As the Commission considers phasing out ‘hazardous’ substances’ in the upcoming ‘Chemical Strategy for Sustainability’ let us look at the many every day things that fall under that heading.
Some obvious hazardous substances are:
Alcohol
Caffeine in coffee and tea
Safrole in spices
Reading through a 1984 book that details man-made and natural hazardous substances, the list runs on for pages.
The essential elements for life are
1. Basic building blocks: Hydrogen, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen;
2. Trace elements: Cobalt, Copper, Chromium, Fluorine, Iodine, Iron, Manganese, Molybdenum, Nickel, Selenium, Tin, Vanadium, Zinc;
3. Macronutrients: Sodium, Magnesium, Phosphorous, Sulfur Chlorine, Potassium, Calcium.
In 1984, 9 were reported being carcinogenic: oxygen, cobalt, copper, chromium, iron, manganese, nickel, selenium, zinc.
Others meet other hazardous criteria. This list is from 1984. It is likely what we know about their hazardous properties has developed over time.
If you use a hazard-based approach to regulate substance, you’ll land up, by accident or design, phasing out the essential elements for life. If you use a risk-based approach and enforce it, you lead to a safer world.
Today, in Europe, we have a hodge-podge approach. Some chemical risk management legislation, like REACH, is based on a risk-based approach. In other areas where chemical substances are used, the co-legislators have opted for a hazard-based approach.
There is a rational reason for using a hazard-based approach. If you phase out something because it meets one or more hazard criteria, you can be sure, or hope to be sure, you’ll never come in contact with it. It is often introduced in reaction to the perceived failure of a regulatory system when people come into contact with a substance at levels they should not have done so. The logical knee jerk response is rational. It happens in many areas.
This approach has downsides. It ignores trade-offs for using some substances. The benefits of some of those substances will be lost if phased out. If you want renewable solar-powered energy, at scale and low cost, it looks like you’ll have to accept the presence of silicon, aluminium, gallium arsenide, indium, phosphorus, arsenic, calcium titanium oxide, tin, chlorine, bromine and iodine. For more, see this Economist piece (link).
Personally, I prefer a risk-based approach, properly resourced and enforced. I prefer this approach for two reasons. Firstly, the case made by Cass Sunstein in ‘Risk and Reason: Safety, Law and the Environment’, link, for a risk-based and cost-benefit based approach, is intellectually coherent. I do not see this approach as a block on the phase-out of the use of substances whose use is not safely managed. Unfortunately, too few regulators and politicians in Europe have read Sunstein’s work.
This is not to say that the use of some hazardous substances should not be strictly controlled. Their manufacture, use and disposal needs to be controlled and safe. REACH talks about ‘closed-loop’ and ‘safe use’.
Secondly, I base it on personal experience. As a regulator, you realise very quickly, that for some substances that are naturally present in the environment, you can not set a zero-based limit for their presence in the environment. Also, having benefited from a genuinely toxic cocktail of chemotherapy and radiation for treatment, which likely hit every hazard label out there, I am glad that some people are busy producing some carcinogenic, mutagenic, toxic, and hazardous substances.
Of course, if you move to a circular, or cradle to cradle approach (link), the idea of a blanket ban on hazardous substances would be knell for a circular revolution.
Source for substance: Edith Efron: How Environmental Political Controls What We Know About Cancer. 1984.