Any potential action taken on endocrine disruptors is a thorn in the side of many industry sectors who see their profits jeopardised. Their efforts to counter any efforts at regulation have mobilised individual companies, lobby federations, and consultancies, both EU- and US-based. These lobbies represent both the chemical industry at large, as well as more specific sectors such as pesticides or plastics producers, that are heavily implicated in the use or manufacture of chemicals suspected to be endocrine disruptors.

In this corporate campaign, multiple lobbying tactics have been used. They include classics such as scaremongering about economic losses, discrediting scientific evidence pointing at the harmful effects of EDCs, and finding reasons to push for delays.

Delaying at all costs any regulations that could possibly deal with EDCs is of crucial importance to the industry because of another (industry- friendly) project the EU has embarked upon: negotiating a free trade deal with the US, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – also known as Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA). One of the main goals of this deal is to flatten out the differences between EU and US regulations to facilitate trade. EU action on endocrine disruptors therefore has become a major leverage argument in the negotiations.

This report explores how chemical corporations and their lobby groups – but also actors within the EU institutions – have been working to stop the EU taking action on EDCs, directly endangering public health and the environment.

The decision-maker and the scientist

In 2009, DG Environment was designated chef de file in charge of regulating endocrine disrupting chemicals, or EDCs (see box on EDCs next page and box on the regulation below). Its first initiative was to commission a report on the state of science of endocrine disruptors after a call for tender. Prepared by a consortium of experts led by Professor Andreas Kortenkamp of Brunel University, London, the ‘State of the art assessment of endocrine disruptors’ (from now onwards the Kortenkamp report) was published in January 2012.2

The Kortenkamp report is a detailed review of the science on EDCs and several hundred pages long, analysing the most recent body of literature of toxicological and epidemiological studies, and going through the evidence of the effects of EDCs on nature and humans. The authors concluded that any attempt to regulate EDCs would face one major challenge: there is no such thing as a universal, ready-to-use detection kit for EDCs. The reason is that the hormonal system is extremely complex and EDCs can hijack it in many different – and largely unknown – ways.

Indeed, the report identified a wide gap between the increasing knowledge about EDCs, and the way the EU regulates chemicals. They argued that the EU was simply not equipped with the right kind of tests to identify EDCs and pick up their effects. The report therefore recommended some measures to identify and regulate EDCs, in order to address this major threat to public health.