On July 13th 2016 China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) released a notification detailing the abolishment of several environmental regulations and support documents. The most notable one is the Environmental Management Registration of Hazardous Chemicals (Trial), a.k.a. MEP Order 22, which was published in Oct 2012, entered into force on Mar 1st 2013 and was just revised in Oct 2015.
MEP Order 22 was enacted in order to collect information about hazardous chemicals, assess their risks to human health and the environment and prevent or reduce potential hazards. However, although MEP tried hard to push MEP Order 22 and held a lot of seminars and trainings, the implementation has been slow since the start, due to the absence of some supporting documents and resistance from industry.
Industry was critical that the Order required submission and generation of too much data with prohibitively excessive technical requirements and was wasteful in terms of resources. As a result, MEP released a revised version in Oct 2015, simplified the registration application form, reduced some supervision requirements and gave up the supervision on the export and import of hazardous chemicals. However, earlier this year the State Council cancelled the approval and issuance system of the environmental management registration for the production and use of the hazardous chemicals, which was the core content of the MEP Order 22 spelling the end for MEP Order 22.
China has been trying to figure out the best methods to regulate hazardous chemicals and protect the environment and human health, while not hurting the economy too much. MEP Order 22 was only one part of a much larger plan to address these important issues. According to Tao Bie, the vice director of the Department of Policies, Laws and Regulations of MEP, currently the management mode of the hazardous chemicals is “under adjustment”.
However he didn’t give much information about the future direction and industry is left anxiously waiting for further management regulations, especially enterprises that have already completed part of the environmental management registration. The authorities are now carrying out a general investigation of enterprises that manufacture or use hazardous chemicals. The investigation could be preliminary work for development of future legislation which MEP would hope is more acceptable and practical for both the industry and the authorities.
