European Commission postpones vote to define and regulate EDs

The European Commission (EC) refrained from voting on proposed scientific criteria that would have identified endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC) and led to regulation on their use in EU countries. This sends the Commission back to the drawing board on the proposal, on which they hope to eventually take a formal vote. The failure to move forward with defined criteria on these hazardous chemicals, which are present in pesticides, biocides, and self-care products, is still largely due to the disagreements of voting member states over the rules reflecting hazard or risk-based criteria. There have been several other meetings of the member states on this proposal, including a meeting in December which highlighted the inadequacies of the criteria. After this meeting, according to Bas Eickhout, of the Greens-European Free Alliance, “Under the Commission’s criteria, it is likely that not a single substance would be identified as an endocrine disrupter, and they would effectively escape specific regulation.”
 

This all follows on the weak regulations issued by the EC in June 2016 to regulate endocrine disruptors in pesticide products, which ultimately undermine the precautionary legal standard that governs pesticide usage in Europe. Many scientists and advocacy organizations criticized the proposed regulations for creating an impossibly high burden of proof for defining harm from endocrine disrupting pesticides and other products.
 

According to Commission documents, the “adoption of criteria to identify endocrine-disrupting substances will fulfill the legal obligations under the plant protection products and biocides legislation. Once adopted, the EU regulatory system will be the first regulatory system worldwide to define scientific criteria for endocrine disruptors in legislation.” The stalling of this process to define and adopt criteria is resulting in unnecessary and harmful exposures to all citizens in Europe, but will hopefully result in criteria that are adequately protective of public health and the environment.
 

The regulations created by the EC endorse the World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition of EDCs. WHO defines an endocrine disruptor as “an exogenous substance or mixture that alters function(s) of the endocrine system and consequently causes adverse health effects in an intact organism, or its progeny, or (sub)populations.” However, the regulations go little beyond defining the term, and do not include clear criteria, which is what the EC has been trying to sort out for the past few months. In speaking with The Guardian, Andreas Kortenkamp, PhD, stated, “In effect, the commission has decided to place the burden of deciding how to regulate endocrine disrupting chemicals onto the assessors on a case-by-case basis.”