A Program to Reduce Toxic Chemical Use

This chapter proposes a program for reducing the use of toxic chemicals. The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) program places the burden of inventorying toxic chemicals on the users of those chemicals. The result of the TRI program was to require product suppliers to reveal the concentrations of TRI chemicals in products sold to those companies required to report under the TRI program. In essence, an annual equal exposure to the toxic chemical at a concentration of 1 ppm in 1 lb of the product could result in three times the acceptable threshold beyond which an adverse effect of some type could occur in every single person in the United States. More composition information is needed as a starting point in any program designed to reduce or eliminate the use of toxic chemicals. Quantitative structure-activity, or structure-property, relationships is the process by which a chemical structure is quantitatively correlated with a defined process, such as chemical reactivity or biological activity.