Summary
PARC(European Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals) is an EU-wide research and innovation program that supports both EU and national authorities and chemical risk assessment/management practices with new data, knowledge and methodologies to better deal with current or emerging chemical safety challenges. The partnership builds on existing regulatory requirements and will facilitate the transition to next-generation risk assessment to better protect human health as well as the environment. This will involve national and EU authorities to ensure political commitment and strategic design of the partnership.
Project description
The aim of the PARC project is to develop a framework for managing chemical risks from mixtures and individual substances that can be used not only nationally but also at EU level. The aim is to increase chemical safety through new assessment and management strategies.
The project will develop new assessment methods and approaches that will subsequently be implemented in risk assessment, for example, to also reduce the need for animal testing. Furthermore, the human biomonitoring established in the predecessor project(HBM4EU) and additionally the environmental biomonitoring will be further extended. Another focus is on making the circular economy more efficient. One contribution we are involved in is to co-develop a European framework for regulatory assessment and handling of mixtures. This is because a major weakness of chemicals legislation in the EU is the lack of consistent assessment and management strategies for combination effects of chemicals. In particular, assessment and management strategies are lacking with respect to complex unintentional mixtures (mixtures), to which both humans and the environment are often exposed. In comparison, there are usually existing regulations for intentional mixtures or products. The problem has long been recognized by the European Commission and member states and is therefore an integral part of the Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability.
Work under PARC will not only broaden the scope to include all relevant chemical classes, exposure scenarios and protection targets, but will also focus on supporting European regulation. To this end, a consistent overarching scientific framework will be built for different protection objectives (e.g., public health, occupational health, environmental protection), different chemicals (e.g., biocides, pesticides, industrial chemicals, food contact materials), data situations (e.g., data-rich versus data-poor chemicals), and regulatory contexts (e.g., prospective versus retrospective assessments, large-scale versus scenario-specific approaches). A focus in this project is a systematic assessment of current practice, regulatory requirements, and stakeholder demands, as well as a data-driven comparative assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of different tools used to evaluate mixtures.
Project details
Project acronym: PARC
Project Management: ANSES (French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety)
Project management AGES: Dr. Veronika Plichta, Department for Risk Assessment
Project partners: 200 partners in 28 countries
Funding: This partnership is funded by the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 101057014.
Project duration: 05/2022 to 04/2029
Last updated: 07.09.2023
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