Sadly out of REACH and touch

The UK Chemicals Industries Association (CIA) has said that it 'cannot support REACH as currently described' as the proposals are administratively burdensome and impractical. This is the key response from the CIA in its submission to the European Commission.

The CIA believes that this disproportionate legislation would seriously damage the EU's attractiveness as a location for the chemical industry and all its customer industries in the manufacturing chain. A major re-write of the REACH proposals is needed to make it workable.

The CIA's key concerns are:

• a lack of prioritisation for progressing those chemicals that pose possibly the greatest risk which will lead to a huge duplication of testing - a view supported by a recent report by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP);

• a failure to introduce a proper centralised decision-making process and to instead continue with the current regime of assigning different member states to take the lead in evaluation and decision making, which has been shown to be slow and ineffective;

• the introduction of a Chemical Safety Report for each substance covering each 'Use' is a major new requirement, which has been ill thought through and is in addition to the existing Safety Data Sheet.

• failure to introduce any requirements to ensure that imports of articles from the rest of the world would be subject to equally stringent testing and evaluation requirements for the substances they contain, thus leaving the EU wide open to the import of the very environmental dilemma that the proposals seek to eliminate.

CIA Director General, Judith Hackitt said: 'The European Commission must re-think REACH from the bottom-up. We have always supported the political aims of the EU Chemicals Policy and acknowledged that the existing legislation needs to be replaced because it is ineffective.

'We have offered constructive alternative proposals, data, practical assistance and advice to the European Commission to ensure the REACH regulations could be workable, practicable and transparent, but sadly, they appear to have replicated all of the failings of the current system into these proposals.

'The more we have read the 1200 pages of text on the Internet, the more apparent it has become that the Commission has chosen to ignore practical reality, by proposing the kind of ill-focused bureaucratic monster that the CIA simply cannot support. REACH, as currently drafted, will be hugely damaging to European manufacturing industry - and won't address what it seeks to achieve.

'Our efforts to convince the Commission of the need for a proper answer to the regulatory question posed by the need for improved chemicals management continue.'

Further Information

The proposal is made up of six volumes covering 1200 pages of text. The six volumes can be downloaded from the Commission's website On 26 June 2003, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution published its 24th report: Chemi-cals in Products - Safeguarding the Environment and Human Health, which can also be found on the web.