Because antifouling is a pesticide it falls under scrutiny in just the same way as products such as domestic bleach or industrial cleaning agents. There are some 200 active ingredients in biocides and the EU is looking at all of them.

Wading through the huge amount of scientific data is a tortuous process and commentators in the marine industry agree that the review will be a lengthy process.

It is estimated that the review of biocides will not be complete until 2005. That's before they even start on the products themselves, which could take up to at least 2008.

The EU has given themselves a total of 10 years to complete the review.

However, although it will be a few years yet before certain products are actually banned, companies have already put a lot of time and expense into analysing how the paint and coatings market will develop.

The EU directive is part of an ongoing process. As of November last year, for vessels under 25 metres, Irgarol 1051 and Diuron were banned from sale and banned from being applied as of November this year. Both are biocides used in most antifouling paints.

"All the mainstream antifoulings now use Preventol A4S instead and the waterways antifouling has been changed to Zineb, " explained Boris Webber of International. "This has put a squeeze on the market and we're pushing hard to find other alternatives."

That squeeze, particularly for smaller companies without big R&D budgets, is likely to get even harder. This is because it is going to be an extremely expensive process supporting new biocides or introducing new products.

So ironically even if a small company discovered some new natural product for antifouling it would not see the light of day unless it had a big industry player behind it.

Generating data International's product regulatory affairs manager, Dr Julian Hunter, told BB : "Bringing in a new biocide is going to be expensive because of the amount of data you have to generate. So if you've invented a new molecule which happens to be a good biocide it is going to cost you millions to bring it to market under the new regulations."

So, in a sense we're stuck with what we've got and when the EU actually review the antifouling products themselves the number of biocides available now is likely to be less.

"This may even mean the number of companies selling products will be reduced, " continued Hunter. "It will be the smaller companies that will have the most difficulty getting the data together."

Future legislation and the ongoing review process is a regular topic at the British Coatings Federation where competitors sit down in a marine working group to try and forecast where the paints and coatings market will go from here.

It has been suggested that, for their long term health, smaller companies may consider getting together as a consortium. There is a successful precedent on a larger scale to this collective approach as demonstrated by the Copper Antifouling Environmental Programme (CAEP).

The CAEP is sponsored by five companies that manufacture and supply various forms of copper used as active ingredients in antifouling paints. These companies are Bardyke Chemicals and Wolstenholme International from the UK, the American Chemet Corporation, Nordox Industrier from Norway and Speiss-Urania from Germany.

They were encouraged to get together by legislators from the Biocidal Products Directive, who would prefer to get their information from one source rather than five different interested parties.

Managing director of Bardyke Chemicals, Duncan Norman, explained how the procedure for registration of biocides took place.

"We were required to tell the EU a couple of years ago what biocides we were marketing.

They went on a list and if we wanted to carry on using them, then earlier this year we had to put in a 'notification'. This meant we had to give summary data of all the toxicology and environmental information we had on these products and commit to presenting a fuller dossier in another 2 1/2 years time."

But CAEP feels there is little point in collecting all this expensive information unless the rest of us get to hear about it.

Spreading the word is good PR for copper, an essential component of antifouling products - even tin based coatings use copper as a co-biocide.

So while preparing the required information, CAEP has also been disseminating it to the world at large, ie, their market place.

The thrust of their argument is that copper is ideal for use in antifouling because it is a naturally occurring material and is an essential element required for normal growth by all plants and animals.

It comes in three main forms as a hull coating: cuprous oxide, copper powder and cuprous thiocyanate. Cuprous oxide is the cheapest way to get cuprous iron into a coating and is therefore the most widely used. Cuprous thiocyanate is a much more expensive way of doing it but is safer on aluminium substrates.

Dr Hunter from International explained why copper is the manufacturers' favourite: "It works on 99% of fouling organisms. There are 4,000 fouling organisms and 1% show resistance to copper so you have to add a booster.

There are about 10 main boosters available, all with different properties and we go for ones that have the lowest environmental impact - ones that break up and degrade."

One of the boosters is something called zinc pyrithion which is the same agent used in Head & Shoulders dandruff shampoo . . . so you might be scrofulous but at least you won't get barnacles.

Affecting natural balance Even though copper is a naturally occurring element problems arise when there's too much of it in the water and this is where countries such as Holland and Sweden have a problem.

Holland's waterways are fed from Eastern Europe and, in a real sense, have inherited everyone else's problems.

"They have difficulty controlling their own destiny from this point of view, " explained Duncan Norman.

Holland prohibited the use of copper containing antifoulings on leisure craft in 1999.

Norman added: "The Baltic is another area which is a special case. This is brackish water and has a peculiar ecology of its own."

The Swedes have chosen to place restrictions on antifouling because they used to have a lot of copper mines and some river waters come from copper rich areas and are acidic, he said. We recognise that conditions there are different from what you see in the UK, Germany, Holland, France and the Mediterranean.

No one underestimates the complexity of multi-lateral legislation, and the heavy investment of resources it's going to take.

What is encouraging is the way the marine coatings industry and the environmental lobby are reacting positively to national and international concerns.