McCormick’s comments:

• stress the need to use its information-gathering authorities to develop experimental data early in the prioritization process;
• caution against over-reliance on voluntary information submissions;
• urge EPA to avoid implanting a bias toward information-rich chemicals; and
• remind EPA of its obligations to make full health and safety studies and underlying data publicly available.

My comments:

• stress that the law sets a higher bar for low-priority than for high-priority designations;
• urge EPA to identify only small numbers of low-priority candidates at a time;
• caution EPA not to identify categories of chemicals as candidates for low-priority designations; and
• argue EPA should consider ensuring a minimum set of hazard data is available for candidates.

EDF Senior Scientist Dr. Jennifer McPartland’s comments point to serious limitations and critical caveats relating to some of EPA’s proposed approaches for identifying candidates, including:

• Canadian Categorization and Chemicals Management Plan;
• Safer Choice Ingredient List; and
• Functional category approaches.