Building Blocks Towards a Proportionate Chemicals Policy With a Focus on the Netherlands.

In this contribution, we propose that 'sound' government policy should be characterised by a proportionate, integral vision with due consideration to tradeoffs between social costs and benefits. This principle also applies to government policy regarding the protection of workers from exposure to chemicals. It should be taken into account that having a job is a huge health benefit.

Nitrogen Critical Loads: Critical Reflections on Past Experiments, Ecological Endpoints, and Uncertainties.

Nitrogen Critical Loads (NCL), as purported ecological dose-response outcomes for nitrogen deposition from anthropogenic sources, play a central role in environmental policies around the world. In the Netherlands, these NCL are used to assess, via calculations using the model AERIUS, to what extent NCL are exceeded for different habitats as a result of different sources such as industry, agriculture, traffic. NCL are, however, not well defined, and are subject to hitherto unrecognized forms of uncertainty.

Reflections on chemical risk assessment or how (not) to serve society with science.

In this paper, we want to shed light on the demand for chemical and toxicological data growing ever more faster than science can supply and other aspects of assessing chemical risks, including the demand for 'ever greater safety'. The treatise that follows is on the one hand rooted in well-established toxicological theory and on the other hand utilises emerging toxicological insights. Both theoretical conceptions and empirical substantiations are discussed to build up a perspective that produces an outlook on innovation and proliferates insights into our inexorable and invaluable exposure to 'the chemical'.

Tradeoffs of chemicals regulation - The science and tacit knowledge of decisions.

In this paper, we want to shed light on the tradeoffs of chemicals regulation. We will discuss two types of tradeoffs: the social-economic impacts of regulation such as cost-induced fatalities and the tradeoffs between 'old' and 'new' chemicals, that is the established chemicals in industry and society deemed in need of replacement with 'new' chemicals. We will show that the progression from the science of chemicals risk assessment to regulation requires the science of regulatory (economic) analyses, with added insight from the philosophy of science.