Reach IT system close to collapse as preregistration ends

Meltdown

26 November 2008 19:24  [Source: ICB]

With preregistration for the EU's Reach scheduled to end last week, there has been frustration about constant crashes on the Reach website

CONTROVERSY HAS dogged Europe's Reach chemical legislation since its inception. And nearly a year after it was formally adopted by EU environment ministers, the wrangling between policymakers and the chemical industry, particularly distributors, continues.

Industry wrath is now focusing on the Reach-IT platform. People struggling to use site claim that the website's poor performance has made it impossible to finish the preregistration process before the end of November deadline, leaving companies open to prosecution for illegal trading. They may even have to pay extra money to the underfunded European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), and remain unconvinced by assertions to the contrary.

UK-based distributor Whyte Chemicals wrote to EU industry commissioner Gunter Verheugen at the beginning of November "highlighting the problems caused by the inadequacies of the Reach-IT system."

The company says it "began preregistering products on the first day that the Reach-IT platform was opened. At that stage, it was taking a few minutes per product. As traffic on the ECHA website increased, the process became slower. By mid-October, Reach-IT began crashing with frustrating regularity. Despite having one member of staff dedicated to preregistration, the company was only able to preregister 25 products during the course of the last week. We have around 1,000 products to preregister, and at this rate, we will not meet the deadline and our market for these products will be lost."

Peter Fields, chief operating officer at European specialty chemical distributor Azelis, says: "We are sometimes only able to preregister a few substances a day - and, having spent hours putting the information in, the system crashes." He adds that the system only starts to become workable "after 6pm."

Peter Newport, director of the UK Chemical Business Association (CBA), says that "ECHA and [the European] Commission failed to supply a robust IT system. Firms are struggling to register two substances in a day, when they need to register 200."

REGISTER AT ODD HOURS

Geert Dancet, ECHA's executive director, says the IT problems stem from the fact that "companies want to preregister at the same times in the day." He says ECHA is "altering the system to allow more simultaneous users, but I think the problem will come back." He advises firms to "use the full 24 hours in a day, seven days a week" to allow the system to absorb the level of traffic.

Dancet says ECHA is "doing all it can" to help firms preregister substances, including launching "special services in the last weeks and over the last weekend." These "special services" include offering "people forms to fill in where they can leave their phone numbers and we can call them" and talk them though the procedure. ECHA is also trying to establish whether "we need to set up more national help desks," he adds.

It is clear that ECHA and the Commission hugely underestimated the number of firms and substances that would be preregistered and that this has generated much more traffic than Reach-IT was conceived to cope with - even excluding the fact that two companies took the unexpected step of preregistering the entire EINECS inventory of existing substances in the EU - over 100,000 chemicals.

REGISTERING EVERYTHING

Azelis was one of these. Fields says that: "Unlike other players that distribute large volumes of single substances, our lifeblood is specialty formulations. Most are multisubstance, such as petroleum derivatives, the make-up of which is often difficult to define.

Producers might say 0-3% of a substance is contained in a product or is 'unknown' or, for example, for a hair-care product we know 20 out of 21 substances, but the manufacturer won't identify the missing substance, meaning we wouldn't be able to sell the whole product [under Reach]. Hence, our decision to register all substances until we have determined exactly which are used."

Fields says he is "surprised more people have not done the same." Newport believes "there are many more companies that have preregistered more substances than they are trading, following the precautionary approach advised by ECHA." But he says this wouldn't be obvious to ECHA as it would be a much lower number of substances than that registered by Azelis.

Despite initial misgivings on both sides, Fields says he has had "constructive discussions with ECHA," and that the agency "understands we [preregistered these substances] with good intentions" and we "were happy to agree they will not add our products to the preregister list they will publish."

Notwithstanding this, the final figures are going to be very different from initial estimates - ECHA suggested in October that the number of preregistrations could reach 1.2m-2m. Likewise, 40,000-50,000 substances have already been registered - according to Fields, the original estimate of 30,000 substances to be preregistered appeared to come "out of thin air."

OTHER INDUSTRIES REGISTER, TOO

Tim Jessel, commercial director of the UK consultancy ReachReady, says the Commission and ECHA "could never have predicted the scale, but they could have had an eye on other industry sectors affected." He suggests the original figures were so low because the focus was on chemical companies, while in reality an extremely diverse set of firms has registered substances. "Via ReachReady, we have, for example, helped financial institutions to register gold bullion that they bring into the EU," he says.

And the budget associated with the registration of substances also seems to have been wrongly estimated. Dancet confirms that ECHA is "receiving less revenue from registration than the Commission calculated, which is why we have asked the Parliament whether we can receive compensation, especially for 2009."

"The subsidy [that pays for ECHA] has been less generously calculated for 2009," says Dancet, explaining that the European Parliament is formulating a plan by which "assigned revenues of €1.5m ($1.9m) left over from 2007 can be used in 2009."

This sum will go some way to alleviating the situation, says Dancet, but he admits it will still leave ECHA with "a shortfall of another €2m." This will be resolved "by reviewing our expenditure system," he claims. Dancet says his team will submit proposals to ECHA's management board at the end of December, setting out how they believe "cost savings can be made."

"We will not require extra money from industry," he stresses, adding that after 2009, the situation will right itself as "more companies will register substances in 2010 and this will balance out the budget."

Clause 22 of the Reach legislation offers the Commission the possibility to revise parts of the regulation "if significant information becomes available" and in light of ECHA's costs.

Fields remains wary. "In the worst case, there will be some kind of tax levied on each registration," he says, highlighting that "companies have not budgeted for such changes" and that additional costs would be "especially unwelcome in the current economic climate."

But, for now, it is the IT problems that continue to cause the most worry. The CBA is leading the call for the preregistration period to be extended, but Dancet is skeptical about whether this is really needed. "It is unclear whether this is a genuine request for more time because the companies have not been able to preregister," he says. "I don't know if companies can demonstrate whether they have tried every day and every time of the day to preregister."

But Newport warns that if ECHA doesn't treat this request seriously, then the whole of the Reach project is at risk. "Now is the time for the Commission to take a pragmatic view of what's happening on the ground and talk to whoever necessary, even if it means going back to Parliament and Council" to get an extension. "This decision needs to be made now," he urges, otherwise "the Reach edifice could collapse."

Have you had problems using the Reach-IT website? Email: Deputy Editor Will Beacham

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Author: Philippa Jones
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