MOSCOW (MRC) -- The European Council has endorsed the EU's chemicals strategy for sustainability, adopted by the EU Commission in October 2020, reported Chemweek.
The council has directed the commission to implement the actions laid down in the strategy, including targeted amendments to streamline EU chemicals legislation, substituting and minimizing substances of concern, and phasing out the most harmful chemicals for non-essential societal uses. The chemicals strategy is an essential part of the EU Green Deal and its zero-pollution ambition, as well as a key component in the EU recovery plan from the COVID-19 crisis.
The council acknowledges in its conclusions that achieving the objectives and vision of the EU chemicals strategy for sustainability requires changes to relevant legislation, including the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) and Classification, Labeling, and Packaging (CLP) regulations. As a result, it supports the announced amendment of REACH in a targeted manner, accompanied by a comprehensive impact assessment, to ensure that the changes will not weaken REACH or lower the level of protection already accomplished, or affect the rights of EU Member States to initiate and influence actions taken under the regulation.
The council says it also endorses the EU in taking a leading role globally by promoting its rules on chemicals as the 'golden standard,' as well as ensuring that the EU has secured access to chemicals that are critical for health and the functioning of society.
Separately, Germany’s chemical industry association VCI (Frankfurt) has raised concerns over the effects it says the implementation of the chemical strategy will have for the chemical and pharmaceutical industry and its customers in downstream industrial value chains, if it is implemented unchanged.
“The EU chemicals strategy is characterized by a regulatory approach that is heavily based on the hazardous properties of chemicals. This could mean that entire groups of substances could be banned from the market, regardless of whether their use actually poses a risk. The strategy does not take sufficient account of the fact that substances with hazardous properties can also be handled safely and are indispensable for many everyday applications,” VCI says.
As MRC informed before, demand and supply growth for naphtha in European markets is likely to be moderate until at least the second quarter of 2021 as inventories are run down and deployment of a COVID-19 vaccine starts to make some headway in reviving oil products demand, according to IHS Markit analysts.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,220,640 tonnes in 2020, up by 2% year on year. Only shipments of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) increased. At the same time, polypropylene (PP) shipments to the Russian market reached 1 240,000 tonnes in 2020 (calculated using the formula: production, minus exports, plus imports, excluding producers' inventories as of 1 January, 2020). Supply of exclusively PP random copolymer increased.
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