Too many chemical tests would burden industry, claims MEP

Date: 09/01/03

By Karen Carstens

AS AN MEP, Karl-Heinz Florenz deals with people. As a farmer, he deals with plants.

Since 1887, his family has owned a farm north-west of Düsseldorf - in Germany's otherwise largely urban North Rhine-Westphalia state - where the burly 55-year-old Christian Democrat spends most of his spare time hard at work in the great outdoors.

In Brussels, he keeps himself busy with other matters often close to the ground as the European People's Party/European Democrats group coordinator on the Parliament's environment, public health and consumer policy committee.

One of his biggest challenges this year is a raft of proposals on EU chemicals' policy he expects the European Commission will finally unveil in March or April. This will come after months of delay about which anxious firms have complained bitterly.

The reason for the corporate concerns: the plans would force companies to retest some 30,000 chemicals already used and sold in Europe.

"About 20,000 of those are about 20 years old," Florenz told European Voice during the Christmas break, speaking from his farm. "And only some 1,500 or 2,000 are really dangerous substances."

The United States government last November denounced the planned system in a two-page report as "costly, burdensome and complex," adding that it might "prove unworkable in its implementation".

It could cost companies around 250,000 (l250,000) to test each chemical, require 13 million animals for that testing and "make Europe the most expensive place to bring a chemical to market," the paper said.

Florenz agrees that testing all of the chemicals at once would place too much of a burden on industry.

Instead, he favours isolating the 1,500 to 2,000 - hitherto untested - dangerous substances for a first phase of testing. Other chemicals can always be tested at a later date, in a kind of staggered process.

"I am very flexible about what should and should not be tested," Florenz said, adding that he does not want to get too specific on all the details before "the Commission has put its final proposals on the table".

These will include three or four separate directives, he said, with at least one on risk assessment, one on the contentious permissions procedure and one establishing a new EU chemicals agency.

Florenz said he hopes that this regulatory body would function similarly to the London-based European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products (EMEA). Established by the European Commission in 1995 to streamline the approval of new medicines, it relies on fees charged to drug companies, along with some additional funding from Brussels.

"This is the best thing we have in the EU," Florenz said. "It has the necessary "attitude" towards the European Parliament and it organises its own costs, like the American NIH (National Institutes of Health)."

Moreover, the shape of the chemicals risk assessment directive will be critical.

"Everything hinges upon this, because we are talking about what substances will be banned here," he added, after his son interrupted him to announce that a hydraulic wood-chopping machine they had rented for the day needed to be returned to a local shop.

"You can either take an "applications assessment" or a "material assessment" approach."

Florenz said he disagrees with the latter approach, favoured by many Greens in the European Parliament, because "then you'd even have to ban things like gas".

Focusing on the "danger aspect" would merely necessitate finding practical alternatives for all the banned substances.

"If you throw a lit cigarette into a gas-powered lawnmower, then you wouldn't need to shave for six weeks, it's as simple as that!" Feeding the wood-chopper big hunks of wood to be reduced into small pieces, like many of his chores on the farm, is all part of "working off my European aggressions," he joked.

Article discusses European Commission proposals on EU chemicals policy, expected to be unveiled in March or April 2003. Firms are concerned that the plans would force companies to retest some 30,000 chemicals already used and sold in Europe.

http://ec.europa.eu/comm/environment/chemicals/index.htm http://ec.europa.eu/comm/environment/chemicals/index.htm

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