EOA Posts List of Safer Chemical Ingredients

From the USEPA:

"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today posted a List of Safer Chemical Ingredients that contains chemicals that meet stringent criteria applied by the Design for the Environment (DfE) Safer Product Labeling Program. This program recognizes products that are high-performance and cost-effective while using the safest chemical ingredients. At present, more than 2,800 common household and other products carry the DfE Safer Product Label. This list of safer chemical ingredients will help product manufacturers identify chemicals that the DfE program has evaluated and identified as safer alternatives.  This list only includes chemicals in products that were voluntarily submitted for evaluation through the DfE Safer Product Labeling Program. There may be other chemicals not included in this list that are also safer."

The safer ingredients list can be found here. 

Former EPA Administrator Russell Train Has Died

Former EPA Administrator Russell Train passed away at the age of 92 on September 17, 2012. Train was the second Administrator of the Agency, serving under President's Nixon and Ford from 1973 to 1977. Prior to EPA he had founded several wildlife organizations and served as the first vice-president of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). He was later made Chair Emeritus of the the WWF, returning there after leaving the EPA.

A statement by Carter Roberts at WWF can be read here.

An EPA biographer of Russell Train can be read here.

An article about Train's passing is here.

More information on Russell Train's career here.

ECHA Strengthens Compliance Check Strategy

From the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA):

"To ensure increased compliance of REACH registration dossiers, ECHA carries out both full compliance checks of the dossiers and now more effectively also targets its evaluation to specific parts of them.

In a full compliance check, ECHA addresses the full dossier content in a single evaluation exercise, especially for randomly selected registration dossiers. This means that ECHA performs a systematic evaluation of all information requirements in the technical dossier (e.g. physico-chemical, environmental and human health endpoints), including the corresponding elements and conclusions provided in the chemical safety report (i.e. PBT/vPvB assessment, classification and labelling, exposure assessment and risk characterisation). Where a dossier is non-compliant with an information requirement, ECHA will request the information in a single decision. The decision is taken in cooperation with the Member States.

In a targeted compliance check, ECHA evaluates only a specific part of the registration dossier based on specified concerns. Selected (groups of) endpoints or criteria, called areas of concern, have been identified that are in particular relevant for the safe use of substances.  The ultimate goal is to focus on those endpoints that matter for human health and the environment. Emphasis will be given to Persistent, Bioaccumulative and Toxic (PBT);  Carcinogenic, Mutagenic or Toxic to reproduction (CMR); or sensitising (S) properties of a substance. IT-assisted targeting combined with expert judgement will help to achieve the necessary increased compliance of the registration dossiers. The chances of non-compliant dossiers being picked up for compliance check are now higher. Dossiers submitted individually outside an existing joint submission and dossiers with obviously incomplete essential elements will be automatically selected for compliance check."

The full press release can be read here.