About 10 trillion pounds of chemicals are produced every year in the US.
And you can imagine wearing a 90-pound backpack on your back.
And then at the end of the day putting that one aside and
the next morning picking up another one.
That is literally how much in the form of chemicals that are regulated under TSCA,
we produce and use every day.
They're used to make just about everything around us.
96% is an estimate.
That excludes a few things like wood and other natural materials.
But just about everything we touch and
use is made of synthetic chemicals regulated by TSCA.
Now, we don't actually know how many chemicals are in US Congress but
we have some ball park figures.
We know that 85,000 chemicals have been in Congress
at some point since TSCA originally passed in 1976.
We know that not all of those are in commerce today but
we don't know how many actually are.
In fact when TSCA passed in 1976 there were about 62,000 chemicals on the market.
And those were put on to what is called the TSCA Inventory.
And then 23,000 new chemicals were added.
At a rate of between 500 and 1,000 a year.
So there really are a lot of new chemicals coming in the market,
replacing old ones, and some of the old ones simply are no longer being used.
So, we'll get to how TSCA reform
deals with getting a better handle on that in a moment.