NPRA ’07: EU agency may be overwhelmed by Reach

27 March 2007 17:25  [Source: ICIS news]

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (ICIS news)--The newly created European Chemical Agency (ECA) could well be overwhelmed with a flood of substance registrations required by the European Union’s (EU) new chemicals evaluation rules, an EU member of parliament said on Tuesday.

 

Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, a member of the Eropean Parliament representing Germany, told chemical executives that the impact of the new registration, evaluation and authorisation of chemicals (Reach) programme that goes into effect 1 June this year “may turn out to be a nightmare” for smaller companies but may have less impact on major producers.

 

In the registration and evaluation process that begins this year and has completion deadlines running through 2012 and beyond, EU producers and importers of chemical products must provide detailed data on the nature of each chemical substance and its possible impact on humans and the environment.

 

The EU has decreed that research data already collected by US producers on high production volume (HPV) chemicals will be accepted under Reach. Lambsdorff noted, however, that producers of smaller-volume and new chemical products face a more challenging registration process.

 

In addition, Lambsdorff said the impact of Reach on downstream users of chemicals “is expected to be especially challenging”. 

 

Those users, he noted, “are required to prepare chemical safety reports, regardless of whether the chemical is registered, and are required to register chemicals - and possibly obtain authorisation - if their uses are not addressed by the manufacturer’s or importer’s registration”.

 

“The implications of this, given the thousands of chemicals covered by Reach and the thousands of uses by downstream users of these chemicals, are nothing short of staggering,” he said.

 

“This may well lead to the newly created European Chemical Agency being overwhelmed with applications to the point where it can’t do its work properly,” Lambsdorff added.

 

Speaking to an audience at the 32nd annual National Petrochemical & Refiners Association (NPRA) petrochemicals conference, Lambsdorff said that the EU “was very ambitious in making demands of industry without taking into account whether there are enough toxicity experts and analysts in the marketplace to conduct the testing”.

 

Lambsdorff, said that if the Helsinki, Finland-based ECA were to get overwhelmed with registration applications, the EU most likely would postpone some of the registration deadlines.

 

“We’re not at that point yet,” he said.

 

The NPRA conference concludes on Tuesday.

By: Joe Kamalick
+1 713 525 2653

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