Since its inception, SIRC has pursued a comprehensive research program to better understand the potential, if any, for styrene to affect human health, as well as to understand the fate and effects of styrene in the environment.
SIRC’s approach has been—and continues to be—to sponsor new research to enhance understanding of the potential health and environmental effects of styrene and ethylbenzene. In 2019, SIRC completed and published an updated comprehensive human health risk assessment as a capstone to our 30-year research program and to update the 2002 Harvard risk assessment. The project, like all SIRC-funded research, serves to fulfill our product stewardship mission.
SIRC’s commitment to science has produced a credible, reliable—and still growing—information resource for regulatory decision-making.
SIRC has worked closely over the years with science experts in developing protocols for a number of the research projects it has sponsored. SIRC also commissions independent reviews of existing health effects studies. Scientific research and literature reviews underwritten by SIRC are sponsored with the intention that final reports will be published in appropriate peer-reviewed journals.
The total cost of SIRC-sponsored research program exceeds $20 million. SIRC’s commitment to science has produced a credible, reliable—and still growing—information resource for regulatory decision-making. The science that SIRC has sponsored has followed a well-defined, orderly program to ensure that each research project builds on findings from past studies—starting with an understanding of styrene’s environmental fate and leading through various steps to human risk assessment using the wealth of data developed since SIRC’s organization in 1987.
For a complete list of SIRC-sponsored research through 2017, download this summary document. Contact SIRC for more information on these or other more recent studies.
