By Lynn L. Bergeson and Carla N. Hutton

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) met with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) on August 5, 2021, to clarify concepts from the July 27, 2021, tiered data reporting (TDR) webinar. EPA’s meeting summary states that EDF representatives requested clarification on the following issues discussed during the webinar:

• Whether EPA intends to scale back the Chemical Data Reporting (CDR) requirements with respect to the amount of information collected per chemical or to the number of chemicals reported.
  • EPA responded that the changes to CDR discussed in the webinar presentation would reduce the data collected per chemical and would not impact which chemicals were required to be reported under CDR.
• Whether the data expected to be used to inform the identification of potential candidate chemicals for prioritization was limited to CDR.
  • EPA responded that the webinar presentation was not intended to identify all sources of information that would be used for the various steps of the overall existing chemicals process, including informing the identification of the pool of potential candidate chemicals for the prioritization process. Rather, the intent was to identify the data that would be available from either CDR or TDR for use for each step in the process.
• Reasoning behind EPA’s decisions regarding timing of the collection tiers and selected data elements.
  • EPA responded that the specifics of what data elements would be included in which collection tiers was under development and that the Agency is interested in comments from EDF or other stakeholders to help inform the TDR proposal.
• Whether EPA had any more details about the post-risk management stage, which was included in the webinar presentation as “TBD.”
  • EPA responded that there were no additional details at this time.

According to the meeting summary, EDF provided additional comments during the meeting, including concern about scaling back CDR; belief that data should be collected earlier in the existing chemicals process to be more useful and enable EPA to make better use of TSCA Section 4; and a request to make the reported data publicly available in a timely manner to inform public comment. EDF “also reiterated their concern with the length of the comment period following the webinar.” The meeting summary states that EPA will accept supplemental comments after August 16, 2021, that are e-mailed to Susan Sharkey (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)), but that such comments should be provided as soon as possible. EPA noted that interested parties could comment during interagency review and following the publication of the proposal.

More information on EPA’s July 27, 2021, webinar is available in our July 29, 2021, memorandum. As reported in our August 6, 2021, blog item, EPA posted a memorandum in Docket ID EPA-HQ-OPPT-2021-0436 stating that it will not extend the August 16, 2021, comment period stemming from the July 27, 2021, public webinar.