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BRUSSELS -- In a setback for global industry, a European Parliament panel strengthened a landmark bill that would more tightly regulate chemicals in the European Union before sending it toward final passage.

The petrochemical industry had been trying to reduce the estimated $6.3 billion cost of complying with the new law over the next decade by asking the EU to accept chemical-safety and environmental data already submitted to other regulatory bodies. That would have reduced the number of expensive new tests.

The EU Parliament's environmental committee rejected an amendment from a conservative Dutch lawmaker that would have required the EU to accept data prepared for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, of Paris, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other chemical regulators.

The text of the law -- dubbed Reach for "registration, evaluation and authorization of chemicals" -- already encourages the EU to make use of OECD data. The National Petrochemical Refiners Association, based in Washington, had lobbied in Brussels to remove any ambiguity about whether such data would meet EU standards.

Nineteen of the 25 EU countries already participate in a detailed chemical-evaluation program run by the OECD. "We don't think it's necessary to reinvent the wheel" and require the submission of more data, said Alexander Lambsdorff, a German parliamentarian who backed the unsuccessful measure.

Justin Wilkes, an analyst for WWF (formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund), an environmental organization that is lobbying hard for the proposed law, said the parliamentary amendment would have gutted it. "What the OECD requires is not enough information," he said. "It undermines a key tenet of Reach, which is supposed to put the burden on companies to produce higher-quality information."

On one of the most hard-fought points, the environmental panel also voted to require companies to substitute safer chemicals whenever possible in manufacturing processes. "It is an incentive [for companies] to look at more possible substitutes and ecofriendly alternatives," said Guido Sacconi, the Italian Socialist shepherding the legislation through Parliament.

While the panel's actions aren't final, they will be tough for industry to reverse at this stage. After three years of debate, final details of the chemical legislation will likely be hammered out in negotiations between Parliament and individual EU governments before coming back to the full EU Parliament for a final vote. Finland's government, which holds the rotating EU presidency, has said it would like to pass a final version before its term expires at the end of this year.