ChemExpo Knowledgebase: A New Way to Explore Chemical Use Information

Published August 22, 2023

There are tens of thousands of chemicals registered for use in commercial, industrial, and consumer products in the US. Under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), EPA is required to assess, manage, and evaluate the safety of existing chemicals, including their exposure potential. A wide variety of exposure-relevant data are necessary to support these chemical evaluations. However, for many chemicals and product types, there are gaps in the exposure information needed to make informed chemical safety decisions, including qualitative and quantitative information about how these chemicals are used and how they may be released to our homes or the environment.

The newly released beta version of EPA’s ChemExpo is a free, publicly available search and visualization tool for exploring chemical use data relevant to exposure assessment that has been curated from public documents. This interactive web application focuses on data collected by EPA about how chemicals are used in commerce and how they occur in consumer and industrial products.

The ChemExpo team actively works to curate these data into consumer and occupational product categories, chemical functional categories, and exposure-relevant keywords, as well as to substance identifiers (DTXSIDs) used by EPA and the CompTox Chemicals Dashboard (Dashboard). These data are collectively known as EPA’s Chemicals and Products Database (CPDat). First published in 2016, CPDat is a database that now contains information that maps more than 49,000 chemicals to a set of terms categorizing their usage or function in 16,000 consumer product types (e.g., shampoo, soap) based on what chemicals they contain.

While this data can be accessed via the Dashboard in summary form or via the standalone machine-readable CPDat database, ChemExpo provides a user-friendly interface to explore, search, and download chemical data drawn from CPDat for exposure risk assessment. One goal of the ChemExpo beta release is to collect feedback on functionality and usability. The ChemExpo team welcomes any comments or reporting of issues via email at chemexpo.support@epa.gov. User feedback will be incorporated into the final version of the application along with that obtained via formal external peer review.

**Learn more: **

Chemical Exposure Knowledgebase (ChemExpo)

EPA’s Rapid Chemical Exposure and Dose Research

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