EPA must be gulping down its energy drinks in large quantities, because after years of allowing corporations to withhold vital safety information, it screamed “stop” yesterday.

In the Federal Register, the agency said that it will no longer permit the obstruction of safety evaluations by allowing firms to hide behind age-old claims of business secrecy.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, had told Congress earlier this year that the heavily lobbied “confidential business information” protection was keeping the agency’s risk assessors from obtaining vital data on health and safety concerns of chemical substances awaiting approval. Thousands of chemicals were not properly evaluated because of the withheld information, she told lawmakers.

This action has real-life implications.

Photo from Green Earth Technologies

Earlier today AOL News published a long story on scientists in the U.S., Canada, South America and elsewhere pleading with the EPA not to approve the use of an oil dispersant that contains unidentified and possibly untested nanoparticles.

The company, Green Earth Technologies, insisting its product is safe for use in the Gulf, says that federal law allows it to conceal information on the composition of the nano-dispersant and precisely what nanoparticles it contains because it’s confidential business information.

That protection may no longer exist, at least within the EPA. Other federal safety agencies such as OSHA and the Food and Drug Administration apparently still allow such corporate obfuscation.

Richard Denison, senior scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, says he rarely gets to use the words “elegant” and “Federal Register notice” in the same sentence, but that’s how he describes the long-sought-after change in how EPA will handle corporate information.

“Yesterday’s notice is the latest in a series of actions the new leadership at EPA has taken to make good on much-neglected aspect of its mission,” wrote Denison.

In announcing the new policy, EPA said it took the action “to promote public understanding of potential risks by providing understandable, accessible, and complete information on potential chemical risks to the broadest audience possible.”

A careful legal interpretation of the long maligned, but vital Toxic Substance Control Act convinced the agency that it could provide more valuable information to the public by identifying data where information may have been claimed and treated as confidential in the past–but is not, and was not, in fact entitled to confidentiality under TSCA.

EPA says it expects to begin reviews of confidentiality claims — both newly submitted and existing claims on August 25, 2010.

Click here for the entire Federal Register report.

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