Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-11-15-Speech-2-226"
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"en.20051115.25.2-226"2
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".
Mr President, this has been an excellent debate, with honourable Members speaking with knowledge, experience and passion. Sixty-one separate Members of the European Parliament have spoken and I have listened with care on behalf of the Council to all of them.
It is vitally important that the burdens which REACH imposes on industry are as low as possible. This is an industry that employs many hundreds of thousands of our European citizens, but it is important that the burdens are consistent with meeting our shared goals of protecting human health and the environment, and we believe that the emerging views of Parliament, the Council and Commission do this.
A focus of many speakers has been the needs of small firms in the chemical and related industries. The Council shares that concern, and in its compromise the Presidency has attempted to put forward a range of measures to help them. These include ‘one substance, one registration’, the role of the agency in assisting small firms and a number of measures to help them capitalise on their innovation.
Many Members have mentioned the word ‘balance’ this afternoon. REACH is in many ways a balancing act and we believe the emerging consensus between our three institutions represents the only achievable balance on this delicate, complex and very important dossier.
I very much welcome and share the widespread support expressed here today for the need to avoid unnecessary animal testing. Clearly, for now, non-animal alternatives do not exist for all the tests we need, so the role of ‘one substance, one registration’ to avoid duplicate testing is key. We also want the scope to amend the list of test methods approved as rapidly as possible as non-animal alternatives come forward.
In its amended form, REACH will target the most hazardous substances; PBTs, VPs and VBs will be registered early. They, CMRs and other substances of very high concern, such as endocrine disrupters, will be subject to a rigorous authorisation process, including substitution.
A key principle of the REACH approach is to lay the responsibility for demonstrating the safety of chemicals firmly upon the chemical industry. The reversal of the burden of proof will mark a positive and dramatic improvement on the current regime and is something that Member States and the Council have seen as vitally important. REACH is a significant improvement on the status quo. It will give us the information we need to address substances of concern. It will promote innovation in the industry itself through reducing the current existing burdens on companies wishing to introduce new and greener chemicals and through promoting substitution of older, more polluting substances. Europe has been debating REACH since 1998. We have come a long way in understanding both the substances and the concerns of all stakeholders. I argue that now is the time to seize this once-in-a-lifetime chance to agree on what is before us and overcome the problems of sound chemicals management.
The current regime for chemicals is flawed, bureaucratic and slow and, in too many circumstances, it is frankly ineffective. More than 40 laws, over 100 000 substances and almost 40 years after the EU first started to address chemicals, we still have not got there. Chemicals pose a huge challenge and a huge opportunity to modern society and we need to take this on now. REACH, as it is emerging in Parliament, the Council and the Commission, is the best tool we have to do this, hence its importance to us all."@en1
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