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28th Mar 2024

Pro-green MEPs prevail in chemicals vote

MEPs took a left-wing pro-environment line on the EU's REACH chemicals bill in parliament on Tuesday (4 October), setting the scene for a clash with the centre-right next month.

The new law is designed to remove potentially toxic substances from circulation by getting industry to provide information on chemicals used in everyday products.

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But the text has become a battleground between the business lobby which claims costs will cripple competitiveness and environmentalists who say it does not go far enough.

Italian socialist Guido Sacconi's pro-green version of the bill went through the parliament's environment committee almost unscathed on Tuesday however, and will now form the basis of the plenary vote in the 14-17 November session.

Under the Sacconi text, the amount of information required from producers will be linked only to the tonnage in which a given chemical is traded rather than its potential risk to consumers, with green campaigners saying the exposure risk is impossible to measure and gives industry a free hand to exempt products from the scheme.

The amount of information required will be relaxed only in the one to ten tonne per year category, firms will be forced to substitute potentially risky substances with less risky chemicals if they are already available on the market and questionable substances will be authorised for just five years pending a review of their environmental impact.

Trouble ahead

Lobby groups such as the chemicals trade federation CEFIC and environmentalists Greenpeace are poring over the details of Tuesday's vote, which covered around 1,500 amendments, before responding.

But the Green group in the parliament hailed the result as a victory for the environment.

"We have turned a corner now on REACH, finally it is going in the right direction again", Swedish Green member Carl Schlyter said.

A Liberal group expert indicated "If the industry view had gone straight through to plenary, it would have been the end of REACH".

But the Sacconi text flies in the teeth of the powerful EPP-ED group, with conservative MEPs such as the Netherland's Ria Oomen-Ruijten and Germany's Hartmut Nassauer calling for lower information requirements in the ten to 100 tonne bracket, more focus on risk rather than tonnage and wider use of existing information rather than new testing.

"It [the Sacconi version] is bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy and the EPP-ED group will never vote for it", Ms Oomen-Ruijten told EUobserver.

"What they are basically doing is introducing the Swedish model, and we do not have a chemicals industry in Sweden any more", she added.

Next round approaches

The head of the environment committee's secreteriat, Francis Jacobs, explained that conservative members have to get just 37 MEPs' signatures to retable their amendments for the November plenary.

Most of the 22 EPP-ED environment committee members voted consistently against Mr Sacconi's text leading to a narrow result on several key points, except on the substitution of less risky products clause, where the Sacconi view triumphed by around 40 votes to 20.

Socialist, liberal and green members mostly stuck together on the other side, with insiders saying that Mr Sacconi's unambiguous victory bodes well for his ability to build a compromise around his text in the next six weeks leading up to the plenary vote.

One rogue conservative who consistently voted against his group on Tuesday, Sweden's Anders Wijkmann, also suggested that the EPP-ED's united facade is beginning to crumble.

"I am talking to a few of my colleagues and some of them are beginning to come around", he said.

But if MEPs fail to see eye-to-eye next month, the UK presidency's plans to get agreement on the bill by the end of the year and to have the legislation in place by early 2006 could collapse.

The sheer complexity of the bill could also cause problems in winning over public support down the line, with one MEP on the environment committee suggesting that members tend to vote along party lines because they do not really understand the issues.

"I would say that out of the 62 members there today, about half don't know what they voted for", the member said.

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