Pushing ahead with REACH

The European Chemical Agency is pushing ahead with the REACH registration process

A significant new phase in the application of the EU’s crucial REACH regulation for controlling the use of chemicals throughout the 27 EU countries came into effect at the beginning of June.

This involved the invoking of a deadline essentially giving the cosmetics and other chemical-based industries six months to lodge registration, pre-registration and other notifications before risking their products being banned. REACH entered into force on 1 June 2007 and consolidates the EU’s former legislative framework on chemicals so as to ensure the protection of human health and the environment from chemical risks. Industries themselves are responsible for assessing and managing risk under the regulation which covers all chemical substances, manufactured or imported into the EU in quantities of one tonne or more per year.

The new regulation is administered by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) based in Helsinki, Finland, which has built up a staff of 200 since its creation a year ago. In June this year ECHA launched its REACH-IT portal to accept pre-registrations and other data submissions from industry. A comprehensive help desk has been built up on the ECHA website, which among other things co-ordinates a network of national help desks in 22 languages. See the REACH-IT section of the website. Between now and 1 December ECHA expects about 200,000 pre-registration files to be submitted as well as notifications, inquiries and registrations. In its first week of operations ECHA reported 1,003 company sign-ups, 4,786 pre-registrations and 25 registrations (using temporary procedures) among other submissions. ECHA is expected to take its first evaluation decisions before 2009.

ECHA has now established the often complex procedures for submissions, based on the REACH-IT system for company sign-up and online entry and submission of preregistrations. Companies who pre-register phase-in substances will benefit from extended registration deadlines, said the agency. These depend on the quantities of the substance involved and its hazard classification. The staggered deadlines range from November 2010 to May 2018. Companies failing to pre-register a phase-in substance by 1 December 2008 will not be allowed to import or manufacture it until they have done so.

Shortly after the launch of REACH-IT this month, ECHA said it had been informed by the European Commission that “there may be substances that were lawfully on the market before 1 June 2008 but which do not qualify for phase-in status under REACH”. The agency said it had been contacted “in particular by importers of certain cosmetic products containing such substances” and it was therefore inviting companies manufacturing or importing these substances (on their own, in preparations or in articles in a quantity above 1 tonne/year) “to contact ECHA by making a company sign-up, followed by an inquiry”. Further information would then be provided. Instructions for signing-up are given on the ECHA website.

Officials in Helsinki told SPC that chemical-using companies were not obliged to indicate the sector they belonged to in the data submission form, therefore ECHA was unable to say how many of the initial inquiries and submissions came from cosmetics and similar companies. But how is the sector responding in general to REACH?

“Most of our members are relying on their suppliers to carry out registration and pre-registration on their behalf and there is a dialogue between our members and their suppliers to ensure that the necessary information is available,” said Chris Flower, director general of the UK’s Cosmetic Toiletry and Perfumery Association (CTPA).

Flower, speaking after a seminar on REACH held by the CTPA, said what his association’s member companies feared was that “when the time comes to back up the registration and pre-registration submissions with more detailed product information some of those ingredients might no longer be available because the supplier may no longer find it economic to go through the full REACH procedure. This is of course common to many industries and we’re not alone here. But we simply do not know, until we come to it, how big or how small this problem will be”.

Flower told SPC that many CTPA members required quite specific ingredients often in small quantities, “and we hope that in these cases the small volumes might be below the one tonne or the ten tonne thresholds so we may escape some of the more onerous requirements”. But if it happened that the quantity was just above the threshold “then the suppliers might say they have to raise the price quite considerably or no longer make the product available. We just don’t know at this point”. He said the timing was important. There was a suspicion that suppliers would “not find out until the last minute that pre-registration should have been done - they either ignored it or thought that it didn’t matter or that somebody else would do it - and this point will be reached towards the end of this year”. The same is applied to imported cosmetic products. It was important to see that enforcement was fairly applied otherwise some countries might be applying the rules more fully than others.

In Brussels the European trade association for the cosmetic, toiletry and perfumery industry Colipa stressed it was also working to keep members informed about REACH, making it a key focus of its annual meeting in May, at Lucerne, Switzerland. There, its issue manager Manuela Coroama promised some last minute tips on pre-registration.

weblinks

http://echa.europa.eu

http:www.colipa.com