EPA Promises Industry 'Adequate' Time To Report Chemical Volume Data
BALTIMORE – A top EPA toxics office official says the agency will provide the chemical industry with “adequate” time to comply with the agency's expanded new chemical production and use reporting rules, though the official stopped short of saying how much time industry will have to comply with the upcoming Inventory Update Rule (IUR).
"I know there is a lot of concern about about [the] timing for the IUR. We will provide [an] adequate period of time for for you to submit . . . your reports," Wendy Cleland-Hamnett, director of EPA's Office of Pollution Prevention &; Toxics, told the GlobalChem industry conference here March 22.
Her comments appear aimed at addressing concerns that industry will not have enough time to comply with the upcoming IUR, a requirement of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). A proposed version of the rule issued last year expands the time period for reporting, increases the frequency of reporting, eliminates upper thresholds for reporting, and rejects more confidential business information claims, among other changes EPA says are designed to improve chemicals reporting.
A final version of the rule is currently under review at the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) and is expected to be released before July. Industry must report their data between June 1 and Sept. 30.
The rule is one of several TSCA measures EPA is developing. In her slide presentation here, Cleland-Hamnett said the agency is also developing a new rule identifying “chemicals of concern” for potential future regulation -- an earlier version of which has drawn strong industry criticism -- and several additional measures requiring industry to test the toxicity and provide data on chemicals.
But the upcoming IUR is a special concern for industry. At a March 21 session here, several industry representatives raised concerns that their companies will not have enough time to comply with the requirements.
Robert Kiefer, director of regulatory and technical affairs at the American Chemistry Council, said that given the changes to what information will need to be collected and the agency's new online reporting system, companies would likely need an additional nine to 12 months to collect all the data needed and enter it into the system. “There needs to be time to make this work for everyone,” Kiefer said.
And Imogene Treble, product and regulatory leader for Dow Chemical, said companies not only need the rule to be released, but also subsequent guidance. Treble said she had put together information on two chemicals as outlined in the draft rule and found “it's a lot of work, it's a lot more work than I was expecting.”
Companies keep their chemical information in a format consistent with prior reporting rules, Treble said, but the new standard has several changes, including asking for more information on mixtures of chemicals and inorganic chemicals, which were exempt in the last reporting cycle in 2006, and must now be taken in to account, among other changes.
Even the way information must be entered into EPA's new online submission system is different from prior reporting cycles, meaning that companies have a lot of work left to do, she said. “I don't know how we are going to get all of this information changed over,” Treble said. “How long is it going to take? Hours for each chemical, that's for sure.”
But EPA's Cleland-Hamnett said that the expanded reporting requirements are necessary. "We have found that without annual reporting [volumes], we're missing a lot of information that can be informative regarding trends," she said, such as for those chemicals that are produced periodically.
Similarly, she said lower reporting thresholds also help capture important additional data. "Current thresholds excludes lots of chemicals that may be important, even high production volume because of facility-specific levels." Even with the proposed change in reporting levels, EPA will still only be capturing data on less than 10 percent of the chemicals in commerce, she said.
And, she added, the agency needs the data to prioritize regulatory and other efforts and to do risk assessments. “We believe that the changes we've proposed will allow us to do that, especially the changes with respect to processing and use,” she said.
March 22
insideEPA.com
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