From: Bureau Veritas Group

All sunscreen products are considered over-the-counter (OTC) products and are required to be in the “Drug Facts” format.

The FDA states that a sunscreen must protect equally against both types of sun radiation (UVB and UVA) to be considered “broad spectrum.” Broad Spectrum sunscreens with an SPF value 15 or higher can claim to reduce the risk of skin cancer and early skin aging if used as directed with other sun protection measures. Non-Broad Spectrum sunscreens, and Broad Spectrum sunscreens with an SPF value lower than 15, can only claim to “help prevent sunburn.”

Any sunscreen product that is not Broad Spectrum, or that is Broad Spectrum with an SPF value less than 15, requires a warning statement. The wording of this warning has been revised to state, ‘‘Skin Cancer/Skin Aging Alert: [in bold font] Spending time in the sun increases your risk of skin cancer and early skin aging. This product has been shown only to help prevent sunburn, not [in bold font] skin cancer or early skin aging.”

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From: Health Canada

The Harper Government is taking action to protect children from dangerous products by proposing a new guideline regarding the amount of cadmium that may be found in children’s jewellery.

Cadmium is a heavy metal which is known to be highly toxic when ingested. Health Canada is proposing a guideline regarding total cadmium concentration in children’s jewellery of 130 parts per million (0.013%).  It is believed this concentration would help protect children from cadmium poisoning following accidental ingestion, or prolonged licking and sucking, of these products.  Stakeholders affected by this proposed guideline have until October 10, 2011 to provide comments on the proposal.

Last October, as a first step, the Government appealed to members of industry to voluntarily stop the production, importation and sale of children’s jewellery made with cadmium or cadmium-containing materials.  While there is no known risk to health from simply wearing jewellery made with high levels of cadmium, a Health Canada risk assessment found that there are serious health risks associated with swallowing, sucking or chewing jewellery that contains high levels of cadmium.

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From: OEHHA

OEHHA announces the beginning of a 60-day public comment period on 39 chemicals, including Bisphenol A,  Coumarin and Dicloran. These chemicals will be discussed at the October 2011 meeting of the Proposition 65 Carcinogen Identification Committee (CIC).  The CIC is the state’s qualified experts on carcinogenicity for purposes of the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986 (Proposition 65).  The CIC’s October meeting is scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, October 12 and 13, 2011.  The CIC will provide the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) with advice on the prioritization of these 39 chemicals for possible preparation of hazard identification materials.  At a later date, OEHHA will select chemicals for preparation of hazard identification materials and announce those decisions in a separate notice.  No listing decisions will be made for these chemicals at the October 12 and 13 meetings.

To download the “Prioritization: Chemicals Identified for Consultation with the Carcinogen Identification Committee” document, or to see the list of the 39 chemicals under review, please click the above link.

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From SEGOB:

On June 3, 2011, Mexico became the first country in the region to put the Global Harmonized System (GHS) for the Classification and Labelling of Chemicals GHS into practice. The GHS standard NMX-R-019-SCFI-2011 has 2 parts: the Hazard Communication program in Mexico and GHS implementation.

The Mexican government states the following as the main objective of the new GHS standard:

This standard establishes criteria for Mexicans to classify chemicals according to their physical hazards, health and the environment. It also establishes the elements of hazard communication standard chemicals and the requirements for labeling and data sheets for their safety. This standard applies to the entire Mexican territory to classify chemicals and is the basis for the implementation of Hazard communication systems (labeling, marking, safety data sheets, etc.) of the agencies of the Public Administration within the scope of its powers. The requirements and characteristics of the labeling of products classified by applying criteria contained in this International Standard will be those established in rules issued by the Public Administration entities within the scope of its powers. Based on the provisions of the Purple Book of the United Nations are exempt from the application of this rule: pharmaceuticals, food additives, cosmetics; pesticide residues in food and hazardous waste.

For more information on the standard, please visit the SEGOB website.

From Nature:

Europe’s sweeping chemicals law, sometimes described as its most complex piece of legislation, was meant to regulate thousands of common substances to protect people and the environment from harm. But four years after REACH (registration, evaluation, authorization and restriction of chemicals) came into force, the burdensome, costly law is beginning to look strangely toothless. Evidence seen exclusively by Nature shows that companies have failed to fill gaps in safety data — and European regulators have done little to pressure them.

REACH requires companies that produce or sell chemicals in the European Union to register toxicity data on the compounds and outline any new tests needed to clarify their biological effects, especially on reproduction and the development of offspring. Before REACH, these costly tests — multigenerational rat studies can cost up to €2 million (US$2.8 million) per chemical — were rarely performed in Europe because the previous law required them only for substances produced in very large quantities. Switching to the REACH system was predicted to trigger millions of extra animal tests (see Nature 460, 1065; 2009), so companies were also expected to propose alternative methods wherever possible to minimize the use of animals.

The legislation requires companies to compile all safety information and planned tests into dossiers, one for each chemical, and submit them to REACH’s regulator, the European Chemical Agency (ECHA), based in Helsinki. The ECHA has little power to enforce the regulations, however, leaving any penalties for non-compliance to individual governments.

Dossiers for more than 3,200 of the most ubiquitous chemicals have been filed with the agency, with more to come over the next seven years.

Costanza Rovida, a consultant chemist based in Varese, Italy, has now analysed summaries of 200 of these dossiers, chosen at random. She plans to analyse a further 800 summaries and present the findings at the 8th World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences in Montreal, Canada, in August. But already, Rovida has uncovered a host of problems.

Commissioned by the European arm of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) at the University of Konstanz, Germany, her research shows that many dossiers rely heavily on old data and fail to suggest new tests, and that few include any mention of non-animal testing methods (see ‘Mind the gap‘). The ECHA acknowledges that there is room for improvement. “Industry has not taken full responsibility for the quality of data,” says Jukka Malm, director of regulatory affairs at the ECHA.

Click on the above link for the complete article.

From TPM:

Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency declassified the identities of 150 chemicals that appeared in toxicity reports, some as long as 30 years ago.

Many were found to pose “substantial risk” to consumers or the environment, and include ingredients found in everything from air fresheners to chemicals used in the cleanup of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill last year.

The names of the chemicals were previously redacted as Confidential Business Information (CBI) under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976. Although the TSCA required that all chemical data withheld as CBI be justified by a “detailed written explanation,” the problem lay in the sheer volume of such filings; claims were left unchallenged, and the chemical identities they redacted were left unknown.

The names of 17,000 of the 84,000 chemicals on the agency’s toxic substances inventory are not publicly available, according to the NYT Green Blog.

Last year, the EPA announced the launch of a long process to review confidentiality claims on chemical identities that turned up in health and safety studies. Any information that “does not explicitly contain process information or reveal portions of a mixture” would be declassified after a formal request was made to the manufacturing company.

“A health and safety study with the chemical name kept secret is completely useless to the public,” Steve Owens, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said in a press release.

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From Switchboard:

Earlier this week, Fisk Johnson, the CEO of the consumer products company SC Johnson said in a speech (Inside EPA, subscription required) that “Your child has a better chance of becoming a major league baseball player than a chemical has of being regulated by EPA,” under TSCA.  He identified the problem as being, in large part, the lack of good information available about the hazards of chemicals in the marketplace, and the limited ability of EPA to regulate chemicals.

It is exactly this problem that has led to both widespread calls for reform from “downstream” companies that use chemicals in their products – like SC Johnson — and unilateral actions from large retailers and individual companies such as Wal-Mart, Target, Toys R Us and Staples to control the use of chemicals in products stocked on their shelves. The same problem has spurred unprecedented action in state legislatures across the country, and a groundswell of health, scientific and medical associations expressing concern about the health threat from toxic chemicals and calling for reform.

Follow the link above for the complete article.

From The Manufacturer:

A small Hertfordshire-based company has spent £150,000 over 18-months developing a new kind of glass – unique due to its complete lack of toxins.

Governments around the world today are increasingly anxious to limit the number and amount of toxins contained in products available to the public. Managing director of Nazeling Glass Stephen Pollock-Hill claims to have solved the problem with a new type of crystal glass that is completely free of arsenic, barium, and antimony, among other chemicals and toxins.

Mr Pollock-Hill explained: “While there are “lead free crystal” recipes on the market, this is believed to be the first attempt to manufacture a glass that contains no toxic ingredients, as defined by the European Chemicals Handling Agency, as ‘Substances of Very High Concern’.”

Glass manufacturers confederation British Glass estimates that the world market for lead glass is Eu2.6bn a year. Thirty five per cent of this is estimated to be made in the US, home to one of the strictest regulatory bodies in the world, the United States Environmental Protection Agency. The potential market for the new glass is significant, according to Pollock-Hill.

Click on the above link for the more information.

From Reuters:

Chrysotile asbestos will not be listed as a hazardous industrial chemical that can be banned from import after countries including Canada and Ukraine blocked consensus, a United Nations spokesman said Friday.

The decision was taken at a meeting of states that have ratified the Rotterdam Convention despite the treaty’s scientific review body having recommended the inclusion of “white” asbestos on health grounds, a U.N. spokesman said.

“Several countries declared in plenary problems they had with the inclusion of chrysotile (asbestos), including Canada, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Vietnam,” U.N. spokesman Michael Stanley-Jones told a news briefing in Geneva.

Australia, Chile and the European Union (EU) were among those seeking the inclusion of chrysotile on the 2004 treaty’s trade “watch list” of chemicals and severely hazardous pesticides which exporters must share information on.

Click on the above link for the more information.