TSCA Active Substances List: How to Get and Screen It

The TSCA active substances list is the active subset of the EPA TSCA Chemical Substance Inventory, the agency's complete roster of existing chemical substances manufactured, processed or imported in the United States. In the July 2026 snapshot the inventory lists 86,741 substances: 42,698 flagged active and 44,043 flagged inactive, so dormant entries outweigh live ones by 1,345 rows. For compliance teams that split is the entire point of the file - it separates substances still moving through US commerce from legacy rows that no longer are.

Granularity stays deliberately flat: one row per chemical substance, keyed by CAS Registry Number, or one row per accession-number placeholder wherever an identity sits on the confidential portion. Datadory scores the dataset 8 out of 10 and catalogs it among the 16 primary commodity-chemicals sources, a family in which EPA is the heaviest publisher with four datasets - this inventory, the Chemical Data Reporting database, the Toxics Release Inventory and ChemView.

A defensible screening pass looks like this:

EPA is the heaviest publisher in this slice with four datasets, and each answers a different regulatory question. The table below lines them up as they appear in Datadory's commodity-chemicals catalog.

Read the table as layers rather than substitutes: the TSCA Inventory defines the universe of 86,741 substances and their activity status, CDR says who made or imported how much of roughly 8,650 of them, TRI reports what facilities emitted year by year back to 1987, and ChemView stacks the documentary record behind a web interface.

Four build patterns dominate downstream of the status flag:

Each pattern reuses the same join key, so one clean CAS-normalized load feeds all four without re-parsing EPA's archive again.