Chemical clean-up
21 January 2004
Greenpeace believes that every effort must be made to avoid the use of animals for chemical testing and to reduce future reliance on animal testing, with the ultimate aim of eliminating such uses.
Greenpeace supports a two phase approach to testing in which substances that exhibit bioaccumulative potential or are persistent in the environment will be automatically prohibited without the need for toxicity testing. It is not necessary to use animals to test for these intrinsic properties and such a policy will reduce the need for animal tests.
Greenpeace also proposes that current substance-by-substance risk assessment is replaced by regulation based on the intrinsic hazards of chemical groups. If one substance in a chemical group is shown to be toxic and subjected to market restrictions, unassessed substances which are chemically similar should be subject to the same restrictions without the need for individually testing each one. This would further reduce the need for animal testing and prevent prohibited chemicals being replaced by similar chemicals.
Unnecessary testing can also be avoided through a policy of greater industrial transparency and mandatory data sharing, ensuring that the needless repetition of toxicity tests, where data already exist, is eliminated.
The need for toxicity evaluation of many chemicals will remain. However, there are a number of methods which are faster, more efficient and more reliable than testing on animals. In the relatively few instances where such non-animal tests are not currently available, Greenpeace believes it is possible to develop and validate appropriate and reliable non-animal tests which will meet the requirements of the proposed system of chemical regulation within the time-frame demanded by a new and efficient EU chemicals policy.
