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The need to look beyond the traditional / conventional target pollutants, when assessing the risks of chemicals to human health and to ecosystems, is now generally recognised as a priority issue in all policy areas at both the European level and the national level in the various European countries. As part of the implementation of the European Environment and Health Strategy and its Action Plan (COM(2004)416) national competent authorities in the various countries give increasingly higher priority to the need to look at emerging substances and improve the current systems for identifying and addressing new risks to health as they emerge. In the water compartment, the Water Framework Directive plays a key role in the inclusion of emerging pollutants as future priority substances. The work on the revision of the first list of priority substances, which started in 2006 (and is still under way at the time of writing), and the negotiation around the Daughter Directive (EQS Directive), with the proposal from the European Parliament for the inclusion of 30 new substances (including various emerging pollutants) as priority substances, show on the one hand the constant pressure from the public for the inclusion of emerging substances as candidate priority substances, and, on the other hand, the importance of an efficient exchange of information about these substances (level of occurrence in the environment, fate and transport, effects, reliability and comparability of the data, etc. ) in order to facilitate the risk assessment and prioritisation process by the European Commission. Member States are currently in the process of identifying the substances that are relevant at river basin level (i.e. pollutants which are likely to cause a large number of water bodies within the river basin district to fail the objective of ‘good ecological status’). The identification of these substances in the various countries is a hot topic at the moment (with many implications, including economic ones). Besides the WFD, other programmes (e.g. OSPAR for the marine environment) are identifying new candidate emerging substances and regularly reviewing their priority lists as scientific knowledge advances. Overall the main challenge is to implement tools and approaches to identify the likely causes of ecological impairment (i.e. impact at the level of populations and ecosystems) and in particular, to establish links between chemical and ecological status. A better understanding of these causal links and the implementation of early warning systems is the only way to apply effective corrective measures and predict potential impacts, thereby avoiding a waste of resources. As regards the air compartment and in particular indoor air, research was focused on lead, asbestos and radon initially (in the 70s and 80s) and on volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the 1990s. In the past few years, research has been focused on semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs), heavier compounds that can be measured both in the indoor air and in house dust. They include many types of compounds from a variety of indoor sources (insecticides, flame retardants, plasticisers…). Interest in the measurement of these compounds indoors is growing, since they are often detected in homes, they are persistent, their metabolites are measured in human blood and urine, and toxicology and epidemiology tend to prove that some of them may be toxic to the human reproductive system and human development. They are therefore considered as indoor emerging substances. Chemicals are beyond any doubt one of the main stressors threatening the soil ecosystem. A proposal for a Soil Directive received insufficient support at first. But now preparations are underway for a modified proposal in which soil quality will be an important issue. The new legislation on chemicals in Europe, REACH, requires producers and users of chemicals to show that their products are safe for human health and the environment. This requires, amongst others, that all information on chemicals should be made available and that a thorough risk assessment should be carried out according to the basic philosophy of REACH. |
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