The Number of Chemicals in Common Commerce to Have Been Analyzed in Environmental Matrices.

[NNadir]

All I will have time to do is to post a little introductory text and the graphics, which in my opinion say a lot, from this paper:

How Many Chemicals in Commerce Have Been Analyzed in Environmental Media? A 50 Year Bibliometric Analysis Derek C. G. Muir, Gordon J. Getzinger, Matt McBride, and P. Lee Ferguson Environmental Science & Technology 2023 57 (25), 9119-9129

The introductory text:

The increased emphasis on “chemicals of emerging concern” since the early 2000s, (1) and the more recent growth of nontarget screening, (2,3) is broadening the list of chemicals identified and measured in environmental media. But how many substances have actually been determined in environmental media, and are they representative of the growing numbers of chemicals in commerce? A survey of the chemical inventories of 19 countries and regions revealed that about 350,000 chemical substances have been registered for production and large scale use over the past 30 to 40 years. (4) About 700 new chemicals per year are officially added to the US Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) inventory each year, (5) while the European Chemicals Agency has registered about 1700 (new and existing substances) per year under Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) since 2009. (6) The threshold for registration under REACH and for the Inventory of Existing Chemical Substances of China (IECSC) is 1 t/yr, while it is 11 t/yr under TSCA. About 4600 chemicals are considered to be high production volume (>1000 t/yr)...

Some graphics:



The caption:

Figure 2. Trends of the number of newly reported substances using CA indexing roles “analytical study” and “pollutant” (ANST/POL) CASRNs for the period 1978–2018 (left vertical axis) and as a percentage of the total number of reports per year for all 19,776 substances in the reduced ANST/POL list based on the BIOL/Occurrence search (right vertical axis).

The caption:

Figure 3. Categorization of the ANST/POL list of 19,776 CASRNs based on screening of lists for various classes of substances (see Table S1). The “Not characterized” class represents a diverse group not found on lists of various monitoring and priority pollutant lists.

The caption:

Figure 4. Percent of total annual CASRN reports for (A) pharmaceuticals, current use pesticides, CECs not on other lists, (B) Legacy organochlorine (OC) pesticides, polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and -dibenzofurans (PCDD/Fs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), (C) polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), organophosphate flame retardants and phosphate esters (OPFR-OPEs), other flame retardants (FRs), (D) Volatile organic compounds and trace gases, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons/compounds (PAHs/PACs), alkane/enes, (E) Major water pollutant ions, inorganic acids, disinfection byproducts, (F) Metal isotopes and major metals (scale on the right), copper (Cu), magnesium (Mg), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), mercury (Hg), (G) poly/perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) including chlorofluorocarbons and hydrofluorocarbons (CFCs-HFCs), (H) Food additives, plastics additives, fragrances, (I) Bisphenols, siloxane/silanes, aromatic amines, benzotriazoles/benzothioazoles. The CASRNs also include transformation products for all classes. See Figure S4 for CASRN counts/year.

CASRN, (Chemical Abstracts Service Registration Number) is the registration number for each new chemical published in the scientific literature, a service of the American Chemical Society.

Chemical Abstracts was a huge set of paper volumes found in every major chemistry library in the world by which a researcher could track down chemicals published in the literature. On line search tools have made these paper volumes superfluous.

Anyway...interesting...

[MayReasonRule]

1. Excellent Post - Thank You!

[littlemissmartypants]

2. ❤️