Cleanzine: your weekly cleaning and hygiene industry newsletter 18th April 2024 Issue no. 1110
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NGOs denounce 'culture of secrecy' in EU chemicals agency
Environmental NGOs have accused the European Chemicals Agency of leniency in enforcing the REACH regulation on chemical safety, raising the pressure on the European Commission to tighten the screw ahead of a review expected this month.
An audit of the ECHA, undertaken by the European Environmental Bureau and ClientEarth, concluded on "fundamental flaws" in the way chemical substances are registered under REACH, reports EurActiv.
The NGOs accuse the ECHA of accepting "uncompleted dossiers" submitted by chemical manufacturers and failing to use its powers to ask registrants to properly complete and correct them.
What's more, the groups also say the agency is "shrouded in a culture of secrecy, under pressure from the chemicals industry which claims 'business confidentiality' as a means to prevent important information being released." The ECHA did not immediately wish to comment on the accusations.
Chemical manufacturers have indeed won safeguards in the legislation allowing them to withhold information such as the precise quantities of substances they produce and where they are produced, arguing this could give competitors an insight into their innovation strategies.
As a result, registration dossiers submitted by industry are of "very poor quality" and include "irrelevant information or empty fields", the NGOs write. And even though the dossiers were incomplete, they were still accepted by the ECHA, which decided to grant them registration numbers by default, the NGOs claim.
Companies may also request the ECHA not to publish the names of industrial sites, claiming that doing so would endanger their commercial confidentiality. ClientEarth filed a lawsuit against ECHA last year, asking the agency to disclose the information. "Commercial interests should not be given precedence over people's health," the NGO argued.
The ECHA has in the past acknowledged the poor quality of dossiers submitted by industry, saying some producers unduly tried to benefit from registration exemptions reserved for so-called 'intermediate' substances.
Geert Dancet, the ECHA's executive director, complained last year about the deceptive tactics used by some chemical companies.
"We have evidence that a proportion of companies have mistakenly claimed to be small or medium," he told a REACH conference in September 2011, promising to make them pay the full cost, plus a surplus charge to cover the administrative expenses.
The NGO report will raise the pressure on the European Commission to tighten the screw on REACH, ahead of a review of the regulation, originally planned for June but which is now expected this month.
The review will contain a series of reports examining how the regulation has worked so far, including one looking into the Helsinki-based European Chemicals Agency.
The Commission has said that the reports were only a legal requirement and that they would not necessarily lead to a full rewrite of the REACH regulation.
Responding to the NGO accusations, the ECHA said it receives "tens of thousands of dossiers containing up to 15,000 fields of information on substances and their impact on human health and the environment" and that it was doing its best to assess them.
The agency said its first task is to perform an IT-based automated review called a 'completeness check' to verify whether all fields have been filled. "It is not a check of the quality of the information provided nor is it a check of its adequacy," the agency told EurActiv, saying: "Article 20 of the REACH regulation actually specifies that the completeness check cannot address quality or adequacy of the information."
If a dossier is incomplete, the ECHA then notifies it to the registrant: "We write to the company concerned and tell them that they have failed to complete successfully, the reasons for that, and the legal consequences for them of not submitting a complete dossier. In that case, a registration number will not be given until a complete dossier has been provided," it said.
In actual fact, the ECHA said it had received only "around 5%" of incomplete dossiers since the online tool was launched in 2009, stressing that the NGOs accusations were "not true".
"And it is also not true to say that we have failed to ask companies to complete dossiers," it argued.
18th October 2012