Overview of EU environmental legislation - Part II
The second part of overview of EU environmental legislation shows legislation connected with hazardous substances, development control and on accessing to information on the environment. The fi rst topic “Hazardous Substances and Processes” explains in brief such EU directives as e.g. the 1907/2006/EC (REACH) on the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals. The aim of REACH is to improve the protection of human health and the environment through the better and earlier identifi cation of the intrinsic properties of chemical substances.
REACH was replaced 40 existing legal acts and create a single system for all chemical substances. REACH requires from manufacturers and importers to gather comprehensive information on properties of their substances produced or imported in volumes over 1 tone per year and to submit the necessary information to demonstrate their safe use in a registration dossier to the European Chemicals Agency.
Next directive talked over in more details is the 2002/95/EC (RoHS) - on the restriction on the use of certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment.
RoHS Directive specifi es that Member States shall ensure that, from 1 July 2006, new electrical and electronic equipment put on the market does not contain lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) or polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE). RoHS directive is alive and still new updates and new EC decisions are publishing. Because some specifi c applications listed in Annex 1 of the RoHS Directive are exempted. The exemptions are periodically reviewed and also some defi nitions in directive are not precise and must be improved.
Other EC directives concern topic “Hazardous Substances and Processes” explain in the presentation are: the 96/61/EC and 2008/1/EC (IPPC Directives) on Industrial Pollution Prevention and Control; Directive 2006/66/EC on batteries and accumulators and CPL Directive 2000/33/EC on Classifi cation, Packaging and Labelling of dangerous substances.
The topic “development control” covers subjects being in the Directive 2001/42/EC on the assessment of the effects of certain plans and programmes on the environment.
Some information about Environmental Impact Assessment was shown also in this part.
The last topic of this presentation is connected with accessing to information on the environment. It base on the Directive 2003/4/EC of 28 January 2003 on public access to environmental information which repealing earlier Directive 90/313/EEC. It requires from Member States to progressively make available environmental information and disseminate it to the public.