Archived press release

EU Ministers urged to stand up for public health, not the chemical industry

6 March 2001

EU Ministers must fix the Chemicals White Paper
Friends of the Earth today challenged EU Ministers to protect public health by strengthening the Commission's flawed White Paper on Chemicals at their informal Environment Council this Thursday, March 8th. The White Paper [1] claims it will protect public health - in fact it will allow the continued use of chemicals which contaminate our bodies or disrupt our hormones, exposing us to unknown future risks.

Friends of the Earth have sent a letter [2] to the EU Environment Ministers, including UK Environment Minister Michael Meacher, calling on them to phase out chemicals that accumulate in our bodies - the White Paper does not even allow restrictions on such chemicals. Earlier drafts included such an option, but it was removed as a result of last minute DG Enterprise and chemical industry lobbying.

Friends of the Earth's key concerns with the White Paper include:

• Lack of any obligation on industry to use the safest chemicals.

• No real controls on hormone disrupting chemicals, which may be responsible for increases in testicular and breast cancer and reductions in sperm counts.

• Governments are not given any powers to apply the Precautionary Principle and ban chemicals which accumulate our bodies. Chemicals that accumulate in our bodies pose substantial future risks, as even if we do not know they are toxic now, if we later find them to be there will be no way of removing them from our bodies.

Previous experience points to a precautionary approach as necessary to protect the public from risky chemicals. PCBs were used extensively in electrical transformers and buildings, and were originally claimed to be safe. Yet we now know that babies exposed to higher levels of PCBs while they develop in the womb suffer damaged intellectual development. One company, 3M, recently withdraw its stain resistance treatment Scotchguard after a component of it was found to be accumulating in our bodies. Even though 3M claimed that the chemical was non toxic, the company did not want to take the risk of future scientific advances finding its product to be damaging. The White Paper provides no mechanism for Governments to take such action.

Friends of the Earth's Safer Chemicals Campaigner Dr Michael Warhurst said:

"The contamination of our bodies by risky chemicals will not be stopped by the current Chemicals White Paper. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to protect future generations and our own. The Environment Ministers must ignore the short term and profit obsessed lobbying of the chemical industry and act to get rid of chemicals that contaminate our bodies."

The informal Environment Council on Thursday 8th March is the first discussion of the White Paper "Strategy for a future Chemicals Policy" agreed by the Commission on February 13th. It is expected that the Environment Council meeting on 7-8th June will reach conclusions on the White Paper, and will instruct the Commission to draft a new directive (or directives).

Notes

More information on Friends of the Earth's Safer Chemicals Campaign is available at:
www.foe.co.uk/safer_chemicals

Press briefings on the campaign are available at:
/campaigns/safer_chemicals/resource/media.html

[1] The White Paper is available at:
www.europa.eu.int/comm/environment/chemicals/index.htm

[2] Friends of the Earth's letter to EU Environment Ministers:

Dear .

Re: European Commission White Paper on Chemicals

I am writing to you on behalf of Friends of the Earth Europe regarding the Commission's recently published White Paper on Chemicals, which we understand you will begin discussing at your informal Environment Council on Thursday.

Friends of the Earth Europe is very disappointed in this White Paper, and considers that it will fail to ensure a high level of protection for humans and the environment and it will not allay public concerns about exposure to risky chemicals. We wanted to make you aware of some of our key concerns with the White Paper to inform your discussions on Thursday:

• It provides no mechanism for restricting the use of chemicals that accumulate in the body and in the environment. Friends of the Earth and the many other NGOs signed up to the Copenhagen Charter are committed to phasing out such chemicals. An earlier draft of the White Paper included a proposal that such chemicals be incorporated into the proposed authorisation regime, but this was removed due to industry lobbying. The public does not accept that our bodies should be contaminated with industrial chemicals - there must be a phase out of chemicals that accumulate in our bodies or the environment, regardless of currently understood toxicity, so we don't repeat the disaster of PCBs.

• It fails to deal with hormone disrupting chemicals. It suggests that they will be dealt with because of restrictions on proven reproductive toxins. In reality, due to the large amount of research required to establish this, the majority of proven hormone disrupters will not be restricted through such a mechanism for many years, if at all, so exposure will continue. This is certainly not precautionary.

• It does not contain clear, firm deadlines for delivery of safety data, after which chemicals must be removed from the market.

• It does not control either exports of chemicals outside the EU, or adequately control import of chemicals within products. The public will not understand why it is acceptable for EU nations to export banned products to the developing world, nor why chemicals in imported products are exempt from proper safety assessment.

• It does not properly enforce substitution, as it states that substitution is only required for substances already shown to be 'dangerous', whilst we - and in our view the public - believe that industry should always be obliged to use the safest chemicals.

• It is vague in its commitment to public right to know - we support a legally binding right.

• It has insufficient regard to the need to minimise animal testing, which can be achieved through adoption of the Copenhagen Charter policies: phasing out chemicals that are persistent or bioaccumulate, an obligation to use the safest chemicals, and only using chemicals if their use is safe beyond reasonable doubt, where doubt can be shown be in vitro or QSAR methods.

We will be providing a more detailed briefing on the White Paper prior to the June Environment Council meeting. If you have any queries or require any more information in the meantime then please contact me.

Yours sincerely,

Dr A. Michael Warhurst, Safer Chemicals Campaigner, Friends of the Earth Europe

If you're a journalist looking for press information please contact the Friends of the Earth media team on 020 7566 1649.

Published by Friends of the Earth Trust