ANTONIO CONTO
Chemsafe, Colleretto Giacosa (TO), Italy

INTRODUCTION
Many years ago, around the mid-1990s, I was discussing with a manager of an important German chemical industry whether he needed more experts to evaluate the dangers and risks of chemical substances.
He, with more experience than me, a young Business Development Manager at the beginning of his career, said “you will see in a few years the demand for experts in the field of risk assessment for human health and environmental impact will increase considerably and there will not be enough resources to devote to this work”. We commented on this issue together! I didn’t believe it much even though already at that time the European regulations and not only were constantly increasing in terms of numbers and depth of requests.

From that time and, particularly, in the last two decades, an impressive increase of regulations have been released at a worldwide level but particularly in the western countries and mainly in the European union. All these new pieces of regulations have been accompanied by millions of pages of technical guidelines. In many cases different regulations are connected each other and, therefore, ne ...