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According to a new report released yesterday, efforts to protect children’s health have been fatally blocked by American industry’s refusal to submit information on the commercial use of chemicals.

In a scathing critique of a voluntary reporting strategy launched with great fanfare under the Clinton administration – and quietly killed in recent years – the EPA’s Inspector General wrote that the Voluntary Children’s Chemical Evaluation Program was a bust.

According to the Inspector General, the much-hyped program was “hampered by industry partners who chose not to voluntarily collect and submit information, and EPA’s decision not to exercise its regulatory authorities under the Toxic Substances Control Act to compel data collection. EPA has not demonstrated that it can achieve children’s health goals with a voluntary program.”

This is not news to anyone who has followed EPA’s uphill battle to regulate toxic chemicals in the environment and in consumer goods. Nor is it news to anyone who has watched the agency’s various voluntary programs fail to win industry cooperation – despite endless “stakeholder meetings” in which companies repeatedly promise to pony up the details about their products’ potential health risks.

“It has become very clear that chemicals can affect children both because of their exposure rates and concentrations,” R. Thomas Zoeller, a biology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who frequently serves on EPA advisory panels, told me. “If you think about flame retardants in California, for example, the levels of these chemicals in children is very significantly higher than in adults. So I do think it’s disappointing that this entire program wasn’t taken more seriously by both by EPA and by industry.”