The EU Removed the Carcinogen Label from Titanium Dioxide
With the efforts of European paint manufacturers, titanium dioxide was successfully removed from the carcinogen classification. On November 23, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) officially declared that the European Commission's corresponding regulation that titanium dioxide is a carcinogenic product is invalid.
The CJEU in Luxembourg stated that the powdered titanium dioxide was wrongly classified as a carcinogen by the European Commission and that the studies relied on by the European Commission in assessing the classification of titanium dioxide were clearly flawed in terms of reliability. The European Commission can still appeal against the CJEU's decision.
In 2019, the European Commission classified titanium dioxide as a carcinogen based on the possibility that titanium dioxide powder with a particle size of less than 1 micron could be inhaled into the body and cause cancer. Although this does not mean that the use of titanium dioxide is banned, it does require that products using titanium dioxide must have a warning label attached to their packaging. This requirement caused controversy among coating companies, especially powder coating companies and the Titanium Dioxide Manufacturers Association (TDMA), and complaints were filed with the Court of Justice of the European Union about this requirement.
After hearing the complaint, the CJEU held that the classification of carcinogenic substances must be based on reliable and accepted tests, which was not the case in the evaluation process for classifying titanium dioxide as a carcinogenic substance. Moreover, a substance can only be classified as carcinogenic if it has "intrinsic properties" that are carcinogenic in themselves (e.g., a chemical substance that causes cellular lesions due to its chemical structure).
However, titanium dioxide itself is not carcinogenic in structure, and the risk of carcinogenicity only arises when titanium dioxide is inhaled in specific aggregated forms, shapes, particle sizes and quantities under certain circumstances. Therefore, the CJEU held that this basis is not sufficient to classify titanium dioxide as a carcinogen.
The removal of "titanium dioxide" from the classification of carcinogenic substances, the most direct result for the paint industry, is that the EU region paint manufacturers will maintain the concept of green and sustainable development, do not have to worry about the paint industry is crowned with non-ecological warnings such as carcinogenic, for powder coating companies, product packaging no longer need to be for For powder coating companies, product packaging no longer has to suffer from adverse market effects due to the words "suspected to be carcinogenic".
