A chance for change

• Over 30,000 chemicals are currently marketed in quantities over one tonne just within the European Union. Even more chemicals enter Europe as additives or contaminants in chemical preparations or consumer products. Others are generated as unintentional by-products of chemical manufacturing or waste management processes and are released in waste streams or even distributed as contaminants in consumer products.

• Unbelievably, only a handful of these chemicals have been assessed for the risks they pose and even then, little effective action has resulted.

• Many chemicals are still widely used even when they are known to be hazardous.

A new proposal, currently being considered by the European Commission, offers a real opportunity to begin controlling the spread of chemicals. Europe is the world's largest chemical producer, so what happens here could change the entire world chemical market.

The original proposal by the Commission to overhaul chemicals regulation in Europe (in its White Paper, Strategy for a Future Chemicals Policy) represented an admission by the Commission, and by European governments themselves, that existing chemical controls have failed to protect us. In its first call for a new chemicals reform, the Commission offered a plan of decisive action to tackle the problem including measures to replace the most hazardous chemicals with safer alternatives.

With toxic additives all around us in consumer products this 'substitution' of hazardous chemicals with safer alternatives is the only way we can reduce our exposure to chemicals in the home. In the meantime, we need to know what chemicals are in what products so that we can begin to take control of our own chemical exposure.

If agreed in their current form, the new EU law could actually trigger a phase out of some of the world's most dangerous chemicals.

But industry is fighting against it. They have mounted a strong global lobby to persuade the EU to weaken its proposal. The US, with a powerful chemicals industry, is even threatening to overrule the EU proposal by claiming to the World Trade Organistaion that it would damage US trade.

We urgently need to tell EU Governments:

• We want the EU to stand up to industry and put our health and environment first.
• We have the right to know what's in the products we bring into our homes.
• We want hazardous chemicals phased out of our products and their manufacture and to have safer alternatives phased in.
• We need this new system to make industry accountable for the impacts of their products, now and in the future.