Cost Of EU Chemical Law Is Higher Than Predicted

The European Union’s 2006 law on regulating chemicals has thus far cost manufacturers and importers of substances about twice as much as originally estimated, a new report says. Companies have shelled out about €2.1 billion (nearly $2.8 billion) to comply with the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation & Restriction of Chemical substances (REACH) legislation, says the report, which was prepared for the European Commission’s Directorate General for Enterprise & Industry. The main reason the costs are higher is that companies have not used quantitative structure-activity relationship analysis to determine chemicals’ hazards, as was anticipated. Instead, firms paid for access to already-completed laboratory toxicity tests, the report says. The costs of implementing REACH, however, seem to have had no significant adverse effects on the EU chemical industry’s overall competitiveness, it continues. Producers of specialty and consumer chemicals have a greater capacity to pass their REACH-related costs to purchasers than do producers of basic chemicals, the report adds.