“Europeans will continue to be exposed to dangerous chemicals“, regrets Wednesday, October 19 on franceinfo François Veillerette, spokesperson for the association for the defense of the environment Générations Futures. The European Commission has decided to move to 2023 the revision of the European regulation REACH, which classifies and potentially prohibits substances chemicals in the EU.
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This REACH directive has been in force since 2007 in the European Union. The European Commission had planned to launch its review during this quarter. But this revision has been postponed until the end of 2023. In its sights: phthalates, flame retardants, perfluorinated compounds and other bisphenols. A variety of chemicals found in many everyday consumer products. A fifth of the substances incriminated being potentially carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic for reproduction.
This revision should affect families of substances and therefore be more effective than the current version. It has officially been postponed because there is still a need for extensive preparation and consultation. The European Commission justifies, among other things, this postponement by the need to protect the competitiveness of industries in times of crisis, in the context of the war in Ukraine. An argument that has a lot of trouble getting through to environmental or health protectors
“It is quite dramatic from an environmental and health point of view“, denounces François Veillerette. According to him, this revision was “essential“, since “the will of the Commission was very good: to evaluate the chemical products by family and not one by one“. With this process, according to the spokesperson of Générations Futures, we save a lot of time in the evaluation of products, among which we find “carcinogens, mutagens, reprotoxins [substances toxiques pour la reproduction]but also endocrine disruptors.“
However, the problem according to Générations Futures is that by postponing this examination to 2023, “we don’t know when [aura lieu] revision of the REACH regulation“. François Veillerette explains that in itself, “push back for a year, it might not be so bad if it didn’t almost certainly push back to the next European Commission.” “As the next European elections are in 2024, there is a risk of relying on the next European Commission, of which we have absolutely no idea what the priorities“, he explains.
“The risk is that it does not take up the same axis at all and that all that goes in the trash.”
François Veillerette, from Future Generationsat franceinfo
Faced with those who say that the competitiveness of industries must be protected in times of crisis, François Veillerette replies that “the war in Ukraine has a good back: this has been the argument used by the agrochemical lobbies to try to postpone or weaken the revision of the directive on the use of pesticides today“. He confides that this argument begins to “annoy” the song. “When it is necessary to act on the environment, it is always later“, he regrets.