President Obama Signs TSCA Reform Bill into Law

President Barack Obama signed the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) into law this week, representing the first meaningful update to TSCA in 40 years, according to the Toy Industry Association (TIA). The new legislation reflects scientific and technological advances and ensures that a uniform federal policy will regulate chemicals across all 50 states.

Congress struggled to pass TSCA reform, so in recent years many states and counties took it upon themselves to pass their own laws for regulating chemicals, forcing companies to comply with a complex patchwork of state and local requirements that did not advance product safety and served only to confuse parents and other toy shoppers. The reformed TSCA law now empowers the EPA to oversee and regulate chemicals nationwide and contains preemptive language so that individual states will not be able to ban or regulate substances under evaluation by the EPA.

The law also focuses on creating risk-based standards for the safe use of chemicals, rather than relying on the precautionary principle approach, and requires the EPA to sort TSCA’s inventory of chemicals into high-priority and low-priority substances and to follow a specific procedure for assessing those chemicals.

TIA’s goal is to continue to ensure that chemicals are regulated consistently across all 50 states.

About the author

Maddie Michalik

Maddie Michalik

Maddie Michalik was the Editor-in-Chief of The Toy Book from 2020-2022. She was also a Senior Editor at The Toy Insider and The Pop Insider.

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