Agency addresses

In the U.S., three pieces of federal legislation that were passed from 1969 to 1980, and the implementing rules and regulations that followed, initiated a series of fundamental changes in the management of waste and byproduct materials. They presently affect the way in which regulatory agencies address waste and byproduct material use. These acts include the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA, 1969), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA, 1976, 1980), and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liabilities Act (CERCLA) or Superfund (1980). 

Several sources of address information were used, including the VA compensation and pension files, records at the St. Louis Military Personnel Records Center, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (which can obtain current address information from the Internal Revenue Service on persons with occupational exposure to possible health risks), and a commercial tracing agency. Addresses of 5,620 volunteers, or 88% of those not known to be dead, were obtained. Of these addresses, 624 (11%) were reported by the U.S. 

Industry-sponsored and advocacy-related adverse event reporting (AER) agencies address safety-related events to the FDA for dietary supplements (www.SafetyCall.com). These groups submit AERs to the Food and Drug Administration s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition s Adverse Event Reporting System (CAERS) at (http //www.fda.gov/opacom/backgrounders/problem.html). 

In recent years, there have been a number of examples of such problems (Table II.). The proposed data requirements for pesticide registration prepared by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency address this topic. This has been an extremely controversial regulatory problem. It is clearly important to know the composition of applied pesticides including the major associated contaminants in order to assess their potential for environmental impact, but as the quantitative significance of... 

What this means is that an educational process should be undertaken for industrial analysts and the agency addressing the complexities of NIR spectroscopy. Analysts must educate themselves about chemometrics before practicing NIR spectroscopy. They must also develop guidelines and create appropriate laws to regulate a field that is just beginning to be understood and appreciated. 

The volume then turns to more practical issues, and the next chapter by Mark Kibblewhite of the Environment Agency addresses the topic of risk assessment and risk management. Options for site investigation are described and problems with both sampling and chemical testing for contaminants are discussed. The... 

AGENCY ADDRESSES OSHA Local Area Offices... 

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