EEB | Letter to REACH Committee May 2020 | Concerns on granting authorisations on the use of chromium trioxide

We are writing to you regarding the REACH Committee meeting that will take place on May 13. At this meeting, discussions and potentially votes are planned on two draft Commission Implementing Decisions granting authorisation to uses of chromium trioxide under the REACH Regulation:

(*) A draft decision addressed to Chemservice GmbH and others, previously named “LANXESS and others”.

(*) A draft decision addressed to REACHLaw Ltd, a consultancy acting as only representative of the Russian chromium trioxide manufacturer, “NPCC”.

We want to express our concerns with these two draft decisions (which are extremely similar). If you adopt these two decisions, it would unlawfully allow the continued use of chromium trioxide, a non- threshold carcinogen and mutagen. Indeed, in both cases, the applicants failed to provide the necessary evidence 1) regarding the risk, notably, for the workers exposed and 2) that no suitable alternatives were available for all applications covered in the very broad scope of these similar authorisations.

The Chemservice case was already subject to an objection through a resolution of the European Parliament which the Commission is proposing here to merely “take note” of, and fails to draw any lessons from. It also fails to learn from the lead chromate judgment (T-837/16)1.