EU Reach may induce US product consolidation

29 January 2007 23:54  [Source: ICIS news]

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida (ICIS news)--US firms can meet burdensome requirements of the new European chemicals registration programme, but the process may force product consolidation among US producers, an industry leader said on Monday. 

Steven Russell, senior director for health, products and science policy at the American Chemistry Council, said the new European Union (EU) rules “will have a profound effect on the significant trade between the US and EU in chemicals and products containing chemicals”.

Russell was speaking on the eve of a two-day conference on the EU's programme for registration, evaluation and authorization of chemicals (Reach) obligations facing US chemicals producers and importers.

The impending Reach programme is “enormously complicated and burdensome and will require an unprecedented level of cooperation among producers and between producers and downstream users in both the US and the EU”, he said.

The Reach obligations for non-EU producers are burdensome not only for the testing that will be required but in the product assessments that will be necessary and the ways in which those assessments must be carried out, Russell said. 

“US producers,” he said, “will have to focus their attention, resources and efforts to come into compliance with Reach.” 

The Reach rules - some 800 pages of EU legislation and thousands more pages of guidance documents that are still not complete - begin to take effect on 1 June. 

The first chemical registrations will be due in December 2010.  A pre-registration phase begins in June 2008 and concludes in December that year.

US producers and importers of chemicals must quickly absorb and adapt to a vast amount of information, Russell said.

“For the time being,” he said, “it’s going to be like trying to take a drink from a fire hydrant.”

By the time the pre-registration period begins in mid-2008, Russell said, “a lot of companies will have to make a lot of decisions”.  Among them, he said, will be decisions on which products to continue manufacturing. 

The high cost of the Reach registration process may move some producers to consolidate their product lines, he said. 

“If a given company is manufacturing, say, six chemicals in the same product family,” he said, “that company might decide to cut its lines back to five or four in order to reduce its registration costs.”

Russell said it is too soon to say whether the Reach process might force wide-scale product consolidation among US chemical manufacturers.

Although the Reach programme presents huge problems, Russell said the US chemicals industry is highly skilled and innovative.

“I think they will bring the same creativity to bear on Reach that they have used in product development and in meeting chemical regulatory obligations worldwide for decades,” he said.

The American Chemistry Council conference on Reach compliance is co-sponsored by the Canadian Chemical Producers Association and runs through 31 January.

By: Joe Kamalick
+1 713 525 2653

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