Chemical reaction

From commission administrator to head of one of the most high-profile EU agencies, Geert Dancet has walked a long path to where he now sits, in the ECHA’s offices in Helsinki.

With 20 years of competition and industrial policy under his belt, he was the obvious choice to head up the REACH unit when it was created in the enterprise directorate in 2004. His studies in industrial economics and econometrics gave him a good grounding for what he does now, he says, and along with a talent for management, he’s fairly sure about the future direction of the agency.

“It is definitely an administrative and regulatory agency that has to manage legislation, and so has to make good use of science for arriving at legal decisions. It’s scientific and pragmatic at the one time.”

Officially opened in June, the ECHA is responsible for implementing REACH, the EU’s chemicals law that evaluates, regulates and sometimes restricts the use of chemicals. It was designed to replace over 40 pieces of separate legislation governing chemicals within the 27-member bloc, and is the basis for the creation of the ECHA itself.

What this means for the agency in the short term is that it must coordinate the registration of all chemicals put on the market by companies in quantities over one tonne. It’s going to be a long list, but Dancet says the ‘pre-registration’ phase, which ends this December, is “working quite well”. “We have over 200,000 pre-registrations, over 200 enquiries, and over 300 production and process-oriented notifications,” he says.

However, he counsels, “It all depends on whether the companies are only pre-registering substances they really would like to register. We estimated registrations for 170,000 but many more are pre-registering. Quite a lot of companies are pre-registering substances they will potentially sell. We want to draw attention to companies that they should focus on the reality and not the potential.”

After all chemicals get pre-registered, Dancet says that companies who manufacture or import chemicals will have to pass their safety information on in data sheets, which are then communicated down the supply chain to businesses who use the substances.

Those companies who fail to pre-register by the December 2008 deadline will in theory be banned from manufacturing or exporting their chemicals, but, says Dancet, there is a fallback for them. There is a way to ‘post-register’, if you like, if a company later on down the line decides to use a certain chemical in its products in amounts greater than one tonne.

Any wide-ranging legislation like REACH, and by association, the chemicals agency, is bound to get a fair few newspaper column inches, not only because of the requirements for industry to comply but because the legislation also affects consumers, the end users in the supply chain. Dancet says all of the media coverage he’s seen – on the whole – has been positive, although teething problems with their IT system in the beginning caused some small difficulties.

“I have not encountered any negative press and have heard relatively good reports. There are always companies that wished our IT systems performed better from the start, but we have been able to compensate for that. Generally, from industry, we have heard very few objections – it is mostly third countries that find the changes more difficult to accept.”

REACH and the registration process will have a bigger impact, he says, in future, and especially after 2010 when 95 per cent of all chemicals will be registered and the effects of the whole exercise will become clear.

“We are very well preparing ourselves for the evaluation procedure, which will make up the bulk of our work over the coming years.” It will be a big change for industry, which has been subject to fragmented rules on chemical use in the past. “[REACH] requires companies that produce existing chemicals not previously subject to regulation to register,” Dancet says.

“In the past, companies have had to agree on how to lower the risk of chemicals and guarantee their safe use, and for substances in amounts greater than 10 tonnes, have had to come up with analyses of their zero-effect for consumers.” Now the ECHA will authorise that analysis, offering help, advice, feedback and double-checking that companies are complying with the REACH regulation. But this will all take time.

“REACH is there for entering progressively into reality,” Dancet explains. Progress with pre-registration can be measured at the end of September, when the ECHA will publish a list of substances that have been pre-registered so far.

And in 2009 the agency will have a first list of substances requiring authorisation, which means companies that intend to use the listed chemicals will have to file for authorisation to do so.

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