I write to urge you to introduce legislation to amend the Toxic Substances
Control Act so as to require chemical manufacturers to disclose details of
chemicals used in household products.

An article in this past Monday's Washington Post (
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/03/AR2010010302110.html
) reports that a loophole in this law allows the compositions of nearly 20% of
household chemicals to remain secret from consumers and regulators.  These
secret chemicals are by no means innocuous: more than half of the "substantial
risk" disclosures filed with the EPA this past March pertained to trade-secret
chemicals.

All that a chemical company need do to claim secrecy is to assert that
revealing the nature of its product would harm its business by disclosing trade
secrets.  The burden of proof is then on the Environmental Protection Agency to
show a lack of harm.  In practice, then, nearly all such claims, no matter how
flimsy, are allowed to stand.

Of the secret chemicals, 151 are made in quantities of more than a million
tonnes a year and 10 are used specifically in children's products.  The
identities of the chemicals are known to a handful of EPA employees who are
legally barred from sharing that information with other federal officials,
state health and environmental regulators, foreign governments, emergency
responders and the public.

In dust samples taken from Boston households recently, a researcher from Duke
University discovered a flame-retardant ingredient similar in structure to a
chemical -- Di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate, or DEHP -- that Congress banned last
year from children's products because it has been linked to reproductive
problems and other health effects.  The ingedient had been kept secret.

Chemical safety is best assured when chemical formulations are open to public
scrutiny.  The Toxic Substances Control Act must be rewritten so as to shift
the burden of proof for product secrecy claims from the EPA to the
manufacturer.