Cleaning Up Chemical Law

New Ground 66
Spring 2004

The UK wants to dilute proposed EU legislation that would make chemicals safer.

"Only 20 out of 140 priority substances have been evaluated since 1993"

The European Parliament is currently considering one of the most important pieces of European legislation of the last 20 years. If REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals) becomes EU law, producers and importers of chemicals will, for the first time, be required to obtain basic data on the environmental and human health implications of all the substances they sell.

The UK government helped initiate REACH in 1998. But, five years later, is the proposal too radical for No 10?

The data REACH would provide are needed to fill large gaps in our knowledge about the potential effects of more than 30,000 chemicals in common use. But Tony Blair is worried enough to have joined Gerhard Schroder and Jacques Chirac in writing to the European Commission to warn it against "endangering the international competitiveness of the European chemical industry."

Our worrying lack of understanding of chemicals used in everyday products has been highlighted by, amongst others, the UN, the European and UK Environment Agencies and the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Providing the necessary data will cost no more than 0.05% of the chemicals industry’s annual turnover. The data are a pre-requisite for a sustainable industry and for regaining consumer confidence in chemicals.

But REACH is not just an information-gathering exercise. It is also meant to deal with chemicals which have hazardous intrinsic properties and give cause for very high concern. This is the ‘authorisation’ part of REACH. Chemicals of very high concern are well-defined in the proposal: carcinogens, mutagens (that cause genetic damage), substances that are persistent and bio-accumulative and others that give cause for concern such as endocrine disrupters. If the base data are there, these chemicals should be easily identified. However, at this point REACH becomes far less radical. It simply proposes that substances of high concern that pose long-term risks are authorised on the basis of ‘adequate control’. This is exactly how they are dealt with now and it doesn’t work. Only 20 out of 140 priority substances have been evaluated since 1993. ‘Adequate control’ relies on estimating exposure and setting acceptable risk from this estimate. It is subjective, expensive and endorses continued use of substances that accumulate in the food chain and human bodies, even if alternatives are available.

We need to move away from a system in which regulators use data that includes a significant amount of guesswork to define acceptable exposure to chemicals that cause genetic damage, cancer or affect human development. Instead, REACH should ensure chemicals of very high concern are replaced with others wherever possible. And the UK should follow up its initiative of 1998 to ensure this is done.

Stephen Tindale is Executive Director of Greenpeace.