The Adhesive and Sealant Council Inc. (ASC) recently announced it has raised continued concerns with the California Department of Toxic Substance Control’s (DTSC) Safer Consumer Products proposed regulation, warning that it could lead companies to abandon California markets or relocate manufacturing facilities to other states. The proposed regulatory activity is a result of a 2008 law, the California Green Chemistry Initiative (A.B 1879), which was designed to address the reduction or elimination of adverse public health and environmental impacts from hazardous chemicals used in consumer products. In written comments to the DTSC, the ASC questioned some of the detailed trade secret information that the new proposal could demand and charged that the agency seemed to be setting itself up in a role to judge one company’s innovative approach against another’s.

“Asking a company to estimate the amount of effort and/or money expended in developing a new formula or defending why a chemical is not readily discoverable through reverse engineering would not be easy to calculate,” said Mark Collatz, director of government relations. “But more importantly, we don’t believe that is either the purview of any regulatory body or was the intent of the California Assembly when it passed the initial legislation.”

The ASC also questioned the establishment of an initial list of 1,200 chemicals that would be characterized as Chemicals of Concern, in many cases without proven justification. In its comments, the ASC noted that because of the expansiveness of the list, many of those listed would not be subject to DTSC review for a number of years. Yet in the interim, a range of formulated products containing these chemicals would be implicated as hazardous simply because of the appearance on this list.

For additional information, visit www.ascouncil.org.