On March 29, 2017, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued in the Federal Register a notice releasing its initial inventory report of mercury supply, use, and trade in the United States pursuant to Section 8(b)(9)(10) of the amended Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).  Specifically, the report is a “compilation of readily available, previously published data on the supply, use and trade elementary mercury and mercury compounds,” and its purpose is to “identify any manufacturing processes or products that intentionally add mercury.”  The report itself is available in Docket ID EPA-HQ-OPPT-2017-0127-002 on http://www.regulations.gov.  The notice states that EPA is not soliciting comments on this report.

The report states that it is focused on commodity mercury, as opposed to mercury that is handled and discarded as waste, and that in some cases the information is outdated.  The report is organized in three parts:

• Introduction, which includes U.S. laws affecting supply and trade of Mercury; and sources of information;

• Elemental mercury, which includes supply of elemental mercury, sources of supply, use of elemental mercury (including mercury-added products and manufacturing processes), and trade of elemental mercury; and

• Mercury compounds, which includes supply, use, and trade of Mercury compounds.