By Maria J. Doa, PhD, Senior Director, Chemicals Policy, and Greg Schweer, Consultant
NOTE: This is the third in a series about EPA’s regulation of new chemicals. See below under Go Deeper for links to other blogs in the series.
What Happened?
EPA recently proposed regulations to govern how it reviews companies’ pre-manufacture notifications for new chemicals before those chemicals can go on the market.
Why It Matters
Industry often waits until late in the review process to submit information—which means that EPA may spend a significant amount of time and effort to revise its risk assessments to incorporate the new information.
EPA has a major opportunity to improve the New Chemicals Program as it crafts these revised regulations. Requiring industry to provide additional “known or reasonably ascertainable information” as required by the law is an important component of this rule. This should reduce the amount of assessment “rework” the agency currently conducts.