Ann Grimaldi

The California Department of Toxic Substances Control has extended the comment period for its draft Priority Product Work Plan to October 21, 2014.  As GLO previously reported, DTSC released the draft Work Plan under the Safer Consumer Products Regulations on September 12, 2014.  The agency encourages comments to be submitted electronically. DTSC also has released an updated informational list of Candidate Chemicals, and has established an updated electronic database to search for chemicals identified on the list.  As GLO previously reported, the Safer Consumer Products Regulations do not themselves establish a definitive list of Candidate Chemicals.  Rather, chemicals are identified…

On September 30, 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published a final rule adding a nonylphenol category to the list of chemicals subject to reporting under Section 313 of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) of 1986. This means that certain facilities that manufacture, process or otherwise use nonylphenols must report their releases and other waste management quantities of these chemicals above specified thresholds. Although EPA originally proposed to add this category by identifying chemical structure rather than individual affected Chemical Abstracts Service Registry Numbers (CASRNs), in the final rule EPA abandoned the structure identification approach and adopted the…

At its September 25, 2014 Priority Product Work Plan workshop in Sacramento, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control announced its expectation that its draft Priority Product Work Plan will be finalized in early 2015 and that the Work Plan's implementation will involve mandatory data call-ins, stakeholder meetings and workshops.  The outcome of that implementation process will be the identification of Priority Products, and DTSC expects to identify no more than 10 Priority Products in any given identification round. The Safer Consumer Products Regulations, finalized in October 2013, require DTSC to publish a Priority Product Work Plan and to update…

In a new draft of proposed revisions to the Proposition 65 warning regulations (Warning Regulation DISCUSSION DRAFT 092314), the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has made certain improvements to its March 7, 2014 draft proposal. (See prior GLO report on OEHHA's earlier proposal.)   However, it's unlikely that either the regulated community or Proposition 65 enforcers will be satisfied with all of the changes in OEHHA's latest approach. On the plus side, OEHHA's latest draft proposal eliminates the previously proposed requirement to use the Globally Harmonized System (GHS) health hazard pictogram in Proposition 65 warnings.  Instead, an exclamation point…

On September 16, 2014, the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment published an announcement soliciting public comments on a number of potential regulatory proposals revising the Proposition 65 regulations.  Public comments are due November 17, 2014, and OEHHA plans to hold a public workshop in the near future on this topic. OEHHA's request for input is part of recent efforts to reform and update the Proposition 65 regulations and follows its pre-regulatory draft proposal, released on March 7, 2014, to revise the Proposition 65 warning regulations.  That pre-regulatory proposal has met with significant resistance from the regulated community as…