The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) developed the standard for domestic industrial chemical management and evaluating chemicals in production, import, use, and disposal.  In 2016, TSCA was revised in the Chemical Safety (Lautenberg) Act to incorporate key changes to the CDR reporting on Form U and the fundamental shifts in requirement and approach to chemical management that impacts facilities and industry.

These revisions and key changes to reporting on the EPA CDR reporting on Form U include:

Industrial Processing and Use

The current process and product use codes will be replaced with codes based on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) function, product, and article use categories. It is now mandatory to report the function of the chemical in commercial and consumer products.

Confidentiality Claims

Amended provisions require substantiation for submission of all Confidential Business information (CBI) confidentiality claims except production volume (volume domestically manufactured in 2019, volume imported in 2019, and the total production volume for the three years from 2016 to 2018) is exempt and in joint submissions, information from the primary submitter as to the supplier identity, chemical substance name (trade name) and details as to the full composition of the mixture is exempt.

Recycling

The question as to whether a chemical is removed from a waste stream and recycled, remanufactured, reprocessed, or reused as codified under the old TSCA regulations has been changed to simply indicate if it is a chemical is removed from a waste stream and recycled.

New Definition of Small Manufacturers

First, a manufacturer (including an importer) is small, if the manufacturer’s total annual sales including those of its parent company (if any) are less than $120 million. However, if the annual production or importation volume of a particular substance at any individual site owned or controlled by the manufacturer or importer is greater than 45,400 kilograms (100,000 pounds), the manufacturer (including importer) will not qualify as a small manufacturer for purposes of reporting.

Second, a manufacturer (including importer) of a substance is small if its total annual sales, when combined with those of its parent company (if any) are less than $12 million, regardless of the quantity of substances produced or imported by that manufacturer (including importer).

Revised Costs

The EPA revealed that the Chemical Safety Act revisions to TSCA are anticipated to increase the overall cost of the rule by $2 million total for the 5,660 sites that are expected to report in 2020.

Reporting Deadline for 2020

The reporting deadline for the CDR reporting has been changed from September 30, 2020 to November 30, 2020 for the reporting year 2020 only.

Furthermore, we will review the new additional definition updates and the possible exemptions available to manufacturers and importers.