9 



What do you mean by this and why do you think it's important? 



Dr. Goldman. We think it's important because when you talk 

 about chemical use, that's where you start getting involved with is- 

 sues such as exposure, such as the potential for emissions to the 

 environment. And so use is really where the rubber meets the road 

 in terms over the inherent hazards that might be present and the 

 exposures that might occur to humans or the environment. 



Senator Reid. Some have called TSCA a "gap-filling statute" with 

 a limited mandate. 



What do you see as TSCA's role in relationship to the other stat- 

 utes which you and others enforce within the Federal Grovemment? 



Dr. Goldman. I think of TSCA as actually being an extremely 

 broad statute that has quite a broad mandate in the area of chemi- 

 cals, and while at times it has been used to fill gaps, I think that 

 the fundamental role of TSCA in providing for prevention — primary 

 prevention really — prevention of use over new chemicals before 

 they're part on the market if they are undesirable, and ability also 

 to get information about existing chemicals so that we can take 

 preventive actions. 



I see TSCA as being fundamental to all of our chemical manage- 

 ment in the agency. 



Senator Reid. I've been told that the EPA's new chemical pro- 

 gram is one of the more successful aspects over the TSCA program. 

 Yet, you've indicated that over 90 percent of the roughly 2,000 new 

 chemicals that the EPA reviews annually are approved without any 

 restrictions on their manufactured use. 



What's your assessment of the new chemicals program? 



Dr. Goldman. Mr. Chairman, I might want to put up another 

 graph. There is a difference in the new chemical programs that Eu- 

 ropean countries have and that the European community has in 

 that our program looks at all chemicals prior to manufacturing. 

 Whereas, in Europe, the programs look at chemicals prior to mar- 

 keting. Our program also looks at far less information about each 

 chemical when we review it than those other programs. 



Now what I think is very interesting here, if you look at the 

 chart, what we have here are the numbers that we've evaluated be- 

 tween 1979 and 1993, which has been, as you've said, a very large 

 number of chemicals. You can see that a little more than half of 

 those that we evaluated have never gone into commerce, and so I 

 think one might well ask the question was that a useful use of our 

 time and resources to evaluate chemicals that never went into com- 

 merce as opposed to the system in European where you would wait 

 until marketing. 



Of those that we did evaluate and that did go into commerce, 

 9,776 no further action was required, 417 were required to go 

 through some additional testing or data gathering of some kind. 

 We have not seen any problems that have resulted from this, and 

 I do think that in that sense, this has been one of the more suc- 

 cessful programs in the agency. I feel that the scientists and the 

 new chemicals program have been extremely creative in using the 

 very small amount of information that they do have and looking at 

 what is called structure activity relationships to try to define from 

 the chemical structure of these chemicals whether or not they 

 might cause problems to ecosystems or problems to human health. 



