Textile finishers and their suppliers working in the European Union (EU) are to face increasing controls over their use of potentially toxic chemicals under a new policy paper released on October 14 by the European Commission.
This ‘Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability Towards a Toxic-Free Environment’ flags three important changes that the EU executive intends to make to European chemical legislation that will impact the textile sector.
The first is by orienting the EU’s ‘substances of concern’ controls to chemicals used in the textile sector to reduce their presence in fabrics, not only when they might have a chronic impact on human health or the environment, but also if they hamper recycling of otherwise safe and high quality secondary raw materials.
“Regulatory actions need to go hand-in-hand with increased investments in innovative technologies to address the presence of legacy substances in waste streams, which could in turn allow to recycle more waste. This is particularly important for certain plastics and textiles,” says the strategy.
As a result, laws springing from this strategy should “incentivise industry to prioritise innovation for substituting, as far as possible, substances of concern [with] sustainable bio-based chemicals,” it adds.
Priority would be given to regulating chemicals used in “product categories that affect vulnerable populations as well as those with the highest potential for circularity, such as textiles and packaging,” according to the paper.
A second strand of controls would flow from Commission plans to extend its ‘generic approach to risk management’, triggering packaging requirements, restrictions, bans and more, to consumer products containing chemicals, as well as the chemicals themselves, as at present.
The goal, says the strategy, is to “ensure that consumer products [the paper explicitly mentions textiles here] do not contain chemicals that cause cancers, gene mutations, affect the reproductive or the endocrine system, or are persistent and bio-accumulative”.
The EU executive said it would immediately launch a comprehensive impact assessment to say how and when it would impose such rules.
Finally, the Commission said it would toughen EU rules on endocrine disrupters in general, saying it would propose a legally binding hazard identification for endocrine disruptors, building on criteria already developed for biocides. This would be based on World Health Organisation (WHO) guidance, it says. And the strategy adds that the EU would “ensure endocrine disruptors are banned in consumer products as soon as they are identified, allowing their use only where it is proven to be essential for society.”
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