TRI supplier notification: the notice you may owe your customers

This page explains what the rules and common practice call for. Every site is different, and what a survey or a filing needs at your facility is something we work out with you after we see it.

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) is the annual toxic chemical release report filed with EPA. Form R is the full report and Form A is the shorter alternative. The same rule contains a requirement, called supplier notification, that reaches companies that owe no Form R at all.

Supplier notification is a separate obligation from reporting. You can be below every reporting threshold, file nothing on July 1, and still owe a written notice to your industrial customers. That is because the obligation is triggered by what you sell, not by how much you release.

It is also a routine finding in inspections under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA).

→ Do you have to file a Form R?

Who it applies to

The rule applies to a facility that:

• Is in SIC codes 20 through 39, the manufacturing range of an older industry classification system, and
• Manufactures or processes a TRI-listed chemical, and
• Sells or otherwise distributes a mixture or trade name product that contains that chemical, and
• Distributes it to a facility subject to the reporting rule (a “covered facility”), or to a person who in turn may sell or distribute it to one

Read that last condition carefully. You do not have to sell to a covered facility yourself. Selling to a distributor who may sell to one is enough. In practice, that brings most chemical formulators, blenders, coating and adhesive manufacturers and specialty product manufacturers in SIC codes 20 through 39 under the rule.

There is one limit worth knowing. You are not covered to the extent you do not know that your facility sells or otherwise distributes a toxic chemical in a mixture or trade name product. That limit turns on knowing what the product contains.

A formulator working from its own formula records usually knows, so in practice this limit does little for a blender. It does more for a company that distributes someone else's sealed product.

What the notice must contain

Every notice needs three elements:

Where the product has a safety data sheet (SDS), the notice travels with it. The rule requires the notice to be attached to, or otherwise incorporated into, the SDS required by OSHA's hazard communication standard. You must also include instructions that any copies passed down the supply chain include the notice.

For a product with an SDS, then, this is not a stand-alone letter that can sit in a sales file.

Trade secret formulas: two substitutions built into the rule

The percent by weight is the element suppliers resist, because it discloses the formula. The rule anticipates that and allows two substitutions, neither of which requires a petition to EPA. You make both in the notice itself.

• The exact percentage. Where the specific percent by weight is a trade secret under OSHA's hazard communication standard, the notice must instead state that the chemical is present at a concentration that does not exceed a stated upper bound.
• The chemical's name. Where the chemical identity itself is a trade secret under that same OSHA standard, you may use a generic chemical name in place of the specific name.

Two things are not optional in either case: the statement that the product contains a listed chemical, and the notice itself. The rule lets you protect the exact number and, where the identity is genuinely a trade secret, the exact name. It does not let you conceal the fact that a listed chemical is present.

Timing

The 30-day correction clock is the one suppliers miss. It runs from the day you discover the error, not from the next shipment or the next reporting year. If a formula review in September finds that a February notice understated a chemical's percentage, the corrected notice is due in October, not with next January's first shipment.

The annual cycle also means this is not a one-time document. A notice sent in 2025 does not cover 2026 shipments.

The 2023 rule: no minimum concentration for chemicals of special concern

Supplier notification came with a de minimis exemption, under which no notice was required for a listed chemical present below the de minimis level in a mixture.

The rule published October 31, 2023 (88 FR 74360) removed that exemption for “chemicals of special concern”, EPA's list of chemicals subject to stricter reporting rules. The list holds the persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic (PBT) chemicals and the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). This is the genuinely new restriction that rule created, and it reaches the whole special concern list, not only the PFAS the same rule added to it.

The result: there is no minimum concentration for chemicals of special concern. If one of them is in your mixture at any level, you owe the notice. Trace levels count.

That matters because de minimis levels also drive what OSHA's hazard communication standard requires you to disclose on an SDS. A chemical can be properly absent from your SDS and still require a supplier notice. A procedure built on “read the SDS and copy across anything listed” cannot catch chemicals of special concern.

One thing the 2023 rule did not do is end range reporting, the option of reporting a quantity as a range. Range reporting and the Form A option were already unavailable for chemicals of special concern:

• For mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins, under the 1999 rule (64 FR 58666)
• For lead and lead compounds, under the 2001 lead rule (66 FR 4500, January 17, 2001)

What the 2023 rule added was PFAS to the special concern list, which extended those existing restrictions to PFAS.

→ Form A or Form R

The exemptions

There are two, and they are narrower than they sound.

The de minimis exemption. No notice is needed where the chemical is below the de minimis level in the mixture. It has not been available for chemicals of special concern since the 2023 change described above.

Three kinds of product:

• Articles. An article is a manufactured item formed to a specific shape or design, whose end use depends on that shape, and which does not release a listed chemical under normal conditions of processing or use. The release condition is the part that fails. A metal part that gives off fume or dust when the customer welds or machines it is testing the edge of this exemption.
• Foods, drugs, cosmetics, alcoholic beverages and tobacco products.
• Consumer products packaged for distribution to the general public. Note the words packaged for distribution to the general public. The same chemical product sold in a 55-gallon drum to an industrial customer is packaged for a bulk industrial customer, so this exemption does not cover it.

Why this applies to suppliers with no Form R obligation of their own

The design is deliberate. A facility cannot report what it does not know it received, and formulated products are the main way listed chemicals enter a facility unlabeled. The rule therefore places the disclosure obligation on the party who knows the formula.

Consider a 40-person coatings blender in SIC 2851 with modest volumes. It may be comfortably below every reporting threshold and still owe:

• An annual written notice to every industrial customer
• A revised notice every time it changes a formula
• A corrected notice within 30 days whenever an error is discovered

Enforcement finds this through the customer. A covered facility that is being inspected under EPCRA hands over the notices it received, and the gaps point back up the supply chain.

What we do here

The practical work is as follows:

• Screen your product line against the full TRI chemical list and the special concern list
• Identify which products trigger a notice
• Draft the notice language
• Build the percent-by-weight figures from your formula records, not from SDS entries
• Set up how the notice is incorporated into the SDS, as the rule requires
• Put the annual and change-driven triggers into a procedure that someone owns

If you also cross a reporting threshold, the same formula review feeds the Form R directly. See our Form R reporting service.

→ How to calculate releases without monitoring data · → Arizona's Pollution Prevention Plan and Toxic Data Report

One honest note. Two questions depend on facts we would need from you: whether a specific product is an article, and whether a specific customer is “a person who may sell to a covered facility”. This page is general information, not a determination for your facility. The chemical lists are also revised, so check the current text of the rule.