Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-12-11-Speech-1-126"
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"en.20061211.14.1-126"2
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"Mr President, there are approximately 100 000 chemicals on the market. We have no knowledge of by far the majority of these chemicals at present. We do not know what effects they have on the environment and on health. That, clearly, is completely unacceptable, but it is a state of affairs that we are now tackling by means of REACH, for REACH introduces two basic principles. Firstly, we are reversing the burden of proof so that, in the future, it will be up to the industry to show that a substance is safe before it can be given permission to market it, whereas, at present, it is up to the authorities to show that a substance is dangerous before they are entitled to ban it.
The second basic principle, and the absolutely most important one, is that the most dangerous substances of all – those that give people cancer and allergies and that affect people’s reproductive ability etc - are to be substituted. If there is an alternative substance that is safer, it must be used instead of the dangerous substance. That is a very important basic principle.
It is also gratifying that, in future, less use will be made of experiments on animals. Implementing REACH would lead to far fewer such experiments. In the short term, there would be quite a few experiments, because we should need to use some data that we do not have at present, but, in the long term, REACH would result in far fewer experiments because of the introduction of compulsory data sharing, which is definitely also an aspect worth including.
All of us have been influenced in this business by many different interest groups. That much is obvious. There are major interests at stake, and things could not be otherwise. There have been the green organisations, on the one hand, and the chemicals organisations and their industry, on the other. The question is, what is the nature of the compromise we have obtained? Has the game ended in a draw, as I saw one newspaper article assert? No, it has not. We have ended up not with a draw but with a compromise, in which it is clearly the green interests that have won. It is clearly environmental and health considerations that have won. In the past we had an open stable door, with the result that a variety of chemicals could, without further ado, be placed on the market and used as one saw fit. That door has almost been closed. The door is not completely secure inasmuch as there is still a small chink in it. In an ideal world we should, of course, have sealed this, but we do not live in an ideal world. We have achieved a compromise, which is good for the environment and people’s health."@en1
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