The European Green Deal foresees the establishment of a “one substance, one assessment” process for chemical safety assessments. The Commission believes that streamlining the scientific and technical work on chemicals at EU level is necessary to achieve this objective, and has just launched a call for contributions to the drafting of the regulation that will frame it.
The Commission committed in the European Green Deal to present a chemicals strategy for sustainability and, as part of this work, to review how to use better the EU’s agencies and scientific bodies to move towards a process of “one substance - one assessment”.
The chemicals strategy for sustainability identified a number of actions to deliver on the commitment to move towards this process. The current call for evidence is part of one of the key actions announced in the strategy, namely “to rationalise the use of expertise and resources by proposing the reattribution of technical and scientific work on chemicals performed under the relevant pieces of legislation to European agencies, including work of the Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risks (SCHEER) and Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety (SCCS).”
The targeted problem
The EU regulatory framework for hazard and risk assessment and management of chemical consists of many pieces of legislation, addressing production and placing on the market of chemicals and chemical products, emissions of chemicals, protection of workers’ health and safety of consumer products, oodstuff and feedstuff, and the environment. A high volume of technical and scientific work supports the implementation of the individual legislative acts. Depending …