Cefic attacks new EU endocrine disruptor chemicals criteria

The European chemical industry association Cefic has criticised the European Commission’s criteria for defining endocrine disrupting (hormone affecting) chemicals, saying resulting guidance could over-regulate harmless chemicals. "For the industry to ensure that people and the environment are properly protected, it is essential that the criteria enable the identification of harmful substances. On the other hand, harmless substances, necessary to maintain a high quality of products and services”, stated a Cefic note. It said that the guidance needed to be refined to "make the criteria operational”. It explained: "To clearly distinguish between those substances, which threaten to harm human health and/or the environment and those which do not, we maintain that all elements of hazard characterisation –potency, severity, lead toxicity and (ir)reversibility – should also be built into the criteria”.

* The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) board of appeal has made its first ruling in a dispute over data sharing rules within the EU’s biocidal products regulation. The board has overturned a ruling ECHA made that a company’s data could be used in an application by a rival for a biocidal product to be admitted into the regulation’s article 95 approved substances list, against the data-owning company’s wishes. The two companies had failed to reach an agreement on data and ECHA ruled the data-owning company had failed to make sufficient efforts to strike an information-sharing agreement. The board overturned this ruling, saying that "the agency had not considered all the relevant facts in a balanced manner”. See https://echa.europa.eu/documents/10162/0/a-005-2015_decision_en.pdf/340ec917-9eb2-40c9-a002-cfe5aa68c3e0

* An EU funded research project called BARRIER-PLUS is developing waterborne new coatings designed to protect Europe’s structural steel installations and assets from corrosion, amidst concern that existing products may become unavailable because of tightening environmental regulations. In particular, rules on limiting volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and the upcoming 2018 REACH registration deadline for lower volume chemicals may restrict the availability of certain coatings. BARRIER-PLUS scientists are developing organic/inorganic nanocomposites to create environment-friendly coatings with enhanced film barrier properties. See http://www.barrierplus.eu/

* The European Space Agency (ESA) is developing special protective coatings to prevent a new weather satellite antennae from being damaged by the extreme temperatures and ultraviolet radiation experienced when in orbit.

See http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering_Technology/

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