The regulatory context for cVOCs

The US Environmental Protection Agency has made regulating contaminants as a group (as opposed to one compound at a time) a part of its new drinking water strategy and has identified carcinogenic volatile organic chemicals (cVOCs) as the first group to be regulated. This article summarizes the potential commonalities for a cVOC rule such as health effects, co-occurrence, analytical methods, and/or treatment or control processes. The authors detail the physical and chemical characteristics as well as the uses of both the currently regulated VOCs and the unregulated VOCs that could potentially be included in a future cVOC rule.