Mr. John Chave:

The Deputy is asking the wrong person. The members have raised the issue of transparency and I will address that. I will release to the committee the Cosmetics Europe submission to the ECHA from when we first started to engage with the agency That submission contains some detailed analyses of polymer materials that we consider to be plastic and some we do not. There is also some detail around the questions on the formulations. I agree that it is important to be transparent, and we, in the industry, lobbied on the single-use plastic directive. That submission might help the committee address those issues. Some polymers, for example, are liquid or solid in form depending on the stage of the process they are at. Liquid polymers are generally not considered as problematic in this context as the solid polymers. We regard the plastic polymers as being the centre of the issue.

I turn to the original question on the scope and what would be covered. One needs to think about this in terms of the definition and the function. Our voluntary recommendation talked about exfoliating and cleansing functions. There is a small volume of microbeads in rinse-off products, which are not necessarily used for exfoliating and cleansing. The quantity is small and, as a fraction of the overall microplastic problem, it is infinitesimally small. Nonetheless, if one uses the definition without limiting the regulation to exfoliating and cleansing, one will capture microbeads that are in rinse-off products, which are not captured in the US legislation or the current French legislation. They are, however, captured in the UK legislation. I urge the committee to consider the UK legislation as a model. Aligning with the UK legislation makes a degree of economic sense because the UK is currently a major trading partner, although that is turning into a particularly unpleasant subject.