Legislation chemicals safety

While it may be very important to attend to the links between chemical safety and national development, this is seldom done in a systematic way. National chemical safety planners tend to look at their activity in isolation and not to identify synergies with other areas of chemical safety. For instance, actions such as legislation, national committees or data bases may be proposed separately for PCBs, dioxins, contaminated sites, chemical hazard information and monitoring, while some of these could be combined. 

Of equal (or perhaps greater) concern to risks in SME are risks to professional users33 and consumers. According to the European Commission, some level of experience or supervision must be assumed for professional uses, albeit with a limited amount of knowledge on chemical safety [200]. With regards to consumers, procedures and guidelines for chemical use are extremely limited, and legislation does not require SDS to be supplied with consumer products. Even if information is available to consumers, many consumers will not read, understand or follow instructions [201, 202],... 

In principle, nontesting methods can be applied at different stages in the development and registration of chemicals, from in-house research and development to the compilation of dossiers on chemical safety for submission to regulatory authorities. In practice, the ways in which these approaches are used depends on the requirements of the specific legislation and the possibilities offered by regulatory authorities. 

In the main, legislation is used to set acceptable boundaries within society. Legislation may provide for individual decisions, or may reserve decisions to some form of societal judgement at local, national or international level. In terms of chemical safety, this legislation may be connected with ... 

There can be differences between countries in legislative demands for technical information. As these differences can lead to barriers to trade, considerable effort is being made to internationalize the common element, the hazard assessment, and, where possible, the risk assessment. Assessments of all the known (at a particular time) information on hazard are published by the WHO/Intemational Labour Office (ELO)/United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS) as Environmental Health Criteria . (See also chapter by Watfa.) In addition, prediction of the hazards for chemicals requires the performance of tests and, especially when these tests involve the use of animal models, it is being seen increasingly as unethical to perform more experiments than scientifically necessary on animals. 

---