On March 26, 2015 the Nordic Council (NC), the official inter-parliamentary body in the Nordic Region, issued a statement on a toxic-free everyday environment at its meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark. The NC calls for a more effective policy for preventing exposure to hazardous chemicals, especially in the case of children. Furthermore, it requires the EU to draw up criteria for identifying endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) as soon as possible. As the NC highlights, EDCs can have a cumulatively harmful effect and can cause harmful health effects even though there are only small amounts of various EDCs in everyday products. The NC emphasizes that substitution is the recommended strategy for countering the EDC problem. That means harmful substances should be replaced with others, less harmful ones, wherever such alternatives exist. Furthermore, manufacturers’ responsibility with regard to documentation should be specified more clearly. Also, the use of chemicals on the Candidate list of Substances of Very High Concern (SVHCs) for authorization under the European chemical regulation REACH must stop as soon as possible. The Nordic countries have limited power in terms of legislation that is mainly implemented at EU level. Unfortunately, it takes too long to draft EU legislation and only one or two out of every thousand reports about potentially harmful chemicals are fully processed, the statement notes. According to the NC, greater political efforts are needed in order to make progress and further measures must be taken to reduce human exposure to EDCs.
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NC (March 26, 2015). “Calls for a toxic-free everyday environment.”
