New EPA PFAS announcements carry significance

By John Gardella | National Law Review | June 11, 2021

Read the full article by John Gardella (National Law Review)

“Yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took three new actions related to PFAS, each of them significant to companies in the United States. The new EPA PFAS announcements included:

issuing a proposed rule that will gather comprehensive data on more than 1,000 PFAS compounds that are manufactured or imported into the United States;
withdrawing guidance that weakened EPA’s July 2020 Significant New Use Rule (SNUR) restricting certain long-chain PFAS; and
publishing a final rule that officially incorporates three additional PFAS into the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI).

The details of each are provided below; however, for any company that manufactures, imports, or utilizes PFAS in manufacturing, it is critical to pay attention to these developments.

Proposed Rule to Require Reporting on PFAS

The EPA’s proposed rule on data collection with respect to various PFAS now broadens the scope of the number of PFAS that the EPA is actively collecting data on to over 1,000 PFAS. While there are over 7,000 PFAS in existence today and the EPA is not collecting data on many of them, the proposed rule put forth yesterday is significant because the EPA is taking the first step in studying an large number of PFAS by placing the onus of reporting on companies. Traditionally, this is the first step that the EPA takes when looking to make a determination as to whether a chemical should be regulated or poses a risk to human health…”

This content provided by the PFAS Project.