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Bringing REACH to the USA

Experts call for US chemicals regulators to follow example of EU legislation

Source: flickr/Milosz1

US chemicals legislation is currently under intense scrutiny, with the Obama administration having pledged to overhaul the 30-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which currently regulates chemicals, apart from drugs and pesticides, that are produced in or imported into the USA. Lawmakers planning reform should adopt ideas from Europe’s controversial 2006 Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), experts say.

Writing in a paper published today in Science,¹ Megan Schwarzman and Michael Wilson, of the School of Public Health at University of California, Berkeley, USA, call for more stringent regulation of industrial chemicals. This can serve to both protect public health and allow the US chemical industry to compete more effectively in the global market, they say.

“REACH has set what may become a de facto global standard,” the authors write. It regulates both manufacturers and importers of products to the EU, and so already presents the international chemical industry with an imperative to adapt their manufacturing processes to European standards, they point out.

New legislation in the USA could provide the incentive needed to shift US chemical manufacturing towards ‘green chemistry’, according to Schwarzman and Wilson, who have previously advised the California Environmental Protection Agency on green chemistry.

‘Model’ legislation

Under REACH, every chemical substance made in or imported into the EU in quantities of more than one metric tonne per year must be registered with and approved by the European Chemicals Agency. It is the first chemicals law to put the onus on manufacturers to demonstrate that existing or new chemicals are safe for the intended use. The legislation applies not only to the chemical substances, but also to some products made using those chemicals.

By contrast, the US TSCA legislation only applies to chemicals introduced since the law was enacted in 1976, and requires the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to show that a substance is unsafe before it can be banned.

There is widespread agreement among politicians, environmental and health advocacy groups, and the chemical industry itself that regulation in the USA is badly in need of reform.

“The TSCA has many deficiencies that endanger the public’s health,” said congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, Vice Chair of the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, at a hearing on Tuesday. “There’s no question that this has placed every American at risk of being exposed to potentially lethal levels of harmful chemicals.”

One of the most striking deficiencies of TSCA, Schakowsky explained, is the huge number of chemicals “grandfathered in” when the legislation was enacted — and the fact that the EPA has no power to demand retesting of chemicals previously presumed to be safe. This, together with legal obstacles to banning a chemical when data showing health impacts do exist, means that the EPA has not banned a single chemical under TSCA in nearly 20 years.

There is no doubt that implementing REACH is costly, but estimates of the price tag vary wildly. The European Commission’s own estimates published in a 2003 report² put the cost at up to 5.2 billion euros over 15 years, much of which will have to be borne by industry. “Applying an approach like REACH in the United States could devastate small and medium sized companies,” said Beth Bosely, speaking at this week’s subcommittee hearing on behalf of the Society of Chemical Manufacturers and Affiliates. But the cost will be offset by an estimated 50 billion euros saved through the public health benefits of REACH, according to the EU report.

Prioritising chemicals for evaluation

A move towards a REACH-style system would require each one of over 80,000 chemicals registered in the USA to be evaluated for safety. “This approach would almost certainly overwhelm EPA and disadvantage US industry,” said Bosely. Instead, industry groups argue, legislation should focus on prioritising for evaluation those chemicals thought to pose the greatest risk to human health and the environment.

But others argue that while prioritising is important, it is not the whole story. “We support the concept of applying a health-based standard to all chemicals under a revised TSCA,” said Daryl Ditz, of the Center for International Environmental Law, Washington, DC, at the hearing. The recommendations for prioritisation contained in the American Chemical Council’s proposed principles for modernizing TSCA would subject “only a fraction of existing chemicals, selected on the basis of whatever information can be cobbled together, to a safety determination and [let] the majority of chemicals sidestep credible evaluation.”

Reference and links

1.	Schwarzman MR and Wilson MP. New Science for Chemicals Policy. Science 2009; 326:1065-1066. doi: 10.1126/science.1177537
2.	European Commission. Extended Impact Assessment of REACH. 2003; (SEC (2003) 1171/3). Report