Last year the boffins created over ten thousand new chemicals which were notified to the regulator before they were released for industrial use or retail sale in Australia. This chemical industry covers a wide field and ranges from the type of things we find on supermarket shelves for home cleaning to the industrial field where chemicals are used in both agriculture and heavy industry and may have toxic qualities.
The " gatekeeper " is the organization known as the National Industrial Chemicals Notification and Assessment Scheme ( NICAS ) and it needs to be satisfied that what is proposed for market acceptance meets Australian standards and has an acceptable public risk rating. It can impose handling and use restrictions on chemicals it determines may pose a hazard to the public.
Under a bill proceeding through parliament the chemical industry will be allowed to self-assess whether a new chemical is " low risk " and therefore exempt from referral to NICAS. It is thought that this would reduce the NICAS inspection rate from the present 3% of new chemical discoveries to somewhere in the vicinity of 0.75 percent.
This will provide a vast saving to the chemical industry. Both the time and cost of complying with red tape to get approval is estimated at a saving of $ 23 million a year, but critics are concerned that this move will place the decision in the hands of the very people who have a financial interest in their new product gaining public approval.
The research laboratories are costly to maintain and evaluation of risk by a chemist is very different from that of the end user. In particular, end users are notorious for not reading the warning labels or diluting the contents in the properly expected ratios. In many cases, the regulator will allow the product to go to market, but at a reduced strength to the original proposal as a safety measure.
Where a new product is developed for a specific purpose there is always the risk that the public will adapt it for other purposes and produce an unintended risk factor. That is something that the NICAS team takes into consideration when evaluating the product. Their job is to be the impartial umpire that examines the total risk factor in allowing a new chemical to enter the marketplace. It is their job to ensure that products with a danger factor are suitably presented in adequate packaging and with use restrictions that contain the risk to an acceptable level.
Transferring that decision to the people who have developed the chemical will be seen by many as a retrograde step. There will be a temptation to disregard risk in the interest of profit and in some cases the harm may take years to emerge. The long term effect of many chemicals on the human body only becomes clear when medical research discovers the link - and that is sometimes many decades after the contamination has occurred.
If the politicians pass this legislation they are creating a " time bomb " for the future !
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