Practical EHS Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
Today’s workplace uses thousands of chemicals, many of which are hazardous. The resources in this section will help guide you in the safe and legal identification, storage, transport, and use of these chemicals, and in making sure that your employees right to know how to be safe around such substances is provided, as required by law.
Hearing impairment can be caused by exposure both to noise and to chemicals, and the impairment from either of those two exposures can be worse if there is exposure to both. Damage to hearing from chemicals—called ototoxicity; the chemicals themselves are called ototoxicants—is a relatively unknown cause of injury to workers, a state of affairs […]
The 2016 amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) expanded access to chemical confidential business information (CBI) that businesses are required by law to provide to the EPA. TSCA Section 14, which deals in general with the CBI, now includes three categories of people who are entitled to receive the CBI. The EPA recently […]
The many new tasks the EPA was assigned in the 2016 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) reform legislation include development of a strategic plan to promote the reduction and eventual replacement of testing on vertebrate animals when manufacturers are required by TSCA to use testing to determine the risks posed by their chemicals.
Twelve federal agencies, including the Department of Labor, are participating in the President’s Task Force on Environmental Health Risks to Children. The Task Force is currently developing a draft strategy on reducing childhood lead exposure. On February 16, 2018, several cabinet heads met to outline the draft strategy. Since childhood lead exposure can occur when […]
We are still months away from July 1, 2018, when reports covering 2017 (called the 2017 reporting year) required by Section 313 of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA)—commonly called the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI)—must be submitted to the EPA. But, as the Agency is fond of pointing out, it is wise to […]
In yesterday’s Advisor, we discussed a recent Chemical Safety Board (CSB) report concerning a chemical release involving a delivery and inadvertent mixture of incompatible chemicals. Today we will review CSB recommendations for the facility, the delivery company, and the local emergency responders. These recommendations are widely applicable to all chemical facilities, delivery companies, and local […]
The combustion of fossil fuels accounts for 75% to 85% of emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2), but the chemical is also generated by multiple industrial activities, including the manufacture of hydrosulfites and other sulfur-containing chemicals; to bleach wood pulp and paper; to process, disinfect, and bleach food; for waste and water treatment in metal and […]
In its latest rulemaking to implement the 2016 amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the EPA is proposing a fee structure to partly defray the Agency’s administrative costs. The fee authority was authorized by Congress to provide the Agency with a sustainable source of funds to fulfill its legal obligations, mainly under three […]
The EPA has floated several approaches to assigning unique identifiers (UIDs) to chemical substances to protect information claimed as confidential by the manufacturers of the substances.
The Health Effects Division (HED) of EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention has issued a memo that explains when the number of field trials to develop residue data for seed-treatment uses can be reduced.