Confidential Business Information (CBI)

Confidential business information is a claim a submitter makes that specific data — usually a chemical identity or a production volume — is commercially sensitive, letting the agency withhold it from publication while still collecting it.

The public record shows what remains. EPA's Chemical Data Reporting (CDR) terms note that "certain volumes and chemical identities claimed as confidential business information appear only as ranges or accession numbers", and that the public database contains only non-CBI content even though manufacturers file more detail than is released.

EPA's TSCA Chemical Substance Inventory behaves identically at scale: the non-confidential portion only is published, identities on the confidential portion appear as generic names with accession numbers, and roughly 16,000 of its ~86,741 listed substances are such confidential entries in the 07/2026 release.

Compliance screening fails quietly on masked rows. A substance you cannot name cannot be matched against your restrictions; if your pipeline treats generic names and accession-number placeholders as junk and drops them, you undercount exposure without any error being raised.

Market sizing skews too. Volume ranges replace point values wherever CBI is claimed, so sums built from public files are floors, not totals — a vendor quoting exact US production for every chemical is either reselling something else or inventing precision.

And authority differs by file. For TSCA, only EPA's confidential Master Inventory File is definitive; the public download is expressly not authoritative, which changes how defensible your compliance conclusions are.

1. Count the placeholders before you buy. EPA TSCA Chemical Substance Inventory lists ~86,741 substances (42,698 active + 44,043 inactive in the 07/2026 release) including ~16,000 confidential entries — ask any vendor how theirs treats those rows.
2. Demand the placeholder convention in writing. Generic names plus accession numbers is the EPA pattern; a source that silently drops them loses records.
3. Check volume granularity claims. CDR reports ranges where confidentiality is claimed across its ~8,650 chemicals in the 2024 cycle — exact per-chemical volumes for all of them are not publicly available.

Where to see it in context: commodity-chemicals data, diversified-chemicals data.

• cas-registry-number — The numeric identifier keying most chemical reference records; CBI-masked rows lack it, breaking joins.
• chemical-data-reporting — EPA's four-yearly TSCA reporting cycle whose public tables carry the CBI ranges described above.
• tsca-chemical-substance-inventory — The inventory itself, where ~16,000 of ~86,741 listed substances appear behind generic names.