ChemRegs Newsletter – January 2020

ECHA Launching European Union Chemical Legislation Finder (EUCLEF)

ECHA is launching a new online service that will enable companies to find out how their substances are being regulated in the EU and what legal obligations they may have.

The European Union Chemical Legislation Finder (EUCLEF) will be a central access point for all the EU laws on chemicals but will initially only cover 40 pieces of EU legislation. ECHA is planning to launch the service in March 2020 and more legislation will be added in the future.

The aim is to make legislative information easier to find.

If you manufacture, use, distribute or sell chemicals in the EU, you have to comply with relevant EU law and this may comprise several pieces of legislation. EUCLEF will help companies – especially SMEs – identify which ones apply to their substances by collecting information from different pieces of legislation and regulatory processes in the one place.

ECHA’s website currently contains information on chemical substances managed by them under the REACH, CLP, BPR and PIC regulations, and the Chemical Agents (CAD) and Carcinogens and Mutagens (CMD) directives. With the launch of EUCLEF, companies will then have access to a much wider range of legislative information on areas such as:

• cosmetic products;
• pesticides;
• waste;
• toy safety; and
• food safety and food contact materials.

EUCLEF will also support the work of the European Commission and national authorities, as it will help them identify substances for which there may be regulatory overlaps or gaps.

EUCLEF will work by integrating information on other pieces of chemical legislation in ECHA’s current Information on Chemicals portal. Users will be able to search for substances either by their names or their EC/CAS numbers.

As happens now, a search will bring up an Infocard (if one is available) with information on the substance, such as details on its classification and labelling (if applicable), manufacture, import and uses. However, once EUCLEF is launched, the search result will also show any pieces of legislation relevant to that substance and covered by the service.

The current plan is to also create a EUCLEF landing page on ECHA’s website. This page will list the pieces of legislation covered by the service and not managed by ECHA – 35 at first – and give access to an overview of the scope of the legislation, exemptions, regulatory activities, obligations and substance lists.

It is understood that ECHA plans to continue developing the service over the next few years, adding further pieces of EU legislation and enriching the kind of information that can be accessed through ECHA’s web pages. For example, there are plans to integrate information on national occupational exposure limits (OELs) and emission limit values from individual Member States to the service at a later stage.

Further developments of the service will depend on the available budget and resources.

ECHA has worked on the EUCLEF project together with the Commission and industry stakeholders. The project is funded under a delegation agreement by EU’s programme for the Competitiveness of Enterprises and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (COSME).

Other News

Regulation (EU) 2020/11 published to postpone CLP Poison Centre Notification Deadline

The European Commission has now published the Regulation that amends Annex VIII of the CLP Regulation, which will postpone the first compliance date for harmonised reporting to poison centres from 1 January 2020 to 1 January 2021. Other compliance dates are not affected.

Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2020/11 was published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 10 January 2020, following a two-month period of scrutiny by the European Parliament and Council. It enters into force 20 days after the date of publication and applies from 1 January 2020.

The Commission is also working on an additional amendment of Annex VIII aiming to solve some of the concerns raised by stakeholders on the workability of the notification requirements. A CARACAL workshop was held on 15 January 2020 with the Commission, ECHA representatives, appointed bodies, poison centres and industry stakeholders to discuss a second amendment to Annex VIII arising from these workability issues.

A number of practical solutions were discussed and the outcome of the workshop will now be considered by the Commission when drafting a revised legal text, which will be presented to CARACAL in March. The revision intends to address issues such as high and unpredictable variability in the composition of certain products.

The changes brought about by the first and second amendments will be discussed during ECHA’s next poison centres webinar ‘Poison centres 2020 – where are we now?’. The webinar is free and you can register here.

New updated EH40 published

The HSE has just published a revised version of EH40/2005 ‘Workplace exposure limits’.

This has been updated in order to implement amendments to the Carcinogens and Mutagens Directive (2004/37/EC) that introduces or revises 13 binding occupational exposure limit values for a number of carcinogenic substances.

Occupational exposure limits (OELs) are implemented in the UK as Workplace Exposure Limits (WELs) via the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) Regulations. They are listed in Table 1 of EH40/2005 ‘Workplace exposure limits’ for use with COSHH.

COSHH requires exposure to carcinogenic substances to be reduced to ‘as low as is reasonably practicable’.

It is important to note that the new WELs listed in Table 1 of the updated EH400 will supersede any limits contained in other HSE guidance or publications.