Apparently, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, due to opposition from both the industry and environmental and health groups defending green-chemistry regulations, the state of California failed to meet a deadline to approve the new regulations. Earlier in December, environmentalists and health lobbyists had complained that the rules were watered down and accused Gov. Schwarzenegger of caving into pressure from business and industry (see here and here).
The rules were initially designed to regulate harmful ingredients in hundreds of thousands of products. The regulations were released in June of 2010, and the revisions were extensive, causing the negative comments noted above. The agency has indicated it was striving to concentrate on the biggest impact products, and if it had to postpone approving the final version of the regulations to get it right, it would do so. “We thought it would be better to get it right, rather than just getting it done,” said Maziar Movassaghi, the department’s acting director. Read more here.