The European Union is a step closer to agreeing to an ambitious new set of rules regulating the use of chemicals in order to better protect people and the environment, officials announced on Friday.
Under the new rules, it will no longer be up to public authorities to show the toxicity of chemicals. Instead, it will be the responsibility of industrial producers to demonstrate that their products are safe.
After marathon negotiations, lawmakers and governments hammered out the details of one of Europe’s most ambitious and disputed legislative packages in years. The compromise paves the way for its adoption by the European Parliament on 13 December in a Strasbourg plenary session.
Since the European Commission first laid out proposals in October 2003, the package has been the subject of fierce lobbying by both industry eager to avoid red tape and green campaigners wanting tough regulations over hazardous chemicals.
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Potential hazards
The reform aims to ensure that 30,000 chemicals in daily use present no long-term risks to human health or the environment.
“I think we are doing a successful job of work here for future generations,” says Italian MEP Guido Sacconi. “We’re trying to ensure that the chemical substances in the medium and long term will be controlled and will be replaced when they’re dangerous.”
The plan sets up a system for the registration, evaluation and authorisation of chemicals (REACH) under which companies have to register all chemicals used and provide information about them, including potential hazards.
Tests provided by chemicals producers will be controlled and monitored by a new agency to be set up in Helsinki, which will be empowered to authorise and register substances.
No outright ban
The rules are to be phased in gradually by 2018, with priority for chemicals considered to be highly dangerous and produced in the largest volumes.
The compromise agreement calls for producers to provide plans for substituting the most dangerous chemicals or developing alternatives when none exist, although dangerous substances will not be banned outright as environmentalists had hoped.
The European Commission welcomed the agreement, which it said struck the right balance between the interests of consumers, the environment and industry.
“It is a marked improvement on the present situation regarding health and environment and at the same time it safeguards the competitiveness of the European industry – paying particular attention to small and mid-sized enterprises – and encourages innovation,” a spokeswoman said.
Selling out?
However, some MEPs were furious about the compromise, accusing their colleagues that brokered the deal of having compromised too much.
“The European Parliament has finally sold out to the intense lobbying of the German chemical industry and agreed a compromise … which will seriously limit the potential benefits of REACH in terms of protecting EU citizens and the environment from toxic chemicals,” said Green MEP Carl Schlyter.
The potential economic impact of the new rules is huge. Europe produces 28% of the world’s chemicals, with an industry turnover of €360 billion ($477 billion).
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)