The dialogue between the Agency and three industrial sectors; cosmetics and personal care products, toys and textiles was initiated last year, of which the outcome has been most recently published in the report 'Evaluation of industrial dialogues'.
Back in December 2012, the government commissioned Kemi to establish dialogues to strengthen the skills of chemical industries, promote the industries, set up monitorable goals, and follow up on their commitments to identify, mitigate risk and substitution of hazardous chemical substances.
According to the Agency, this report therefore represents the first step in evaluating and creating an awareness of harmful chemicals that may be present in products and to describe and analyze the starting position in industry dialogues.
"The goal is to strengthen a company's work with chemicals so that they can reduce risk and replace hazardous chemical substances without awaiting legislation. Efforts are now in several areas both national, EU and internationally.”
'Hazardous chemicals’ in the cosmetics sense can refer to a number of ingredients like phthalates, parabens or even allergenic perfumes and preservatives.
Research finds there is an awareness of the problem of harmful chemicals
Kicking off the process, the Agency carried out surveys with participants from each sector on the state of industries in terms of harmful chemicals in products as well as the expectations of the participant and the industry.
"The overarching questions that we addressed while composing the evaluation were; 'Have the objectives set out in the Action Plan and the industries met?', 'What is the effect and impact of the dialogues had?' and 'How important is working die industry dialogue had to work?'."
As a result of those surveys, Kemi found that all three industries are still looking for more information to work on, despite industry players for cosmetics and personal care products being perceived to have a higher level of knowledge than the other industries.
"The interviews indicate that there is a difference in the level of knowledge even among the sectors, this can be explained by the fact that cosmetic regulation goes back a long time, while toys and textiles are composite products that have not been settled in that area to that extent.