Chems industry group slams German law change

17 June 2008 16:16  [Source: ICIS news]

TORONTO (ICIS news)--Proposed legislation to streamline, consolidate and simplify Germany’s environmental laws and regulations into a single code will not achieve its objective, the country's chemical industry association Verband der Chemischen Industrie (VCI) said on Tuesday.

 

Instead, the legislation - called Umweltgesetzbuch (Environmental Law Code) or UGB - would lead to additional permitting delays and costs and would create significant legal uncertainties, VCI said in its assessment of the proposals which are currently being debated.

 

VCI general manager Utz Tillmann described the legislation as a step backwards, rather than progress, and called for improvements.

 

Rather than strengthening environmental protection the legislation threatened to hurt the competitiveness of Germany’s chemicals industry, Tillmann said.

 

“It must be our objective to achieve a high level of health and environmental protection with - as far as possible - simple, unbureaucratic and low-cost regulations,” he said.

 

Germany's powerful environmental pressure group BUND said the UGB was an important piece of legislation which it supported but it urged improvements, in particular with regard to the regulation of drinking water and land use.

 

Germany’s federal Environment Ministry has just kicked off a three-day round of consultations on the UGB.

 

The UGB aims to consolidate and integrate Germany’s many overlapping and diverse environmental laws and regulations into one single environmental code, similar to the country’s Civil Law Code, the Buergerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB).

 

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By: Stefan Baumgarten
+1 713 525 2653

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