74 percent of substances where a concern for human health and the environment has been demonstrated has not received any regulatory follow-up to control the risk and are still allowed on the EU market.
This information comes from a new report by the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), scrutinising the REACH substance evaluation process.
“ECHA needs to make sure that all substances of concern are taken care of and to speed up the process to make sure that EU citizens are not exposed to these hazardous chemicals”, comments Frida Hök, Senior Policy Advisor at ChemSec.
The pace of REACH is another aspect highlighted in the report. The report states that it may take 12 to 16 years to regulate chemicals of concern.
“The EEB report spells it out very clearly. There is an obvious need to speed up the whole REACH process, at the moment it takes an embarrassingly long time to regulate chemicals of concern”, Frida Hök says.
REACH consists of four processes: registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction. The two steps of the evaluation process are dossier evaluation and substance evaluation. The first is performed by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) while the latter is executed by the EU Member States.
Dossier evaluation checks whether the information provided by industry in the registration process complies with the legal information required by REACH. Substance evaluation checks if a chemical is of concern for human health and the environment and, if so, recommends suitable risk management measures.
