CEFIC : CHEMICAL INDUSTRY INSISTS ON CONSISTENCY AND CONSULTATION.

The chemical industry is one of the most highly regulated industrial sectors in the European Union. Over one hundred pieces of legislation relate directly to chemicals, a further 360 cover the wider areas of pollution and nuisances and over 1,300 exist in the broader field of the environment.

The Commission's DG Environment launched a study into 165 individual items of legislation to determine whether they are consistent with REACH, five years after this basic legislative framework for the industry had been in place to establish whether there are gaps or overlaps in areas such as waste, water, end-of-life vehicles and batteries.

The European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) itself had already conducted its own analysis of the 20 most important pieces of legislation affecting its members and had identified several inconsistencies which it had asked the Commission to address. "We have problems with legislation which was adopted after REACH and does not refer to REACH, or even changed its scope," explains Anne Rose Lambers, CEFIC's senior legal counsellor.

One example of inconsistency came with the RoHS directive on the restriction of the use of hazardous substances. This banned the presence of some substances, such as lead, in certain products. However, CEFIC discovered that the restriction procedures under the two pieces of legislation were completely different and so required industry to request authorisation under both procedures. After CEFIC had pointed this out, the anomaly was partly addressed.

It is not just the basic legislative act which determines the requirements the chemical sector must meet, but also the many subsequent rules adopted under comitology. As CEFIC's Secretary-General Jean Claude Lahaut says: "We want to see consistency of legislation in both law and implementing measures".

This is especially important when the legislation merely sets out the general principles in areas as complex as chemicals or emissions trading. This was particularly true of the latter where the EU adopted broad brush legislation in order to be ready for the Copenhagen climate change conference in Copenhagen, in December 2009. "They said the rest would be decided in comitology. So, the content of the law came afterwards," explains Lahaut. "You had decisions about the sectors exposed to international competition, benchmarks and auctioning rules. These decisions are made in comitology and for us, these are clearly more decisive than the actual...