Biography | Geert Dancet — The REACH Desk in the Breydel Building

People treat Helsinki as the start of Geert Dancet's chemicals life.

The file opened in Brussels.

From March 2004 he headed the newly created REACH unit inside the European Commission's Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry.

Official Parliament biographies say the unit had two jobs at once.

It had to take the REACH proposal through the Council and the European Parliament.

It also had to write the interim plan for a new chemicals agency, including the building and the first staff list.

The regulation was adopted in December 2006 as Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006.

By then the unit Dancet ran had already been planning Helsinki.

The Breydel building on Avenue d'Auderghem is the honest Brussels pin for that work.

It housed the Commission College from 1991 to 2004 while the Berlaymont was emptied of asbestos.

After the College moved back, the Commission kept Breydel.

DG GROW, the successor to Enterprise and Industry, still occupies the complex.

A visitor will not find a REACH plaque in the lobby.

The work that happened here was a unit file, not a ribbon-cutting.

What left this building in 2007 was a man and a seconded team, bound for Annankatu 18.

The agency they opened on 1 June was the product of three years of this desk.

Photo: JLogan, 27 January 2009, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons