PFAS Reporting and Recordkeeping Requirements: What Equipment Manufacturers Need to Know

"It’s all about managing risk. We need to be ready with robust compliance programs, because there is legislation coming with the potential for more litigation in the future. You don’t want to be in a position where your product is obsolete because you weren’t ready. We need to understand the risks, which means we need to know where PFAS is used in our products, and how much. If we do this, we can be confident our designs and our end-product solutions have futures.” – Justin Prosser, senior product compliance specialist at AEM member company Danfoss  

On Sept. 5, 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a Direct Final Rule amending their TSCA Section 8(a)(7) Reporting and Recordkeeping Requirements for Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances Final Rule, from Oct. 11, 2023. The amendment changes the submission period start date from November 12, 2024, to July 11, 2025, and indicates that the EPA will seek additional feedback from industry on the reporting software module it plans to release through its CDX platform. 

The original Final Rule requires any chemical manufacturer, or importer, of PFAS or articles that contain PFAS, in any year from Jan. 1, 2011, to Jan. 1, 2023, to submit to EPA information on these substances regarding chemical identities, production volumes, industrial uses, commercial and consumer uses, worker exposures, disposal, and any existing information related to potential environmental and health effects. The scope of this rule applies to PFAS found in chemical mixtures, complex articles, or its bulk form. 

In its Direct Final Rule, EPA acknowledges the need for additional resources and feedback from industry stakeholders on the implementation of their PFAS reporting module within its larger chemical reporting platform, the Central Data Exchange (CDX) system. While the Direct Final Rule does not change the specific data reporting elements found in the original rule, it does provide much needed regulatory relief for the industry. 

“This is going to affect all manufacturers of PFAS substances and mixtures, including article importers, dating all the way back to January of 2011,” said Jacob Schantz, senior chemical regulatory engineer at AEM member company Doosan Bobcat.  

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a large family of synthetic organofluorine compounds which contain thousands of unique chemical entities. For many industries, including the non-road sector, PFAS chemistries are selected to provide high thermal and chemical stability, a resistance to heat, pressure, chemical, and friction stressors, as well as extremely low surface tensions, making them repellent to both water and oil. Due to their highly advantageous properties, PFAS can be found in a variety of different applications, including:  

“(This) family of chemicals are being worked into legislative instruments like REACH, like TSCA, and also spurring their own laws, such as the product laws in Maine and Minnesota,” said Cally Edgren, sustainability director at Assent.  

“So, the first questions manufacturers need to ask themselves are where their PFAS are and why they’re using them,” continued Edgren. “Because you’re going to need that information for a lot of laws. And, at the end of the day, knowing how you were using them in the past, or not using them in the past, could help protect you from some of that litigation in the future.” 

Under the Final Rule, any company, individual, or entity which manufactured or imported PFAS in the U.S. market for commercial purposes since Jan. 1, 2011, will be required to electronically submit their data to the EPA for any year that they did so. According to EPA:  

[The] reporting standard requires reporting entities to evaluate their current level of knowledge of their manufactured products (including imports), as well as evaluate whether there is additional information that a reasonable person, similarly situated, would be expected to know, possess, or control. This standard carries with it an exercise of due diligence, and the information gathering activities that may be necessary for manufacturers to achieve this reporting standard may vary from case-to-case.  

“The final deliverable is that there is going to be a requirement to submit a digital electronic report to the EPA through the Central Data Exchange,” said Schantz. “This is the platform that they are using to accept all the submissions. Now, you can do this in two different forms, and it depends on which form is applicable to you based on the type of product you actually produce.”  

“This is going to affect all manufacturers of PFAS substances and mixtures, including article importers, dating all the way back to January of 2011.” -- Doosan Bobcat's Jacob Schantz

According to Schantz, the two options are:  

“So, depending on which bucket you fall into for those you're reporting, the requirement is going to be slightly different,” said Schantz. “And regardless of which of those reporting options you have, there is no minimum threshold for PFAS concentration inside those components.”