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Keynote by Mr Geert Dancet, Executive Director,
European Chemicals Agency
“Positioning ECHA for the future”
2015 Helsinki Chemicals Forum
28 May 2015, Helsinki
Ladies and gentlemen,
Welcome to the seventh Helsinki Chemicals Forum. It gives me a great
pleasure to experience, once again, this annual gathering of chemical safety
professionals. We have with us many prominent HSE executives from
industry, experts from regulatory authorities around the globe, policy
shapers from Member States and European institutions, from multilateral
organisations and from key stakeholder organisations. This is an excellent
audience to explain how I wish to position ECHA for the future.
Your attendance testifies to the common chemicals goal all nations set at the
2002 World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, namely
“to achieve sound management of chemicals through their lifecycle by 2020
so that chemicals are produced and used in ways that minimise significant
adverse impacts on human health and the environment”. In other words, all
nations have taken it as their common responsibility to ensure that human
health and the environment are duly protected from chemicals by 2020
whilst our societies will benefit from the safe use of chemicals in nearly all
aspects of our lives. In 2003 the European Commission’s “White Paper”
clearly realised that the chemicals legislation in place at that time could not
close the knowledge and safety gaps on the tens of thousands of chemical
substances and millions of products that the “chemical revolution” had put
on the market, let alone reducing their risks to a minimum. Therefore, the
EU adopted the ground-breaking REACH regulation in 2006 as its enabler for
reaching that world summit goal.
REACH has been a trailblazer in implementing the EU regulatory regime to
catch up with the knowledge and safety gaps on the high number of
chemicals on the market. We have collectively and successfully proven that
REACH works. And I am proud of having been entrusted with leading the
European Chemicals Agency in making it work.
Is the drive to a world where all chemicals are manufactured and used
without causing any adverse effect to man or the environment bad for
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business and competitiveness in Europe? That fear existed in the beginning
but is being contradicted by reality. Our daily practice in implementing
REACH shows that many companies and downstream users are already
benefitting from the demand for safer registered chemicals, and REACH
provides a growing push for innovation and better knowledge of alternatives.
REACH – and ECHA’s work – inherently serve to foster substitution, which is
one of the panel topics. The REACH system accepts that substances of
concern that are in specific industrial processes not causing any significant
exposure to workers or the environment can be continued to be used as an
intermediate, can be excluded from a restriction or can get an authorisation
or being exempted from it. Yet, the identification of a substance of concern
via harmonised classification, placing it on the candidate list for
authorisation or proposing it for restriction is a signal to industry to start
exploring options for substitution. Evidently, any substitution represents an
investment, a technical challenge for research and development, and
potentially a business risk. However, it is also an opportunity for developers
of safer alternatives to make profit. Hence the impact of authorisation
should be assessed at societal level. I would like to call upon sharing good
examples in substitution as they set the pace. Equally interesting are sharing
the failed efforts from those who have tried. We need an open and
collaborative approach in sharing the best practices in alternatives’
assessment so that society can benefit as a whole.
The idea of substitution comes back in the theme of “green chemistry” –
another panel discussion in this Forum- even within the circular economy
concept which the European Commission is promoting. The idea of “circular
economy” contains a novel approach to saving resources and protecting our
environment in highly developed industrial economies which have for too
long already depended too much on consuming finite commodities. If,
additionally, these moves are supported by convincing business cases for
sound chemicals management, this appears to me like a good recipe for
sustainable development and provides pro-active businesses a clear
competitive advantage if they take the circular economy on board in their
corporate strategies.
You might have noticed that I have already mentioned an important quality
that brings us together here – the notion of “responsibility”. Just like in
2002, when nations took their joint responsibility under the World Summit
for Sustainable Development, REACH is taking the concept of responsibility a
step further. Indeed, ECHA’s work on REACH and the other pieces of EU
chemicals safety legislation that we manage relies on industry taking its
responsibility and working together on a substance basis. Industry has the
burden of proof to demonstrate that their chemical substances are safe as
opposed to making authorities demonstrate that a substance is unsafe.
REACH has driven industrial actors towards a better knowledge of their
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portfolios of chemical substances that they place on the market. Thanks to
this explicit responsibility, the data and information that industry has
submitted to ECHA are cornerstones of all regulatory follow-up, allowing
ECHA and Member State authorities to identify chemicals of concern and
address them by the appropriate EU-wide risk management measures. As
you can see, both ECHA and Member States have not failed to take up their
responsibility. ECHA has invested heavily in developing and establishing the
requisite regulatory processes as well as the screening methods, IT tools and
guidance that support them. This year, ECHA will launch an improved
version of our dissemination portal that provides free access to easy to
understand summary information on chemical substances that the European
industry has submitted to the largest chemical database worldwide. This
information will also help authorities, companies and consumers around the
world to enhance the safe use of substances. The quality of the data that we
publish is also progressively improving in response to the decisions that
result from the evaluation of dossiers and of substances that ECHA and the
Member States undertake under the provisions of the REACH Regulation.
As a demonstration how the REACH data is being used by authorities I can
tell that we in the EU work at any given point in time on the safety of over
500 hazardous substances through the many evaluation and risk
management processes that we manage. I consider this an impressive
figure, also when comparing it with the number of substances I see our peer
authorities in other OECD countries working with. The European Commission
and ECHA have had over the years multilateral and bilateral contacts with
many other policy and regulatory authorities around the globe but have only
managed so far to convince few countries to move to an ambitious REACHtype of legislation to advance the safety of all widely used chemical
substances. I have personally taken the floor on the OECD workshop of 2011
reviewing the merits of 40 years of its chemicals work in order to convince
the participating governments to work towards a harmonised risk
assessment methodology so that the safety agenda of the World Summit for
Sustainable Development could be shared among the OECD countries. That
remains my beautiful dream.
Whilst we will need to think also beyond 2020, we need to grasp the
opportunities to make a difference already now. Exercising our responsibility
for chemical safety is a continuum. What are our strengths today? Where
can we work together already now? What are our challenges for the future?
From what I have said so far, it is clear that I see ECHA has all the potential
to position itself for the future chemicals management tasks. But I don’t see
a future where ECHA or Europe would work in isolation. Even if the
regulatory regimes differ across the globe, the hazards of chemical
substances and the assessment results are by-and-large the same for topical
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chemicals such as many phthalates or flame-retardants. Identifying their
properties, exchanging scientific assessments and views on appropriate risk
management is definitively something that we can do together across
continents. The multilateral and bilateral agreements provide an enabling
framework for such an exchange of regulatory expertise and outcomes as
they do not infringe on each other’s chemicals safety standard. I also see
free trade agreements having the potential for spreading sound risk
management practice. Let’s not forget that Europe has already such free
trade agreement with Canada and is negotiating also one with Japan and the
US. We have moreover intensified our cooperation with Australia.
Hence, whatever regulatory regime each country decides to follow we need
to continue working together on advancing the chemical safety. Here I
believe that international activities such as the OECD Chemicals Program
should continue to play a central role, and we could have another look what
opportunities it could provide also in sharing experiences and workload in
the areas of risk assessment and risk management, in addition to its very
valuable current work, which is still fairly much focussed on hazard
assessment. I see only one direction forward that will be to the benefit of us
all: that of a joint international responsibility, sharing our knowledge and
expertise on chemicals management. This will make the world a safer place
and it will ensure that more innovative products will be replacing substances
of concern.
Ladies and gentleman, looking at the more immediate future, our Agency is
going through challenging times. I wish to share with you the key drivers
that are characterising our work as we speak.
First of all, it is clear that ECHA is currently in a transition from a constantly
growing regulatory agency that dynamically rolls out new processes and
tools to an agency that is consolidating and integrating its current portfolio
of regulatory processes. To that effect it wishes to demonstrate that it can
achieve more impactful regulatory output with fewer staff by adopting lean
approaches.
At the scientific level we are keen to observe that we have ever growing
expert participation from all over the globe in our annual scientific
workshops. These key events help ECHA live up to its ambition of acting as
scientific “hub” in developing regulatory responses to scientific concerns in
fields of less charted territory. We had a very favourable echo to the
scientific workshops which we held on such subjects as sediment risk
assessment or nanomaterials and we will continue to organise them on
crucial topics supporting regulatory science in chemicals management
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ECHA is also working hard on the new generations of its scientific IT tools,
which will be an enormous step forwards in technology, user-friendliness and
integration. Mid-June we will publish the demo version of IUCLID 6 to be
tested by the chemicals and metal industries around the world already using
today IUCLID 5. Next year we will roll-out the production version of IUCLID
6, REACH-IT 3 and CHESAR 3. Had I more time I could, like Steve Jobs, give
you a preview of the wonders of our new software products. ECHA has the
ability to keep up-to-date to state-of-the-art 7 major tools for industry, 5 for
authorities, 2 for the public and 5 for its own processes. I know of no public
body capable of doing that. I call on the Commission to preserve, this jewel
in ECHA’s crown.
By continuously innovating and improving its services, ECHA will be in a pole
position to receive new responsibilities that can leverage its substance
knowledge and know-how to its use in mixtures and articles, whatever their
uses are. By becoming a one-stop-shop on chemicals management and its
website a one-stop-shop on safety information on chemicals, the necessary
trust of the public in chemicals can be achieved.
In the future, as users throughout the supply chains, retailers and
consumers at large are increasingly conscious of their own roles and
responsibility in the safe use of chemicals, I also perceive ECHA as service
provider to the industry and society that can provide unbiased advice,
knowledge and tools that will be needed beyond 2020.
This brings me to my last point to whatever extent we finally achieve the
2020 goals the work on chemicals safety is not over by that year. I am very
proud of our achievements as an Agency managing and coordinating the
REACH implementation. And as you have heard, I would like start a
discussion how we can collectively build on our respective experiences and
strengths. The Agency’s institutional expertise and leadership, its
accumulated knowledge and established methods for exercising its
regulatory responsibility will not only be valuable, but indispensable for
meeting the chemicals goals of the future. The latter is in fact the topic of
the first panel.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I wish you a fruitful and successful HCF 2015 and look forward to the lively
panel discussions over the coming two days and the conclusions which can
be drawn from it.
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