Small companies still unaware of Reach - EC

“Small and medium-sized companies in particular may not have the staff to follow all the policy debates and may still not be conscious of their obligations, either because they are not aware of the scope or the specific requirements or because they believe that Reach does not affect them, especially if they are not part of the chemicals sector,” the spokesman added.

The Reach rule requires some 30,000 chemicals to be pre-registered between 1 June and 1 December if manufacturers want to continue producing or importing them without interruption.

The new European chemicals agency (ECHA), which would open its doors on 3 June, would be responsible for assessing the safety of all the chemicals registered for use in the EU, and the EC was expecting at least 180,000 pre-registrations to be submitted before 1 December.

The pre-registration would facilitate the sharing of data between companies, thereby reducing unnecessary testing and would keep costs to a minimum.

Companies that pre-register would then have until 2010, 2013 or 2018 to submit a final registration, depending on the volumes of chemicals concerned and those that failed to pre-register would not be allowed to produce or sell the chemicals after 1 December till they made a full registration with ECHA.

While Reach requires manufacturers and importers of chemicals to obtain information on the physicochemical, health and environmental properties of their substances and use it to determine how these can be used safely, the pre-registration process allows firms to submit limited information only on each substance to ECHA.

This information includes the substance name/identifiers, company information, envisaged registration deadline, tonnage band and, potentially, an indication of related substances that can help assessment of the substance.

The EC was so concerned about the potential ‘hole’ that could be created in the EU chemicals sector if companies failed to pre-register that it planned to hold a workshop in Brussels on 14 April to advertise the pre-registration procedure.

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