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The move is part of the EPA's effort to find better, cheaper and faster ways to screen thousands of chemicals for human risk, including the ways in which toxicity occurs, the impact of long-term exposure to various chemicals, and how chemicals effect genetic variations of the population.
"Right now, there isn't enough capacity to test all the chemicals we want information on," Robert Kavlock, director of EPA's computational toxicology program, told GreenBiz.com Wednesday.
The agency asked its various departments about high-priority chemicals for which they'd most want information. After compiling the list of nearly 10,000 chemicals and consulting the public literature, the EPA discovered it didn't know whether two-thirds of the chemicals on this list caused cancer in animals; for 90 percent of the chemicals, it didn't know their effects on reproduction.
The "U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Strategic Plan for Evaluating the Toxicity of Chemicals," (PDF) released today, will also enable the agency to study how toxicity impacts children.
It expects the new approach will yield significant savings. For example, companies may have to pay upwards of a half-million dollars to perform an endocrine disruption screening on individual chemicals, as may be required by the end of the year for chemicals that include food use pesticides, but the new approach may trim the cost to about $20,000.
"For people who are developing green chemistry, this may allow them to look for an alternative chemical and profile that chemical for $20,000," Kavlock said, adding the new approach may serve as a way to validate whether one chemical is greener than another.
The strategic plan builds upon the findings of a 2007 report from the National Research Council which advocates transforming the way human toxicity risk is determined by focusing on identifying and evaluating toxicity pathways.
The EPA will still use animal testing for the foreseeable future, but in smarter ways, Kavlock said. "For a long time there will be a need for animal testing," he said. "They've served their purpose well. The only way we can study some things is in animals."
Kavlock expects the testing strategy to be fully deployed within 10 years but believes useful applications will be released within two years.
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Animal testing
What are the smarter ways of using animal testing. Prolonging the animals life so it can suffer even more after the first tests. And is that an animals only purpose, to be tested on. Im sure there are other ways to test these chemicals and products with out using animals as a test subject. And beside when u test chemicals and products on animals they wont react the same as us. What i think is that this method of testing chemicals is a cruel cause the animals cant defend themselves in anyway and forced into a painful and slow death that they dont deserve in the first place.