Washington, D.C. (October 5,
2021) – Businesses across the country will
soon face challenging new requirements to disclose the presence in
their products of, and worker and environmental exposure from, an
enormous set of chemicals that have been used for years in
products, including cooking pans, furniture and carpets, food
wrappers, apparel, paint, automobiles, machinery, and a vast array
of other products. Making the challenge greater, this reporting
obligation extends back ten years, even though few companies have
records that disclose whether an ingredient or component they used
contained one of thousands of per- or polyfluorinated alkyl
substances (PFAS).
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is set to
finalize new regulations soon that will force the
manufacturing community to provide these detailed reports within a
year, and if hard numbers cannot be ascertained, businesses must
produce best estimates based on diligent search efforts. And
