On December 19, 2024, the EPA announced draft national recommendations for health-based levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in water bodies.

On December 9, 2024, the EPA announced it finalized the latest risk management rules for trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE) under the 2016 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) amendments.

On December 20, 2024, a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Confidential Business Information (CBI) Rule “is unlawful insofar as it requires entities reporting by non-confidential accession numbers and without knowledge of the underlying chemical identity to assert CBI claims for the underlying chemical identity in order to maintain the chemical identity’s confidentiality.”

On December 6, 2024, the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) announced the final approval of amendments that “will make the Proposition 65 (Prop 65) short form warning more informative to consumers by adding at least one chemical name and providing additional warning options from which businesses can select,” according to an OEHHA news release.

In the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2024, the EPA finalized 215 settlement agreements with companies small and large across the United States. This represents a decrease in enforcement actions—down from 482 penalties issued in Q3. The actions taken resulted in $7,739,116 in fines. Here are some of the highlights.

The EPA recently released a draft of the Interim Framework for Advancing Consideration of Cumulative Impacts, which is intended to provide EPA employees and decision-makers with tools and principles to consider cumulative impacts in their work.

In 2025, many facilities that have never had to complete Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) reporting will be required to submit reports on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). This is because of the addition of more than 196 PFAS to the TRI list in 2024 and the elimination of the de minimis exemption, which allowed facilities using less than regulated threshold amounts of PFAS to be exempt from reporting requirements.