The Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals Regulation that the European Commission adopted in December 2006 has an apt acronym because it does have incredible reach. The idea behind it was relatively simple and straightforward – to protect European Union citizenry from potential chemical hazards by requiring suppliers to identify such hazards and then to inform those who might come into contact.

But of course chemicals are almost everywhere and in almost everything, so REACH encompassed a daunting number of companies and substances. Since its adoption – supplemented in early 2009 by passage of the Classification, Labeling and Packaging Regulation – untold numbers of businesses have invested significant money and resources struggling to inventory the chemicals they handle, determine whether they present threats, register them with ECHA and fulfill requirements to appropriately label products and to inform those up and down the supply chain of hazards.

The report, The Operation of REACH and CLP 2011, says businesses filed more than 26,000 dossiers through the first quarter of this year, registering more than 4,300 distinct substances. It also makes a number of recommendations: Industry needs to do a better job of testing substances and make more detailed assessments of potential hazards, the report says. Regulators should continue striving to provide timely information about the legislations requirements.

Unfortunately, the report does not completely address the main arguments that were at the center of REACHs adoption five years ago and which remain pertinent. Proponents contended that the law would help many people avoid being hurt by chemicals – whether by sudden mishap such as explosion or injury or by prolonged exposure to some unrecognized danger. If supply chains would take precautions against harm, if the public were educated and alerted, the argument went, problems could be avoided.

On the other side, opponents complained that the legislation would do more damage than good – that the requirements and bureaucracy would overburden businesses, dragging down the economy and ultimately causing a different kind of injury to the public it was meant to protect.

Our guess is that, on balance, REACH was and will be a positive development. Commerce leans increasingly on chemistry. Thats bound to mean more things being done with more chemicals, and inevitably some of those things will be hazardous. People and the environment need to be protected, and in the long run, these types of protection are more efficient when centralized.

Thats not to say that concerns about economic impact should be dropped. Its important to recall that legislation can have negative impacts, because much legislation does. Part of the answer is to minimize those negatives. To its credit, ECHAs report does discuss how to administer REACH more smoothly, how to avoid hurting businesses unnecessarily.

Still, Europeans should be careful not to completely lose sight of the big questions. Some laws are ultimately too burdensome to bear. In such cases, the first step is to recognize them as such, even ifthe evidence is imprecise.