Products containing dangerous chemicals could get EU green label

Planned changes to criteria for sustainable investments could see cosmetics and other products containing harmful substances, including some PFAS ‘forever chemicals’, given the EU ‘green’ label despite potential risks, campaigners have warned.

The amendments, buried in the small print of an ‘omnibus’ deregulation proposal tabled last month, could limit the list of chemicals whose presence would preclude a product from the EU’s sustainable investment list to as few as 247 identified ‘substances of very high concern’.

Theresa Kjell, head of policy at the non-profit chemicals watchdog ChemSec, said the Commission was abandoning the ‘do no significant harm’ at the core of the Green Deal agenda of president’s Ursula von der Leyen’s first five-year term at the head of the EU executive.

“In so doing, it is also destabilising the investment environment and therefore putting economic growth at risk,” she said.

ChemSec, a long-time critic of the sluggish pace of EU chemicals restrictions, warned companies could bask in the green glow of an EU sustainability label while marketing products containing chemicals such as the hormone-disrupting perfume galaxolide or the forever chemical TFA among many substances not yet restricted under EU law.

But the Commission apparently enjoys considerable support for its simplification drive – which it insists is not deregulation, although even European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde said in a recent BBC interview that this is what it amounts to.

President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola, whose European People’s Party is on the vanguard of the push to free businesses from EU regulation, voiced support for pressing on with the simplification drive after meeting EU leaders during today’s European Council summit.

“The European Parliament will play its role [in] taking the simplification drive forward,” Metsola said. “During the next plenary, we will adopt an urgency procedure for the simplification omnibus by doing what essentially has never been done before.”

The Council is expected to endorse the anti-red tape agenda during its ongoing summit. A public consultation on the proposed reform to the sustainable investment rule book runs until 26 March.