On February 4th, 2026, the first events of the Winter Olympics kicked off in Northern Italy, bringing together ambitious top athletes and excited winter sports fans from all over Europe and the world. Unfortunately, it’s not just all fun and games: Various concerns surround the event, related to its carbon footprint, its impact on water resources – and also the issue of harmful chemicals.
Are you following the event? Do you perhaps even like to ski or ice-skate yourself, or do other winter sports? There are so many good reasons to exercise in general: It’s beneficial for our health, it can create a sense of community, or strengthen our connection to nature. As such, it is very concerning that recent studies have found that sports clothing, equipment and facilities can contain many different chemicals that can be harmful to our health and the environment. For example:
Sports bras and other fitness clothing1 2
Yoga mats and other equipment1 2
Smart and fitness watches1
The air in bouldering halls1
… and many more. And it’s not just sports-related products and places that are the problem:
Harmful chemicals have spread far beyond the sidelines – and are found in countless everyday products as well as in our natural environment.
Chemicals are used in consumer products for various reasons: Some help achieve the function of a product (for example, certain substances are supposed to make textiles stain- and water-repellent, and softeners can make plastics bendable), others are added for aesthetic reasons (such as pigments and dyes in clothes). However, these chemicals can also have hazardous properties (see below).
What’s perhaps even worse: Harmful chemicals can also hide in our food and drinking water – despite having never been intentionally put there! This is because during the manufacture of any product, including sports and outdoor equipment, hazardous substances may be emitted into our natural environment – our air, soils, water – and subsequently also end up in (farm) animals, fish, crops, or drinking water.
Take the ‘forever chemicals’ PFAS, for example, which are used in a wide variety of consumer goods and industrial applications – including in ski wax, which has been linked to PFAS contamination on ski slopes in Switzerland. Thankfully, ski waxes containing PFAS have been prohibited in professional sport competitions since the 2023/2024 season, but they remain allowed in amateur and hobby sports – and the forever chemicals are still used in countless other applications.
In 2023, the “Forever Pollution Project” showed that around 23,000 sites all over Europe are contaminated with PFAS. These substances have also been detected in our food, in drinking water across Europe – and in our bodies. For instance, the largest European human biomontioring project, HBM4EU, found out that 14% of teenagers in Europe are at risk of health damage because of PFAS in their bodies.
A losing match for people and planet: There is growing evidence of the damage these harmful chemicals can cause to our health and the environment.
For instance, some PFAS, bisphenols and other substances that have been found to disrupt the human hormone system (also known as endocrine disrupting chemicals, EDCs for short) and that are commonly found in everyday products, have been linked to fertility problems, hormone-related cancers like breast and prostate cancer, impaired brain development, obesity and diabetes, and more.
Read more about potential health impacts of harmful chemicals like EDCs here. We have also compiled some relevant materials at the bottom of this page – just scroll down or click here.
The current legislation misses the mark – and does not properly shield Europeans from the dangers of harmful chemicals.
The main chemicals safety law in the EU, the REACH regulation, was introduced in 2006 to better protect people, wildlife, and the environment from harmful chemicals, while enhancing competitiveness and innovation towards safer chemicals.
REACH is the most advanced framework for chemical safety in the world – but it still has a lot of problems and has not fully delivered on its core objective of protecting human health and the environment. For example, for most chemicals, we still lack information to identify whether or not they are harmful. Many of those that we do know are harmful are still allowed to be used – even though safer alternatives are available. Also, risk assessments don’t reflect that we are exposed to many chemicals at the same time:
Chemicals Cocktails – Another Dimension to the Problem
From frying pans to lipsticks: We are all exposed to many chemicals from various sources in our everyday lives. But we don’t come into contact with each substance individually, but rather with a mixture of chemicals – a chemical cocktail.
The exposure to chemical cocktails can have adverse impacts – even when each chemical is present at low concentrations, below a level considered safe in single substance assessment. This is known as the cocktail effect or mixture effect.
Want to learn more about chemical cocktails and cocktail effects? We have put together some materials for you with more information and explanations – just scroll down to the bottom of this page or click here.
REACH has a dedicated restriction mechanism to deal with harmful chemicals in consumer products (the so-called Generic Risk management Approach, GRA for short). However, this mechanism is slow, not protective enough and has only been used twice for consumer articles in almost 20 years. It must be improved to ensure we have toxic-free products, and to avoid environmental contamination and toxic recycling cycles.
All this is why:
It’s time to up our game: REACH must be revised now to secure a winning level of protection for people and the environment.
The EU has committed to reforming REACH, and this process is underway. The publication of a revision proposal has been pushed back multiple times, but is finally expected in the first half of this year.
What will it take to REACH the finish line?
The revision needs to make REACH:
- Simpler in generating the information we need so that all chemicals with the most harmful properties are known to authorities and industry, avoiding costly clean-up or the reformulation of products.
- This also includes establishing a mixture assessment factor (MAF) to address chemical cocktails, rather than obliging each company to do a complex and costly specific assessment.
- Faster in controlling the most harmful chemicals and thus boosting the market for safer alternatives.
- This also includes simplifying the risk management procedures for the most harmful chemicals in products for the general public, by improving and extending the fast-track process for controlling carcinogens, mutagens and reproductive toxins (‘GRA’).
- Bolder in enforcing the rules, avoiding future problems, and protecting the internal market, people and nature.
Read up on the details in our briefing „REACH revision 2025: simpler, faster, bolder“.
