In this week’s Chemical Watch news podcast science editor Andrew Turley, emerging markets reporter Ginger Hervey and editorial director Geraint Roberts join global managing editor Kate Lowe to discuss three big news topics from the past week.
They include a look at the latest steps towards creating a national inventory for industrial chemicals in Colombia, which has seen the government scale back certain provisions in response to concerns from the country's chemicals industry.
The team also examines the concern of the UK’s chemicals industry trade bodies that the EU–UK trade deal, announced by negotiators on 24 December, could leave business facing a £1bn bill for registering substances under the UK REACH regime – and offers the prospect of the UK increasingly diverging from EU chemical safety standards.
But we start with the EU’s flagship biomonitoring project, HBM4EU, which has published, in a peer-reviewed journal, its first guidance values for one of the substances it has defined as a priority – cadmium.
The project, which is scheduled to run until 2021 under the EU’s Horizon 2020 research framework programme, aims to provide a pan-European platform for human biomonitoring that can provide robust exposure data.