The Nickel Report

The EU's Approach to Product Stewardship

While the European Union (EU) does not have any legal principle specific to product stewardship, it has applied the full range of EU environmental law principles to create a comprehensive framework for product stewardship. These principles include the prevention and precautionary principles, sustainability, extended producer responsibility, supply chain responsibility, and corporate social responsibility. In addition, product stewardship is a key instrument in the EU's latest strategic environmental focus areas: the circular economy and the toxic-free environment, two main themes of current EU environmental policy making.

Last year, President Obama signed into law the amended Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Congress made substantial changes with respect to how both existing and new chemical substances are regulated. Some of these changes are significant and will have a direct impact on US chemical manufacturers, importers, distributors and users. However, the US did not attempt to mimic the EU’s REACH Regulation.

This article provides a high-level comparison of the main building blocks of the two regimes, bringing out the main similarities and differences between them. Of course, these are two different jurisdictions and no direct comparison can be completely valid, but it is worth making the comparison nonetheless, because many companies operate across both regions and because other jurisdictions have mimicked REACH in their regulatory reform, whereas the US has chosen not to.