Decision-making under REACH

Under REACH, chemicals will also continue to be restricted, banned or authorised under several pieces of different legislation, including product-specific legislation such as the Toys Directive, Construction 

58 A cut-off threshold of 0.1% weight/weight applies, but it currently appears unlear as to whether this concentration must be determined at the total article level or on a component or even a material basis. 

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The final objective of the research project was to develop a framework for decision-making under REACH. Applying the framework should result in a predictable set of regulatory options to control the use of... 

The soft-systems analytical framework facilitated the comparing and contrasting of national approaches, as well as interviewee perspectives of EU decision-making and REACH. In total, the results of these processes formed the basis for proposing a framework for decision-making under REACH. 

A four-step methodology was devised to develop a framework for EU risk management decision-making under REACH (Figure 3.4). 

The next Chapter exposes how without careful attention to particular issues during implementation the REACH legislative text is unlikely to deliver the recommendations identified in Table 4.6. Several examples are presented in Chapter 5 that illustrate how the strengths and weakness of the national approaches tend to hinder rather than facilitate EU decision-making. The proposed systems framework for decision-making under REACH then seeks to rectify these potential shortcomings of the legislation. 

Figure 5.5 Regulatory decision-making under REACH (differences from the current regulatory structure are indicated in grey)...

While the systems framework contains structural elements of the chemical strategies that have been proposed by the Dutch VROM and the UK RCEP, it focusses on decision-making under REACH. In comparison, the RCEP specifies action relating only to phase-out of... 

The proposed systems framework for EU decision-making under REACH seeks to counterbalance the weaknesses and to draw on the strengths of the national approaches while addressing the points shown in Table 7.1. Specifically, the framework would fuse hazard, technical and risk-benefit approaches to risk management (Table 7.2). Compared with the current process of chemical legislation and the recent REACH proposal, the systems framework would avoid a linear substance-by-substance approach by applying a set of decision-making rules based on hazard and use to all chemicals (Section 5.3.1). 

Permitting schemes relating to technical standards must be notified to, and approved by, the European Commission under Directive 98/34. Co-ordinating this process with decision-making under REACH is therefore not expected to be administratively burdensome to Member States or the Commission. 

Although establishing the necessary controls for point source emissions should only occur at national levels, the results of these activities should be reported to decision-making under REACH. 

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