The EU’s REACH chemicals law aims to ensure that chemicals are safely manufactured and used, so as to protect human health and the environment, at the same time as enhancing innovation and the competitiveness of EU industry. REACH includes requirements on companies to provide – and use – safety information on chemicals, and provides mechanisms to ban [...]
Regulation
We are all exposed to hundreds of man-made chemicals in our daily life, coming from everyday products including furniture, packaging and clothes. The aim of chemicals regulation is to try and establish which of these chemicals are dangerous, and then to put in place measures to ensure that they are used safely, or not used [...]
The main lobby organisation for Europe’s chemical industry, CEFIC, has been keen to publicise a new study from the European Commission, a “Cumulative Cost Assessment” of the cost of regulation on Europe’s chemical industry. However, as the European Commission has pointed out, the study doesn’t consider economic or broader societal benefits of the legislation (such as [...]
MEPs on the European Parliament’s Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee have this morning voted to strengthen their draft report on the regulation of Food Contact Materials. They are calling for the European Commission to create new regulations to ensure that people’s health is protected from chemicals in paper and board packaging, and for particularly problematic chemicals [...]
There’s increasing debate on the problems with the laws covering chemicals in food contact materials such as packaging, with the European Parliament currently discussing a report on the issue. On 10th March 2016 CHEM Trust organised a workshop in Brussels to discuss one important aspect, the overlap and gaps between the main chemicals regulation REACH [...]
Food packaging, factory equipment, food utensils – almost everything we eat has been in contact with one or more of these items. The EU’s laws should ensure that chemicals used in these materials are safe, but they do not go far enough and contain holes. These holes – for example a lack of harmonised rules [...]
One of the main objectives of the EU’s REACH chemical regulation system is to provide a high level of protection for people and the environment. A key part of this system is the authorisation process, which incentivises companies that are using the most problematic chemicals to move to safer alternatives. The European Commission have just been consulting on two [...]
Last week the European Chemical Agency (ECHA) held a conference on “Lessons learnt on Applications for Authorisation“. I couldn’t attend myself, but I did watch much of it on line – I’ve also spoken to people who were there. It ended up being a very positive event, which is good news as Authorisation is an [...]
[Updated on 10th March on the publication of the EAC report – see below] The Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) of the UK House of Commons is currently doing an inquiry into the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and its impacts on the environment and the developing world. Yesterday they published the evidence that [...]
The EU and US are continuing in their attempts to negotiate a new “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership” – or TTIP for short, including measures to increase regulatory harmonisation, to reduce tariffs and to create an ‘Investor State Dispute Mechanism’. As we wrote back in July 2014: In CHEM Trust’s view proposals for enhanced regulatory [...]
