A UN committee is recommending trade restrictions for decaBDE imports which could become subject to ‘prior informed consent’ procedure.
Chemical Watch reports on the UN committee recommendations that decabromodiphenyl ether (decaBDE) which aim “to improve responsibility on importing hazardous chemicals, notably through the “prior informed consent” procedure.“ As part of this the recommendation is to impose international trade restrictions for this (and other listed) hazardous chemicals.
The Rotterdam Convention’s recommended “prior informed consent” means that “countries must gain permission from receiving countries before exporting the substances” and countries could ban the import completely, Chemical Watch reports.
Chemical Watch writes that the UN committees recommendation will be considered by 2021 when the Rotterdam Convention is holding their next conference.
DecaBDE, the use of which above a particular quantity was banned in electrical appliances (including printer cartridges) across the European Union ten years ago, is described as “difficult to decompose” and has been assessed and classified as a Persistent Organic Pollutant (POP). It is also listed as a Substance of Concern by the European Chemicals Agency. The supplier of a product has a duty to inform commercial customers if that product contains a concentration of more than 0.1 percent of a Substance of Concern.
In March this year, the European Council reached a provisional agreement to toughen rules on what it terms Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), including the brominated flame retardant DecaBDE, which has recently been found in the casings of various printer cartridges.
The new ‘unintentional trace contaminant value’ threshold was set at 500 milligrams per kilogram (mg/kg) for all BDEs cumulatively – not just DecaBDE. Although this was half of what was originally proposed in the European Parliament, it was still “significantly higher” than the level campaigned for by NGOs.
DecaBDE is a member of a class of chemicals known as PBDEs. This class includes all chemicals with the diphenyl ether structure where one or more of the hydrogens have been substituted by bromine, and the members range from monobrominated to decabrominated.
