Under REACH, the burden of proof for demonstrating the safe use of chemicals has been transferred from Member States to industry to ensure that risks to human health and environment are avoided or adequately controlled. Enterprises that manufacture or import more than one ton of a chemical substance per year will be required to register the chemical in a central database. The deadline for registration ended in June this year.

The REACH regulation went significantly further than other legislations, introducing new ground-breaking principles such as ‘no data, no market’, substitution, building on the precautionary principle and placing the burden of proving the safety of chemicals on companies.

However, an investigation of German authorities [German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) together with the German Environment Agency (UBA)] on the availability of human health and environmental data in the REACH registrations of chemicals regarding their compliance with the requirements on toxicological and eco-toxicological information as laid down in REACH came to the conclusion, that  companies are breaking EU law by marketing hundreds of potentially dangerous chemicals that are widely used in consumer and other products (see the news below).

The European Environmental Bureau has formulated the shortcomings of REACH:

REACH underlying principles are not being applied. The principle of “No data, no market” is not in place as ECHA provides registration numbers, hence access to the market, to all registration dossiers by default, even to incomplete, inadequate and irrelevant dossiers. The burden of proof has not been shifted to industry. The extremely poor information provided by companies in the registration dossiers shifts the burden to Member State authorities and to ECHA Committees to complete the information needed for managing its risks. Although REACH provisions are underpinned by the precautionary principle, it is not being applied when taking decisions on restrictions or granting authorisations. And finally, consumers keep fighting to know. The right to know on substances of very high concern in consumer products is applied as the ‘right to ask’ or ‘the fight to know’ since REACH obligations have shown to be insufficient and its implementation is very poor.

It seems to be clear that great improvements in the implementation of REACH are required in order to assure safety of the consumers.