Chemical Passports: Environmental Science, Information, and Regulation in the Trade of Toxic Substances during the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract: After World War II, thousands of new synthetic chemicals entered the marketplace and, eventually, the environment. The trade of toxic chemicals posed regulatory challenges to national authorities and to international bodies that supported free trade. Some policy experts worked to develop systems in which toxicity information, or "chemical passports," would accompany exports of commercial chemicals across national borders. This article examines the fate of these efforts at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which had been working to eliminate nontariff barriers to the international commerce of chemicals by harmonizing toxicity test requirements. In 1982, the US government under Reagan doomed the proposed requirement of a minimum premarketing dataset across OECD member countries. The chemical industry contested other programs at the OECD and elsewhere for the exchange or disclosure of unpublished toxicity data. These struggles over data sharing in the 1980s can be understood as part of a shift toward environmental regulation by information, in which the right-to-know movement was met by claims that toxicity data were intellectual property.