August 8, 2008 — Six months after launching its voluntary reporting program for nanomaterial producers, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has made virtually no information public about the limited number of submissions it has received. As a result, the public can have little confidence that the program is providing the information the Agency will need to protect citizens, consumers, workers and the environment from the potential risks of nanotechnology, according to Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) (www.edf.org).

The EPA intended its Nanoscale Materials Stewardship Program (NMSP) to provide both EPA and the public with a better understanding of what nanomaterials are being produced, how they’re being used and what their producers know about them.
“EPA not only appears to have received limited information, but worse, EPA is saying almost nothing about it. The information being received appears to be entering a black hole,” said Richard A. Denison, Ph.D., EDF senior scientist. “Limited participation, some company submissions covering only a single nanomaterial, ignorance as to the extent of information being provided, and an almost total lack of public transparency are not a good recipe for a program that was supposed to help restore the public’s trust.”
The only information EPA has provided on its website is a list of nine companies that have made submissions and 11 companies that said they intend to submit information. The nine submissions equal the number received under the United Kingdom’s nanomaterial voluntary reporting scheme. All of these companies have or intend to volunteer under the “basic” program component, which calls on companies to report information they already possess on the identity, properties, production and management of their nanomaterials. Two of these companies have also volunteered for the “in-depth” program component, which could entail new testing.
When it launched the NMSP, EPA said it expected to receive 240 submissions from 180 companies under the basic program, and to attract 15 participants in the in-depth program. EPA based its projections on an estimate that, in 2005, more than 600 companies were manufacturing and applying nanotechnology, a number that has surely grown since then.

“EPA was unwilling to include in the program meaningful ways to measure how complete or representative the information being submitted is,” said Denison. “For example, EPA didn’t ask companies to tell them how many nanomaterials they produce, or even require them to indicate whether the information they’re submitting on a given nanomaterial is complete or not.”