EPA Urged to Work on Compliance Issues For Makers of Biobased, Other Chemicals

The July 1, 2013, issue of Bloomberg BNA Daily Environment Report featured comments from the BNA webinar called “Toxic Substances Control Act Premanufacture Notifications: The New State of Play,” moderated by Lynn L. Bergeson. “The Environmental Protection Agency should work with chemical manufacturers and other parties to address some core issues complicating regulatory compliance for biobased and other chemical manufacturers, an attorney and an expert in chemical control regulations told EPA officials June 27. These issues can confuse chemical purchasers along with companies that import finished goods, or ‘‘articles,’’ containing certain chemicals, said Lynn Bergeson, managing partner for Bergeson & Campbell, P.C., and Kathleen Roberts, vice president of Bergeson & Campbell Consortia Management, L.L.C.

Issues Bergeson and Roberts focused on included:

• several recent significant new use rules (SNURs) EPA has proposed that would cover imported articles;
• inconsistencies in the nomenclature used for the TSCA Inventory that result in biobased chemicals potentially being subject to different regulations from their molecularly equivalent petroleum-based compounds; and
• the sometimes duplicative procedures chemical manufacturers or processors must follow when a SNUR defines a new use as production that exceeds a specified volume, but that volume is claimed as confidential business information (CBI) by the chemical’s original manufacturer.”

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