Bowing to pressure from various environmental groups, California's Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) will rewrite the green chemistry regulations that were supposed to go into effect Jan. 1, 2011. DTSC has intentionally missed that deadline and will soon begin another round of drafting.As reported in early December, in the third draft (November 2010) of the California Safer Consumer Product Alternatives Regulations, DTSC significantly narrowed the scope of the proposed regulations due to budget constraints. Had that most recent draft become the final regulations, most of our industry's products would not have been included in the first five years of the program.
In September, DTSC released the official draft of its Safer Consumer Product Alternative Regulation, which stages a key component of the state's 2008 Green Chemistry Initiative law to create a system to regulate chemicals in consumer products. The first (unofficial) draft of these "Green Chemistry" Regulations was released to the public in June 2010. ACA and its California Paint Council have been actively monitoring the development of the regulations and have submitted extensive comments at each stage of the regulatory process.
The potential impact of these regulations on the paint and coatings industry and consumer product manufacturers in general cannot be overstated: the regulations include a very broad definition of the term "consumer product" that is intended to capture more products than the federal definition that is regulated by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Many products will be captured by these regulations and may have to be reformulated if intended for sale in the state of California. Read on at Paint.org
