Use of hazardous chemicals to be made safer


In a drive to improve worker safety and consumer protection, the EU’s chemicals watchdog is set to publish in the coming months an inventory of over 20,000 chemicals declared hazardous by manufacturers and importers, reports the EurActiv. The inventory “will significantly improve safety by providing up-todate information on all the hazardous substances that are on the EU market today,” said Geert Dancet, executive director of the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). The inventory will be drawn from data submitted by manufacturers and importers under the EU’s classification, labelling and packaging (CLP) regulation, in force since 20 January 2009.
Just over 3.1 million notifications of 24,529 different substances in use on the EU market were submitted to the agency by this week’s deadline. The high number of substances notified is a result of the fact that companies were required to send bulletins for all chemicals classified as hazardous regardless of volume – even for substances for which no registration is required under new EU chemicals regulation REACH or which only have to be registered under it in 2013 or 2018.
The agency hopes to have the classification and labelling database ready by May this year.
[28/08/2011]