Developmetn of Standards for Evaluating the Importance of Contaminants in the Environment

To fully understand the relationship between EPA and Committee E47 we need to go back to the 1970s and early 1980s. In the time from World War II up to the early 1970s, when the EPA was established, toxicity tests had been used extensively to determine the effects of potentially toxic substances released into the environment. These tests were used to evaluate industrial effluents, pesticides, and heavy metals. The early toxicity tests were performed with freshwater organisms, especially fish, but the advent of conducting toxicity tests with estuarine and marine animals and algae, which had markedly different life cycle requirements from freshwater fish, prompted the need for the development of standard testing methods. Although ASTM Committee D19 on Water had developed a standard dealing with aquatic toxicology methodology prior to this time, few people knew about this method and it was not widely used. Thus this trend to conduct tests in a standard way was a relatively "new" concept in the 1970s. In 1971, the Committee on Methods for Toxicity Tests with Aquatic Organisms was formed to develop a set of test methods for aquatic organisms. This committee comprised representatives from EPA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, industry and academia; their effort culminated in an EPA publication on acute toxicity tests. Shortly after this publication came out, the Committee on Methods was dissolved because it was felt that a move toward the development of standards through the consensus-based process would be the best approach. ASTM was a logical choice for carrying on the work outlined by the original Committee on Methods, and thus many members of this group joined ASTM Committees Dl9 or E35 on Pesticides to continue efforts for standards development.