Swedish Enterprise on the revision of REACH

The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise welcomes a Chemical strategy for sustainability and a revision of REACH that both simplifies the legislation and makes it more efficient. This combined with a strong and coordinated enforcement across the union will protect consumers, environment and ensures a level playing field and competitiveness for business.

REACH is the most comprehensive regulatory framework aiming at securing safe use of chemicals, but chemicals are also regulated in several other legislations. The way forward should be to simplify the legislation, make it more efficient and to avoid overlaps with other legislation in combination with a strong and coordinated enforcement across Member States.

Given the broad use of chemicals Swedish Enterprise stresses the need for impact assessments made with a holistic view that look at the potential effects for the whole value chain. Such assessments must include all stakeholders, from the chemical industry to downstream users such as article producers and consumers.  

Therefore, the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise would like to stress that the current REACH revision is an opportunity to further improve the framework by making it more efficient, consistent and coherent with other pieces of EU product safety and environmental law by:

• Bringing added value to new data requirements

• Using digitalised supply chain communication

• Simplify the authorisation and restriction procedures

• Improve and maintain policy coherence between REACH and other policies (RoHS, Ecodesign, IED etc)

• An essential use concept must facilitate decision making in authorization/ restriction process

• Improved and coordinated enforcement to ensure safety of imports entering EU