EPA Withdraws SNURs for 18 Chemicals Following Community Challenge

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EPA has withdrawn proposed Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) significant new use rules (SNURs) for 18 chemical substances developed by Chevron USA, after a community organization argued that EPA’s regulation failed to address “extreme health risks” to residents near industrial sites in Mississippi.

EPA previously withdrew the corresponding TSCA section 5(e) order and premanufacture notice (PMN) determinations for the chemicals in December 2024, following a voluntary remand in a D.C. Circuit challenge to the order, Cherokee Concerned Citizens (CCC) v. EPA, No. 23-01096.

“Consistent with the withdrawal of the TSCA 5(e) Order” and received comments, “EPA is withdrawing the proposed rules,” EPA’s July 9, 2025, Federal Register notice states.

Petitioner Arguments

In the associated case, CCC argued that the 5(e) order—which restricted uses of the chemicals beyond those proposed by Chevron in its PMNs and mandated worker protections—did nothing to protect fenceline communities from health risks identified by EPA in its analyses.

“[T]he Order summarizes numerous risks that exceed by orders of magnitude the risk levels EPA has consistently defined as ‘unreasonable’ and then recites trivial requirements for Chevron’s production and use of the waste plastic chemicals that could not possibly mitigate the risks to people living near the refinery,” CCC’s opening brief stated.

Among the risks identified by EPA was a one-in-four chance that people exposed to long-term air pollution generated by one chemical would develop cancer—a risk 250,000 times greater than EPA’s one-in-a-million cancer risk benchmark, according to CCC.  In its motion for voluntary remand, EPA acknowledged it had “substantial concerns that the Section 5 Order may have been made in error.”

The SNURs identified significant new uses to include uses that did not conform to the 5(e) order, as well as the manufacture or processing of the chemicals using feedstocks containing PFAS or other chemicals of concern.

The PMNs stated that the chemicals would be used as a fuel, fuel additive, fuel blending stock, or refinery feedstock.  EPA reports that their manufacture had not yet commenced at the time the order was withdrawn.