3
The Role of Legislation
3.1
Varied Approaches to Legislation
Ensuring chemical product and process safety to protect human health and the
environment is essential, and effective legislation containing enforced rules and
standards set by governing bodies is central to accomplishing this. The approach
taken to develop, enact, and enforce legislation relating to chemical products and
processes varies significantly depending on factors such as societal values and
previous experiences. Variations in approaches exist between different countries and
regions, and differences can even occur on the state and municipal levels.
The chemical industry has an obligation to adhere to the legislation relevant to
their operations and products, and this can mean considering multiple, sometimes
conflicting requirements when operations and product sales span across borders.
A commonly applied requirement for developing legislation is the ability to
establish causality between a damage and its causes. In this regard, the areas of
product safety and process safety are very different. While the causes and effects
in the area of process safety are usually closely related, dangers posed to human
health and the environment by a product can be complex and difficult to identify
and assign. This is because the cause and the effect can often be far apart from one
another in terms of both time and space (see Fig. 2.3). A wide range of causes can
lead to a wide range of health and environmental impacts, some of which may not
even be detectable with current techniques.
There are numerous ongoing international discussions regarding which
approaches are best to take for developing chemical legislation, including the
challenge of determining responsibility for increasingly global chemical pollution
problems.
Since process safety legislation has been heavily developed and strictly enforced
in many industrialized countries for decades longer than product safety legislation,
this chapter focuses on the more recently established legislation for the protection
of human health and the environment concerning chemical products, specifically
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
K. Hungerbühler et al., Chemical Products and Processes,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62422-4_3
27
The Role of Legislation
3.1
Varied Approaches to Legislation
Ensuring chemical product and process safety to protect human health and the
environment is essential, and effective legislation containing enforced rules and
standards set by governing bodies is central to accomplishing this. The approach
taken to develop, enact, and enforce legislation relating to chemical products and
processes varies significantly depending on factors such as societal values and
previous experiences. Variations in approaches exist between different countries and
regions, and differences can even occur on the state and municipal levels.
The chemical industry has an obligation to adhere to the legislation relevant to
their operations and products, and this can mean considering multiple, sometimes
conflicting requirements when operations and product sales span across borders.
A commonly applied requirement for developing legislation is the ability to
establish causality between a damage and its causes. In this regard, the areas of
product safety and process safety are very different. While the causes and effects
in the area of process safety are usually closely related, dangers posed to human
health and the environment by a product can be complex and difficult to identify
and assign. This is because the cause and the effect can often be far apart from one
another in terms of both time and space (see Fig. 2.3). A wide range of causes can
lead to a wide range of health and environmental impacts, some of which may not
even be detectable with current techniques.
There are numerous ongoing international discussions regarding which
approaches are best to take for developing chemical legislation, including the
challenge of determining responsibility for increasingly global chemical pollution
problems.
Since process safety legislation has been heavily developed and strictly enforced
in many industrialized countries for decades longer than product safety legislation,
this chapter focuses on the more recently established legislation for the protection
of human health and the environment concerning chemical products, specifically
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
K. Hungerbühler et al., Chemical Products and Processes,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62422-4_3
27