US to begin testing inorganic chemicals

18 March 2008 14:43  [Source: ICIS news]

BALTIMORE, Maryland (ICIS news)--The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will launch a new programme in the third quarter this year to begin testing inorganic chemicals that are produced in high volumes, EPA administrator Stephen Johnson said on Tuesday.

 

Johnson told a chemicals industry conference that he expects his agency will be ready to expand the existing high production volume (HPV) programme, which so far has focused chiefly on organic chemicals, to inorganic substances by August this year.

 

The nine-year-old HPV programme is a voluntary, cooperative arrangement between EPA and the US chemicals industry to determine the environmental profile of substances that are produced or imported in quantities of 1m pounds (454 tonnes) annually.  Industry-funded risk assessments have been nearly completed on about 2,800 high production chemicals.

 

Speaking at the annual GlobalChem conference on chemical regulation, Johnson said he wants to engage the chemicals industry in a broader application of the HPV programme, to include inorganic chemicals.

 

“This is needed to provide the American public and the global community with a complete profile on all high production volume chemicals,” Johnson said.  He did not indicate how many chemicals might be affected by the new HPV testing plan.

 

He also said EPA is to review and revise the inventory of some 83,000 chemicals that are regulated under the principal US substances control regime, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

 

“We want to be sure that the TSCA inventory reflects the chemicals that are actually in production and use in this country,” Johnson said. 

 

“We strongly suspect that a significant number of the chemicals in the TSCA inventory are no longer produced or used, and resetting the inventory will help us make TSCA more efficient,” he said.

 

He said he has directed senior EPA officials to initiate a series of discussions with chemical industry representatives and other stakeholders to see how lessons learned from the existing HPV programme and TSCA enforcement might be applied to the two new undertakings.

 

“I hope we will be ready to implement the inorganics HPV programme and the TSCA inventory reset by the end of summer,” Johnson said.

 

Cosponsored by the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association (SOCMA) and the American Chemistry Council (ACC), the three-day GlobalChem conference continues through Wednesday.

By: Joe Kamalick
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