We reported formerly on Maine’s 2021 law disallowing the sale of brand-new items consisting of deliberately included PFAS and the reporting requirements that the law enforced upon producers. Under the law, both the very first stage of the sales restriction and the reporting requirements were set up to work on January 1, 2023. Nevertheless, pursuant to a brand-new law enacted on June 8, 2023, the reporting requirements will not enter into result up until January 1, 2025, which will postpone up until the very same date execution of the sales restriction on items with intentionally-added PFAS besides carpets, carpets, and material treatments. (The sales restriction on the latter 3 item classifications entered into result as set up on January 1, 2023.) The Maine Department of Environmental Management (MDEP) had actually given numerous extensions to the managed sector to adhere to the reporting requirements under the 2021 law, which probably would have weakened the statutory function.
Eventually, the time out produced by the freshly enacted statute will permit MDEP to clarify a few of the intricacies of the initial statutory language through policies, and for a few of the more possibly difficult reporting requirements to be tempered. For instance, under the brand-new law, instead of needing to report the quantity of each PFAS compound in the item, covered producers might comply by reporting the quantity of overall fluorine in the item if the quantity of each PFAS substance is not understood. This modification will likely conserve producers time and expenditure that they otherwise would have sustained from a more particularized chemical analysis of item samples, despite the fact that utilizing overall fluorine as a proxy for PFAS might end up causing reporting of a little overemphasized numbers as compared to speciated PFAS quantities. This change might permit more producers to adhere to the reporting requirements, and therefore prevent the initial statute’s restriction on sales of any PFAS-containing item in Maine for which the producer stops working to report.
In addition, the applicability of the reporting requirements has actually been restricted to producers that use more than 25 individuals. Even more, for the item classifications that go through the reporting requirements, the exemptions from the sales restriction have actually been broadened to include exemptions for items for which MDEP has actually waived the reporting requirement, and throughout of any extension for compliance afterwards given to any covered producer by MDEP.
We’ll continue to follow execution of the Maine statute along with the growing variety of comparable laws being enacted and executed in other states.