The Regulation of Chemicals

This chapter considers policy on a specific area of technology synthetic chemicals. Synthetic chemicals have been manufactured on a large scale for at least 50 years. Unlike genetic engineering and nanotechnology, they are not considered to be new , but despite the decades of production and use there is still a great deal that we do not know about their effects. Time and again novel synthetic chemicals have been found to cause problems that were not expected. 

The general public policy approach to technology, discussed in the previous chapter, can be seen in the attitudes of the UK government and the EU Commission towards synthetic chemicals. The UK government s chemicals strategy (DETR, 1999) and the European Commission White Paper on chemicals (CEC, 

Science obviously plays an important role in chemicals policy. The synthetic chemicals industry is an outcome of the science of chemistry. Many more sciences — including biochemistry, toxicology, epidemiology and atmospheric chemistry — are important in our knowledge of the effects of chemicals. As I argued 

To understand the issues involved in chemicals regulation one needs to have some understanding of the different types of chemicals and the development of the chemicals industry. The next section of this chapter therefore outlines the relevant background information. I then go on to describe European legislation on synthetic chemicals (from which UK legislation derives). Finally, I outline some of the relevant issues in the debates that preceded the introduction of REACH. 

Chemicals are what chemistry finds when it looks at matter. In one sense, chemicals are merely one aspect of the ways we can consider matter matter can be considered in terms of its shape, size, colour, mass, solidity or fluidity, but also in terms of its chemical composition. In the last 150 years we have become adept at identifying, isolating, purifying and synthesizing chemicals. This last process has led to entirely new chemicals. It also means that we can produce large volumes of 

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Why Do We Need to Know This Material The dynamic equilibrium toward which every chemical reaction tends is such an important aspect of the study of chemistry that four chapters of this book deal with it. We need to know the composition of a reaction mixture at equilibrium because it tells us how much product we can expect. To control the yield of a reaction, we need to understand the thermodynamic basis of equilibrium and how the position of equilibrium is affected by conditions such as temperature and pressure. The response of equilibria to changes in conditions has considerable economic and biological significance the regulation of chemical equilibrium affects the yields of products in industrial processes, and living cells struggle to avoid sinking into equilibrium. 

Risk, Responsibility and the Regulation of Chemicals Anne Chapman... 

Democratizing technology risk, responsibility, and the regulation of chemicals / Anne Chapman. 

Our Stolen Future convinced me that we should be much more worried about synthetic chemicals than we generally are. So when I decided to do a PhD in philosophy in 2000, I chose to look at the regulation of chemicals, to see why the regulatory system was so ill equipped to deal with the issues raised by endocrine disruption. I felt that treating chemicals as isolated entities was part of the problem, so my research became an investigation into how we think about and publicly assess technologies, taking synthetic chemicals as an example. This book is the result of that research. 

Robert Nilsson, Science and Politics in the Regulation of Chemicals in Sweden ... 

The regulation of chemical contaminants in foodstuffs in the European Union... 

In most cases, limited information is available regarding the toxic effects of chemicals. Empirical guidelines are then used in an attempt to protect most of the aquatic ecosystem s biota. The regulation of chemicals, for instance, generally uses safety factors from 10 to 1000 depending on the number of species tested. Mesocosm studies or comparisons with real field situations are accepted with lower safety factors on a case by case basis, since these studies reduce the uncertainty linked to the relevance of laboratory models in terms of site-specific data. 

The main tool to assess the carcinogenic potential of a chemical is the rodent bioassay. Because of its central role in the regulation of chemicals, the rodent bioassay has been under intense scrutiny. The overall evidence points to the validity of the bioassay as a basis for human risk assessment (Fung et al., 1995 Haseman et al., 2001 Huff, 1999 Huff, 2002 Tomatis et al., 1997). 

It is against the background of these serious problems for the regulation of chemicals that the achievements of REACH have to be evaluated. In Section 5.2 we will further discuss the demands on risk assessment of individual substances and the consequent demands on toxicity data. In Section 5.3 we will assess the achievements of REACH in these respects. Based on this, we propose in Section 5.4 some further improvements of REACH. 

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