Detergents

The Commission supports the Council Common Position because it largely follows the lines of the amended proposal. It also includes the 2 following statements: 1) Fragrance Allergens : the Commission recognises the importance of the incidence of allergy amongst consumers. It is therefore necessary to take all necessary measures to ensure that detergents are appropriately labelled so that consumers who know that they are allergic, can avoid specific ingredients. Thus, the Commission will ask the Scientific Committee on Cosmetics and Non-Food Products to continue - and where possible accelerate - its work on establishing individual risk based limits for fragrance allergens, with special reference to detergents. It is the aim of the Commission to have such limits established and adopted by Comitology closely after the entry into force of the Detergents Regulation. 2) Publication of Standards : the Commission recognises that some of the standardised test methods are rather old and in need of updating. In addition, some of them are national standards and are therefore only available in their original language. It is desirable to remedy this situation by establishing European Standards that would replace the national ones and would be available in the languages of the CEN system. The Commission will therefore ask CEN to review the existing national standards and to adopt, where possible, equivalent European Standards. As soon as these are available, the Commission will propose to integrate them into the Regulation by Comitology.�