The Nickel Report

On September 15, 2026, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit vacated the US Environmental Protection Agency’s risk management rule for methylene chloride, a widely used solvent, under the Toxic Substances Control Act. East Fork Enterprises, Inc. v. EPA, Nos. 24-60227 & 24-60256 (5th Cir. 2026). The rule prohibited 40 uses of methylene chloride and imposed numerous workplace requirements on the remaining 13 industrial and commercial uses, including exposure monitoring and an existing chemical exposure limit roughly ten times more stringent than OSHA’s standards. After a ten-year process of EPA evaluating extensive data on methylene chloride, publishing and then revising a determination that the substance presents an unreasonable risk to human health, and imposing bans on a majority of uses of the substance, including industrial uses and uses in finished products, the Fifth Circuit scrapped the rule, finding EPA exceeded its statutory authority and lacked sufficient evidence to support its rule.

Last year Congress directed the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review new chemicals by a new process. A major question for manufacturers and consumers is whether EPA can do this within a reasonable time period without unnecessarily getting in the way of innovation.

Since enactment of the Lautenberg Act amending the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) in June 2016, the pace of EPA’s review of new chemicals has slowed dramatically. While EPA’s pre-enactment new chemicals program handled around 1,000 premanufacture notifications (PMNs) annually, EPA estimates that a backlog of about 600 new chemicals had built up by January 2017, which created a substantial concern in the regulated community.