Municipalities can do more than Nations!

NonHazCity showed that municipalities have a great number of opportunities to reduce the hazardous substance load in their territories as they can set strategic goals for hazardous substance reduction for the entire municipality including businesses and inhabitants:

Chemicals Action Plans (CAP), as introduced by the City of Stockholm, set strategic goals and define concrete measures and appropriate strategies to phase out hazardous substances within the own operations. Turku, Pärnu, Riga, Silale, Kaunas District and Gdansk developed CAPs in the frame of the project. Stockholm and Västerås updated existing CAPs and assessed their implementation. The CAPs developed within NonHazCity became policy documents with high levels commitment for implementation and new priorities for chemicals risk management at the municipality.

Some of the CAP measures were implemented within NonHazCity as test cases. The hazardous substance reductions associated with each measure were calculated. Results suggested a great hazardous substance reduction potential if measures were to be implemented at large scale.

The project demonstrated that municipalities can directly reduce the hazardous substance load by good housekeeping of chemical products and substitution of those containing hazardous substances at their own premises.

Read more about the NonHazCity CAPs and measures at the information material section.