Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), as amended by the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, requires the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate existing chemicals to determine whether they “present an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment.” On December 19th, 2016, EPA initiated the first risk evaluations on 10 chemical substances drawn from the 2014 update of the TSCA Work Plan for Chemical Assessments. Within six months of this date, EPA must publish a document that outlines the scope of the risk evaluation that will be conducted for each chemical, including the chemical’s hazards and exposure for the conditions of use of the chemical substance.<br/>To support each risk evaluation, EPA sought to gather all data for all the major components of the evaluation (engineering, exposure, fate, ecological hazard, and human health hazard) prior to the six-month deadline of the scoping document. A strategy was developed to conduct a systematic literature search that is both transparent and comprehensive and would identify relevant information/data for the risk evaluations.<br/>This talk will outline steps taken by EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics to gather and systematically review the data needed to develop the risk evaluations for the first 10 existing chemical assessments under the amended TSCA. Further, it will describe the development of the literature search strategies and screening protocols, the initial steps of data gathering and literature screening, the use of EPA’s Health and Environmental Research Online (HERO) database as a tool to develop each risk evaluation, and next steps following screening.<br/><br/>

Data gathering for existing chemicals risk evaluation under the amended TSCA

254th National Meeting (2017)

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