A thing of beauty: EPA restores a good chunk of the public’s right to know under TSCA

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EPA rightly discards that argument:

EPA, however, questions the assertion that when disclosing a chemical identity of a chemical substance inspires a competitor to ascertain a process for manufacturing the chemical substance, such disclosure is equivalent to disclosing the process itself. Disclosing the end product of a process (i.e., a chemical identity) is not the same thing as disclosing the process to make that end product. The process information would come from the competitor’s expertise, research, or publicly available sources, not from EPA. Although some companies might find such use of a chemical identity undesirable, EPA does not believe that TSCA section 14(b) was intended to limit the uses of information from a health and safety study. (emphasis added)

EPA notes that this latest move is one more step in a systematic effort to identify and make public “information [that] may have been claimed and treated as confidential in the past but is not in fact entitled to confidentiality under TSCA.”

It’s about time.