Overview

In March 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provided free public access to the consolidated Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Chemical Substance Inventory on its website for the first time. The inventory was also posted as a data set that can be extracted in a variety of ways, enabling further manipulation of the data. The TSCA inventory contains EPA’s consolidated list of industrial chemicals. Only nonconfidential chemical information was made publicly available.

Useful Links

• EPA News Release, “EPA Makes Chemical Information More Accessible to Public for the First Time, TSCA Chemical Inventory Free of Charge Online”; March 15, 2010.

• EPA New Chemicals Program web page, which provides an overview of TSCA and links to related program information.

• TSCA inventory download page at data.gov. (http://www.data.gov/raw/1630#)

History of the TSCA Program

EPA published the final TSCA Inventory Reporting Rule on December 23, 1977. The initial reporting period was January to May of 1978, for chemical substances in commerce since January of 1975. The initial TSCA Chemical Substance Inventory was published in 1979; a second version was published in 1982 and included approximately 62,000 chemical substances provided to EPA during the initial and follow-up reporting periods. Through the addition of new chemicals in commercial TSCA applications in the U.S., there are more than 84,000 chemical substances, as defined in TSCA section 3(2)(A) – among them organics, inorganics, polymers, and UVCBs (chemical substances of Unknown or Variable composition, Complex reaction products, and Biological materials) – on the Inventory at this time.

(Excerpt from the EPA web site)

About the Author

Michael Bittner is an associate partner in the Boston, U.S.A. office of Environmental Resources Management (ERM) and editor of the EHS Journal. He has more than 20 years of experience in the EHS field, including 17 years of EHS consulting experience and four years as the corporate environmental manager for a U.S. Department of Defense contractor. Mr. Bittner specializes in global EHS solutions including

• Compliance and management systems auditing.
• EHS management systems implementation and design.
• Sustainability solutions.
• Strategic planning.
• Mergers and acquisitions support.

Image: Orbit 5 by Barun Patro, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.