Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-14-Speech-2-057"
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"en.20061114.7.2-057"2
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"Mr President, may I first of all pay tribute to the work that Mrs Sornosa Martínez has done on this report, even though I do not agree with all of her conclusions. Nevertheless, we have worked very well together on this.
In March this year the House debated the Commission’s mercury strategy. It asked the Commission to restrict the marketing and use of mercury in all measuring and control equipment but to allow for some exemptions. It also called on the Commission to permit the use of mercury by the small number of professional companies in the EU that produce traditional barometers. Nevertheless, I am sorry to say that the Commission completely ignored Parliament’s wishes at that stage and went on to propose the directive that we are debating today.
This directive will ban the production of all new barometers. As Members will be aware, the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety subsequently adopted an amendment, which I tabled, introducing an exemption for this long-established traditional European art. Along with Mr Blokland, we have retabled that amendment for plenary to consider. I would point out to the Commissioner that we are not talking about the general introduction of new mercury into the environment – the vast majority of these makers actually use recycled mercury taken out of the environment in the production of these new instruments. There are a very small number of SMEs throughout Europe that continue this traditional art, mainly in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Portugal and the UK.
If this directive is implemented as the Council wishes, those businesses would almost certainly be forced to close, thus eliminating places where consumers can take their existing instruments for repair and for maintenance. Let us not forget that there are hundreds of thousands of traditional barometers hanging on people’s walls all over Europe. This directive would of course not affect that, but it could potentially remove places where people could get those instruments repaired and maintained.
The banning of new barometers will not stop pollution; in fact it could become more prevalent as the general public would have nowhere to take their instruments. There are also some enormous loopholes in the legislation. It is only the marketing of new devices that is prohibited. There is nothing to stop manufacturers from selling new barometers without any mercury, along with a set of instructions on how consumers can fill them themselves. That is surely more hazardous than allowing them to continue production in carefully controlled and licensed circumstances."@en1
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