After seven years of intense negotiation between EU policymakers, industry representatives and both consumer and environmental organisations, the EU's REACH strategy for making chemical products safer is nearing completion.

Are satisfactory compromises in the offing for issues like the automatic substitution of any safer chemical available? And have outstanding questions on labelling been resolved? Above all, can the EU's 450m consumers be certain that levels of both risk and hazard relating to some 30,000 chemicals in everyday use have now been reduced without triggering major cost increases at the supermarket checkout desk?

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