On 6 November 2024, a Swedish EU minister Jessika Roswall was approved as EU Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy following her confirmation hearing at the European Parliament the day before. For the next five years, she will oversee chemicals policies, including the long-awaited REACH revision and a chemicals industry package.
Ahead of the confirmation hearings, she and Stéphane Séjourné, who was nominated as Executive vice-president for prosperity and industrial strategy, expressed commitment to progressing with REACH Revision in 2025. The chemicals industry package, which covers REACH review, will strive to revamp and streamline the regulatory framework to remove harmful substances from the marketplace while providing greater long-term investment certainty for the European chemical companies.
To note, the confirmation hearing of French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Stéphane Séjourné is scheduled for 12 November 2024. Once confirmation hearings of all Commissioners-designate are completed, the Commission as a whole is approved in a single vote by the Parliament.
REACH revision
As part of the REACH Revision, pending since 2022, the Commission has highlighted the following focus areas:
- Review authorisation and restriction processes, aiming to substantially reduce the need for individual authorisations. This would allow faster and more transparent decision making without jeopardising chemical safety.
- Strengthen enforcement to level the playing field, including for online sales, to maintain the competitive position of compliant EU companies and ensure that imported products meet the standards.
- Improve information requirements such as on endocrine disruptors to close information gaps and improve risk control.
- Promote non-animal testing
- Digitalisation to ease regulatory burden on companies, particularly SMEs.
These focus areas support the priorities of the new chemicals industry package:
- innovative, sustainable and secure supply chains that need clarity and long-term predictability for investors
- streamlined legislation, including the REACH revision, to prioritise simplification, burden reduction and competitiveness without compromising on the protection of human health and the environment
- policy coherence, including alignment between REACH and other pieces of legislation; and
- providing clarity on the universal PFAS restriction as soon as possible.
Update Towards a Decision on PFAS
The new Commission maintains commitment to banning Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). To provide some degree of clarity and predictability, Commissioners-designate highlighted focusing on banning the consumer uses of PFAS, such as in cosmetics, food contact materials and outdoor clothing.
Where adequate safety/performance alternatives are not available, continued use of PFAS could be permitted under strictly controlled conditions in industrial applications, particularly critical ones. Such continued uses would be subject to strict emission and disposal rules to limit environmental release, as well as clear incentives to innovate and develop sustainable substitutes.
Political Guidelines for the New EU Commission
Earlier, in September, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared the following goals in her Political Guidelines:
Working to decarbonise our economy will be part of our continued shift to a more sustainable pattern of production and consumption, retaining the value of resources in our economy for longer.
This will be the purpose of a new Circular Economy Act, helping to create market demand for secondary materials and a single market for waste, notably in relation to critical raw materials.
We will put forward a new chemicals industry package, aiming to simplify REACH and provide clarity on “forever chemicals”, or PFAS.
Published November 12, 2024
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