On July 10, 2017, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a prepublication version of a direct final rule, Significant New Use Rule on Certain Chemical Substances, noting the issuance of significant new use rules (SNUR) under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) for 29 chemical substances that were the subject of premanufacture notices (PMN) and subject to consent orders under TSCA Section 5(e). These are the first rules with consent orders negotiated...
On June 30, 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued its opinion in Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), et al. v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Case No. 14-1036, resolving jurisdictional and substantive issues following complaints alleging that EPA violated Section 7(a)(2) of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) by failing to make an effects determination or to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) or the National Marine...
On January 12, 2017, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is scheduled to publish in the Federal Register a Section 8(a) of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) rule establishing reporting and recordkeeping requirements for certain chemical substances when they are manufactured or processed at the nanoscale. According to a pre-publication version of the final rule, manufacturers and processers, or persons who intend to manufacture or process these chemical...
In June 2017, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a draft Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP) National Program Manager Guidance for Fiscal Year (FY) 2018-2019, which sets forth the strategies and actions that EPA and its state and tribal partners will undertake to protect human health and the environment via six key programmatic activities. EPA uses an Annual Commitment System (ACS) to track annual regional performance information and...
According to the July 7, 2017, issue of the Chemicals Management Plan Progress Report, Health Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada are in the process of prioritizing nanoscale forms of substances on the Domestic Substances List. As reported in our July 27, 2015, blog item, Canada conducted a mandatory information-gathering survey under Section 71 of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999. Canada states that the survey identified 53 substances as...
On July 7, 2017, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a notice in the Federal Register announcing the availability of the scope documents for the risk evaluations of the first ten chemicals that it will be conducting under the amended Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). 82 Fed. Reg. 31592. The notice states that each scope document includes “the hazards, exposures, conditions of use, and the potentially exposed or susceptible subpopulations the EPA expects to...
To assist the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in selecting agents for review in future Monographs, IARC regularly convenes international, interdisciplinary Advisory Groups to review all public nominations and to recommend those it considers to be of high priority. According to information on its website, IARC will convene its next Advisory Group in 2018/2019. IARC encourages the general public, the scientific community, national health agencies, and...
On June 30, 2017, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) Board of Appeal published two decisions related to nanomaterials. In the July 5, 2017, issue of ECHA Weekly, ECHA states that the Board of Appeal “largely upheld the appeals and annulled most of the requests for information.” In Cases A-014-2015 and A-015-2015, registrants appealed the same 2015 ECHA decision requesting information on synthetic amorphous silica (SAS) following a substance evaluation by the Netherlands Competent...
On June 1, 2017, in the People’s Republic of China (China), the newly revised Regulation on Pesticide Administration (RPA) became effective. The newly revised RPA was approved during the 164th executive meeting of the State Council of China on February 8, 2017, and published as Decree Number 677 of the State Council of China (China Decree 677) on April 1, 2017. It requires the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) to formulate relevant rules and measures for its implementation....
The Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology (CEINT) seeks comments on the NANoREG-proposed ISA-TAB-nano templates. According to CEINT, the ISA-TAB-nano file sharing format, developed under the National Cancer Informatics Program Nanotechnology Working Group (NCIP NanoWG), is an accepted ASTM standard (ASTM International E2909-13). In 2016, the European Union NANoREG project adopted and adapted the ISA-TAB-nano format to organize consistently the results...