Harmful chemicals in babies’ pacifiers. ‘Forever chemicals’ / PFAS in dental floss. Known carcinogens in lipstick lids. These are just three examples of toxic chemicals in everyday products that reveal how the EU’s flagship chemicals policy, REACH, is not delivering for citizens.
But it is increasingly clear that the planned — and much-needed — robust revision of EU chemicals rules is being derailed by corporate interests.
While REACH has undoubtedly helped to switch some production away from hazardous chemicals, these rules — now 20 years old — are too often slow, inefficient, and have loopholes.
As a result, EU citizens are still exposed to harmful chemicals on a daily basis. The health, environmental, and economic consequences of this are huge — and growing.
The European Environment Agency says that “according to some estimates, about eight percent of deaths can be attributed to hazardous chemicals. These numbers could be underestimated, given that we are only aware of the health effects of a small portion of chemicals in use today.”
That’s why REACH needs urgent reform, to better do the job it was set up to do.
The good news is that in 2020, as part of the European Green Deal, the first Ursula von der Leyen commission promised that REACH would be revised.
This was linked to an ambition for “zero chemical pollution in the environment” and citizens were promised that REACH’s processes would be modernised, to make it far quicker and more effective to tackle harmful chemicals.
And the bad news…
The extremely bad news is that, five years on, the second von der Leyen Commission has yet to publish a proposal to reform REACH and start to deliver a zero chemical pollution environment.
Instead corporate privileged access and lobby spin — alongside Brussels’ current deregulation mania and hostility to strong green rules — is derailing the Commission’s previouspromise.
New research by Corporate Europe Observatory lays bare this privileged corporate access. In 2025 industry had 93 high level meetings with commissioners and their cabinets on REACH; NGOs, only 19.
Our research has also exposed the use of spin and other well-recognised lobby tactics in the operation, by the chemicals industry and its allies, to undermine a progressive REACH reform.
These have included: using eye-catchingly high potential industry costs; ignoring the health and environmental benefits of regulation; undermining science; and making misleading claims about how progressive proposals would work.
There is a clear pattern of extensive industry lobbying opposing proposals which would make a big difference in tackling harmful chemicals. These include bringing polymers (the ‘fundamental building blocks of plastics’) into REACH so problematic ones can be regulated; dealing with the ‘cocktail effect’ when chemicals are used together; and extending the mechanism to get harmful substances out of day-to-day products.
Instead, industry is promoting its own agenda to revise REACH. In particular it is demanding an additional upfront filter on EU regulatory action, which would increase industry’s opportunities to influence decision-making early on, and likely discourage member states proposing bans on harmful chemicals to take action.
From Antwerp to Alden Biesen
There is perhaps no better example of the corporate influence that the chemicals industry holds over the EU than the annual CEFIC-organised jamboree held in Antwerp last week, where commission president von der Leyen reported back on her delivery of industry’s agenda.
Two years ago the Antwerp Declaration was launched at this event.
This is industry’s “shadow roadmap” for the EU which, while framed as something that will boost the economy, is actually an agenda for corporate welfare and the dismantling of the EU’s democratic safeguards.
Last year von der Leyen told the assembled corporate interests that her commission’s policies, including the so-called Clean Industrial Deal, “delivers on each and every one of the 10 recommendations in the Antwerp Declaration”.
This year industry’s Antwerp meeting was swiftly followed by an informal European Council summit in Alden Biesen, rural Belgium, which discussed further ideas to dismantle European social and environmental protections, in a misdirected effort to boost competitiveness. Von der Leyen hotfooted it to the Belgian countryside with industry demands ringing in her ears.
Time for a chemicals lobby firewall
The EU’s chemicals regulations are already under attack.
The ‘defence readiness omnibus’ proposes to weaken REACH, while rules on chemicals labelling, cosmetics, and fertilisers are being weakened via the ‘chemicals omnibus’.
There should be no deregulation of any chemicals rules via omnibuses.
Considering the privileged access and spin we see in Brussels today, alongside the chemicals industry’s long history of undermining science to weaken or derail regulation, it is overdue for decision-makers to avoid interactions with the promoters of hazardous chemicals and their allies.
These lobbies have significant financial conflicts of interest, which contradict and undermine the wider public interest of promoting and protecting health and the environment. The chemical industry and its allies must be challenged at every step.
Maybe then EU citizens will get the REACH chemicals rules that they were promised.
