Chemicals policy reform

Our nation's main statute governing chemicals policy — the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) — is seriously flawed and needs fundamental reform.

Unlike every other major environmental law, the statute has never been significantly amended since it was adopted, in 1976.

TSCA is badly broken and fails to ensure chemical safety in the U.S.

Specifically, the statute:

• has failed to deliver the information needed to identify unsafe — as well as safer — chemicals,


• forbids the federal government from sharing much of the limited information it does obtain,


• imposes a nearly impossible burden on government to prove actual harm in order to control or replace a dangerous chemical and


• thereby perpetuates the chemicals industry's failure to innovate toward inherently safer chemical and product design.

Towards a solution: the Safe Chemicals Act of 2013

EDF strongly supports the Safe Chemicals Act of 2013, which was introduced by Senator Frank R. Lautenberg and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in April 2013. This bill addresses the major flaws of TSCA and would provide important protections for public health and the environment.

Among the bill's key provisions:

• Industry would bear the burden of proving its chemicals are safe, instead of government having to prove harm to health before being able to regulate a chemical.
• Information on the health and environmental impacts of chemicals would be required to be developed by companies and disclosed to the public.
• Industry would be required immediately to reduce use of or exposure to chemicals of greatest concern, including those that are toxic, persist in the environment, and build up in people.
• Companies would have to substantiate that any information they want to keep secret is a legitimate trade secret, and most such confidentiality claims would expire after 5 years unless resubstantiated.

EDF reports spotlight urgent need for reform

Major advances in chemicals policies in other parts of the world are leaving the U.S. behind in the increasingly global chemicals economy. For more than a decade, EDF's experts have pressed for reform, issuing a series of groundbreaking reports and papers:

• Our 1997 report Toxic Ignorance [PDF] raised public awareness of how few widely used chemicals had been tested and how little public data were available.


• EDF's 2007 report Not That Innocent documented the urgent need for policy reform. Our analysis contrasted U.S. policies with those in Canada and the European Union and identifed "best practices" culled from all three systems that together create a vision for future U.S. chemicals policy.


• Our September 2008 report Across the Pond assessed one of the first impacts that the new European regulation called REACH will have on U.S. companies and chemicals: REACH's identification of "substances of very high concern."


• EDF scientist Richard Denison's paper Ten Essential Elements in TSCA Reform [PDF], published in January 2009 in the Environmental Law Reporter, laid out a blueprint for new legislation to replace the outmoded Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.

EDF partners with state and national groups to press for reform