EPA Publishes 2020 Chemical Data Reporting Information

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is publishing information collected during the 2020 Chemical Data Reporting (CDR) cycle to increase public awareness of chemicals being manufactured in communities and to enable citizen and stakeholder access and use of the reported information. CDR data users comprise a wide variety of stakeholders in addition to citizens and communities, including EPA, other regulatory agencies, industry, researchers, and nongovernmental organizations. 

The CDR rule requires manufacturers (including importers) of certain chemicals listed on the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Chemical Substance Inventory to report data to EPA every four years. Manufacturers (including importers) are required to report if they meet certain production volume thresholds, generally 25,000 lbs or more of a chemical at any single site. CDR is the most comprehensive source of basic exposure-related information on chemicals in U.S. commerce. The collection of CDR information is essential to meeting the agency’s information needs, especially for prioritization, risk evaluation, and risk management of chemicals under TSCA. CDR information enables EPA to develop an understanding of the types, amount, end uses, and possible human exposure to inform the agency’s identification, evaluation, and management of risks to human health and environmental risks.

In keeping with the agency’s emphasis on data integrity and transparency, EPA carried out the most extensive data quality control efforts to date to identify potential reporting errors. The 2020 CDR information primarily covers manufacture, processing, and use activities for calendar year 2019. The data released today includes company and site information, manufacturing (including import) information, production volume, and processing and use data. 

Longstanding resource shortfalls in the TSCA program have limited EPA’s ability to put the necessary IT infrastructure in place to enable a more robust CDR reporting tool that, for example, would have identified certain reporting issues before information had been submitted. As a result, EPA staff have spent numerous hours performing manual data quality checks on this information to ensure its accuracy. Because of competing TSCA priorities, such as other data gathering efforts and activities underway to use CDR data as part of meeting deadlines for TSCA risk evaluations, EPA’s data quality efforts took a longer period of time than normal. 

Further supporting EPA’s ongoing efforts to increase transparency and public access to information, the 2020 CDR data release does include information on chemicals not included in previous releases. This release includes chemicals which lost their confidential status on the TSCA Inventory because one or more manufacturers reported the chemical identities as non-confidential during the 2012, 2016, and/or 2020 CDR reporting periods. Therefore, the 2020 CDR database will include information related to those chemical identities that could not be revealed publicly in previous publications of CDR data.

The 2020 CDR data is available in downloadable files on EPA’s CDR webpages. EPA will also soon make the data available in ChemView. Helpful resources about using the CDR data and interpreting the CDR data are also available from EPA’s CDR website.