The Nickel Report

Last year Congress directed the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review new chemicals by a new process. A major question for manufacturers and consumers is whether EPA can do this within a reasonable time period without unnecessarily getting in the way of innovation.

Since enactment of the Lautenberg Act amending the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) in June 2016, the pace of EPA’s review of new chemicals has slowed dramatically. While EPA’s pre-enactment new chemicals program handled around 1,000 premanufacture notifications (PMNs) annually, EPA estimates that a backlog of about 600 new chemicals had built up by January 2017, which created a substantial concern in the regulated community.