Testing Methods for Asbestos in Talc and Cosmetic Products Comments
Published
March 04, 2020
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and ILR submitted comments urging the FDA to withdraw the Interagency Working Group on Asbestos in Consumer Products' (IWGACP) preliminary recommendations on talc testing, arguing they are scientifically unsupported and economically harmful. The core objection is that the IWGACP recommends treating asbestos and "cleavage fragments" — non-asbestos mineral particles that merely resemble asbestos — as equivalent, despite decades of federal agency findings (from OSHA, the Department of Interior, and others) and peer-reviewed studies concluding that cleavage fragments do not pose the same health risks as true asbestos. The Chamber warns that adopting these recommendations without proper notice-and-comment rulemaking would expose the economically significant talc industry (and related sectors like plastics, automotive, paper, and construction) to a wave of plaintiffs'-bar-driven litigation premised on scientifically dubious equivalence, and could trigger unwarranted regulation of dozens of other critical minerals used in aerospace, defense, and energy industries.
