UK Chemicals Stakeholder Forum (CSF)
Criteria for Concern - process of agreeing the criteria
Requirement for criteria
The UK Chemicals Strategy sets out a fast track procedure for taking action on the chemicals of most concern. This required the development of criteria to enable chemicals that require a risk management strategy to be identified quickly.
As a first step in this process the UKCSF was asked to agree criteria to identify the chemicals of greatest concern, taking into account the key properties of persistence, bioaccumulation and toxicity (PBT).
Identifying and agreeing criteria
The UK Chemicals Stakeholder Forum held an initial discussion on criteria at its first meeting on 2nd October 2000. The Forum considered the work in other fora (particularly that developed under the OSPAR Convention to prioritise action on substances which pose a threat to the marine environment) in reaching its conclusions on criteria for priority chemicals for the UK to consider in all environmental media.
An ad-hoc meeting of the Forum, held on 3rd November 2000, considered in more detail the implications of different sets of criteria. The discussion was based on a paper produced by the Natural Environment Research Council Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, which looked at how different criteria selected substances from a sample of chemicals considered under OSPAR.
The Forum held a further discussion on 30th November 2000 and agreed to recommend to Government criteria which would enable all relevant information to be taken into account. The Forum received further information on an OSPAR exercise to identify the numbers of chemicals which might be selected by five different sets of criteria.
With the assistance of the Advisory Committee on Hazardous Substances, in December 2000 the Forum defined criteria for identifying chemicals that have intrinsic properties that give cause for concern about their potential to damage the environment or human health through the environment based on persistence, bioaccumulation and toxicity, and persistence and bioaccumulation without known toxicity. These criteria are modelled closely on EU guidelines of the time.
Refining the UKCSF criteria
Since then these guidelines, which are also used by the OSPAR Convention on release of chemicals into the North East Atlantic, have been further developed and refined. At the September 2002 Forum meeting it was agreed that the harmonisation of the Forum’s criteria with those at EU level would make them simpler to understand and use. At their meeting on 11 March 2003 the Forum agreed to harmonise their criteria for chemicals of highest concern with those of the EU Technical Guidance Document (EU TGD).
The UKCSF Criteria for Concern
For chemicals that are found to meet the criteria, information is needed about how and where they are used and disposed of. This allows us to make an assessment of
the degree and nature of environmental exposure and, together with a consideration of the hazardous properties of each chemical, will indicate the degree of risk presented.
Page last modified: 14 September 2007
Page published 14 September 2007