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  • From: tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Wonderful---can't wait until U.S. has a sane approach on safety of chemicals
  • Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:52:46 -0500

At present chemical companies are free to dump lethal products on Americans and make millions of dollars as agents of sickness and death, depending on the fact that the FDA has insufficient funds, labs and employees to test them.

The faster the U.S copies the E.U. approach, the better off Americans will be.




Policy News –
January 5, 2005
U.S. companies get nervous about EU’s REACH

Since 1998, Europeans have been working on legislation that will require industry to prove that chemicals being sold and produced in the EU are safe to use or handle. The current system requires governments to prove that a chemical is dangerous. If passed, the legislation will send European chemical manufacturers scrambling for safety and health data on chemicals that have been marketed for years; many experts predict that it will change the industry worldwide. With billions of dollars in trade and investments at stake, U.S. companies are expressing concern.
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Researchers say that over 99% of the more than 30,000 chemicals currently on the market do not have sufficient safety data that are publicly available.

Clearly, the EU represents a huge swath of the chemical industry, and REACH will have global implications,” says Michael Walls, director of science policy with the American Chemistry Council, an industry trade group.

Called REACH—Regulation, Evaluation, and Authorisation of Chemicals—the policy will require registration of all substances that are produced or imported into the EU in quantities greater than 1 ton. The amount of information required for registration will be proportional to the chemical’s health risks and production volumes. Companies will also need to seek authorization to sell and produce problematic chemicals, such as carcinogens, mutagens, and teratogens. Toxic chemicals that persist in the environment or that bioaccumulate will also need authorization, which will be granted if risks can be adequately controlled or if there are no alternatives.

The European Parliament and the European Council will have hearings on REACH within the next couple of months. The policy is slated for enactment in 2006, but many familiar with REACH say they don’t expect anything to be passed until 2007.

U.S. companies have a lot at stake if REACH becomes law. According to Penelope Naas, director of the Office of EU and Regional Affairs for the U.S. Department of Commerce, EU and U.S. markets are intricately linked. U.S. chemical trade across the Atlantic is worth $600 billion every year, but more importantly, she says, U.S. companies have $2.5 trillion invested in Europe.
REACH defenders say it is good policy

“Once you go through the REACH process, you have chemicals that have a ‘blessing’, and you create better markets,” argues Robert Donkers, the environmental counselor to the EU’s delegation to the United States and the person credited as the author of REACH. He predicts that the policy will increase the public’s confidence in consumer products that have suffered a series of scandals, including mad cow disease and the discovery of dioxin in chickens.

“Our industry is [also] heavily reliant on imports,” says Thomas Jostmann, a director with CEFIC, the European Chemical Industry Council. In fact, with a net surplus in chemical trade to the United States, the EU would seem to have more at stake.

The direct costs of REACH to EU companies are projected at about €3.5–4 billion over 11 years, with most costs stemming from safety testing and registration. Annually, this comes to about €315 million, or 0.06% of annual chemical sales, according to a study by the European Council.

“This is not a crippling blow to industry,” says Frank Ackerman, an environmental economist at Tufts University, whose own study on the costs of REACH confirmed these numbers.

European officials said that REACH could both benefit and hamper smaller companies. Because REACH requires businesses to generate safety information for a specific market, the regulation could open up opportunities to smaller companies that find it profitable to furnish these niche customers with the safety information. And as chemicals are removed from the market for safety reasons, small businesses are more likely to respond with innovative products that are safer for users.

“At least in Europe, the innovation is coming from the small- to mid-size companies,” says Robert Foster, a senior science advisor to Notox, a company that tests chemicals for safety.

Lawyers representing multinational companies, some based in the United States, say that the EU’s plan may violate World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements. Law firms are now lobbying European officials to weaken REACH and may sue the EU before a WTO panel when the law is finally implemented.

Many of the U.S. concerns were given voice in December at a meeting in Cambridge, Mass., that was attended by top representatives from such major chemical-producing and -consuming companies as Estee Lauder, S.C. Johnson & Son, Dow Corning, Merck, Procter & Gamble, and Lyondell.

Walls says that the direct costs of testing will not be the only way companies will be impacted. One-third of the U.S. chemical industry is foreign-owned, and the United States is a net importer of chemicals from Europe. “If products are removed because of REACH, we will be affected,” he pointed out.

The new layers of bureaucracy that would be put in place also cause concern. All the information gathered under REACH will be stored in a central database that can be publicly accessed, and the whole initiative is likely to be handled by a soon-to-be-created EU government agency. Detractors say the process in all probability will be unwieldy and a barrier to trade.

Others are worried about the amount of information that will have to pass up and down the supply chain. Companies formulating chemicals will have to ensure that end users have sufficient safety information. For instance, because they will be exposed to greater quantities, industrial chemical workers will have different exposure scenarios than those only using the compound for household applications. But even different industrial users might have varying exposures. For example, workers spraying a cleaning agent in an auto factory would encounter the chemical as a fine mist and might inhale it, while people using the same chemical in the textile industry would probably encounter the chemical in its liquid state. The scenarios would require different safety information.

This problem became apparent during a government–industry simulation of REACH in four different supply chains, says Andreas Ahrens, a co-founder of the German consulting company Ökopol, the Institute for Environmental Strategies. The simulation showed that for product formulators to prepare proper risk assessment documents, a great need exists to determine how consumers use a product and what terms and language they can understand. “Users will buy based upon the information available,” says Ahrens. “And companies will have markets based upon whether they choose to develop that information to service certain markets.”

Ahrens worries that some companies may become overburdened by the necessary paperwork, especially small- to medium-size firms with fewer than 250 workers. A representative from the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association (SOCMA), a U.S. industry trade group representing smaller chemical companies, agreed and said that the high costs of REACH may keep new products from ever getting to market.

“It could have a detrimental impact not only on exports but [also] on investments,” added Naas.

In an interview with ES&T, European government officials charged that U.S. government agencies have worked closely with business to weaken the impact of REACH, but they did not wish to state this publicly for fear of alienating U.S. officials. Naas dismissed those criticisms at the conference: “The press likes to publicize this as the U.S. attacking the EU.”

However, documents gathered by the environmental group Environmental Health Fund under the Freedom of Information Act and released by U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) last spring paint a very different picture. These documents indicate that various agencies within the U.S. government have conspired with chemical companies and chemical trade organizations to derail the scope of REACH. According to the documents, U.S. government lobbying on behalf of industry included a cable in April 2003 from then Secretary of State Colin Powell to diplomatic posts in the EU that provided “talking points” for U.S. government officials to use when speaking with their European counterparts. The arguments were notably similar in language to themes developed by industry at the request of a U.S. trade official, charges Waxman.

For instance, one of the themes developed by industry reads: “REACH will work to stifle innovation and the introduction of new, safer chemicals.” In his cable to U.S. diplomats, Powell wrote, “These compliance costs may negatively impact innovation and EU development of new, more effective, and safer chemicals and downstream products.”

“The United States has not conducted studies on the health and environmental impacts of REACH,” Waxman tells ES&T. “It [simply] began to lobby against REACH on behalf of U.S. industry interests without a full understanding of these impacts.” The EU’s own analysis of REACH projected a possible savings of €50 billion in health-care costs, he says. “My primary concern is that the Bush Administration has allowed special interests to dictate government policy.” Industry experts contacted by ES&T declined to respond to Waxman’s report.

The most interesting wrinkle in the debate over REACH is now occurring in California. In early 2004, State Assembly member John Laird (D), chair of the assembly environment committee, and former State Sen. Byron Sher (D), chair of the senate environment committee, tasked the University of California, Berkeley, with developing a modern chemical policy for the state. When interviewed by ES&T in November, Michael Wilson, an assistant research scientist in the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at Berkeley, said the report’s recommendations will have many elements in common with REACH. He expected the report to be released sometime in March and said that chemical industry representatives were already talking to state lawmakers about the topic. By December, Wilson said that he was unable to talk further with the media until the report was released.

A senior science advisor to the California State Legislature said that certain legislators are exploring changes to state chemical policy because federal regulations are broken. In the past decade, California has been hit with a number of costly chemical scandals, including the discovery of perchlorate in foods and the gasoline additive methyl-tert-butyl ether (MTBE) in drinking water.

“California needs to go beyond this inadequate federal oversight,” said the science advisor, asking to remain anonymous. The advisor added that chemical trade groups are “nervous about what we’re up to” but that many companies would like to see better chemical policy along the lines of REACH, so that they can quickly remove harmful chemicals from the market and protect themselves from lawsuits.

Geert Dancet, the European Commission official in charge of REACH legislation, was more direct in his assessment: “Companies in America are probably worried because if Americans see that Europe has these protections, they might want them as well.—PAUL D. THACKER





  • [Homestead] Wonderful---can't wait until U.S. has a sane approach on safety of chemicals, tvoivozhd, 01/25/2005

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