Deluge of Notifications Pleases EU Chemical Chiefs
The European Chemicals Agency, ECHA, announced that 3,114,835 notifications of 24,529 substances for the Classification and Labelling Inventory, either hazardous or subject to REACH registration, were submitted by the midnight Jan. 3 deadline.
Leaders of the European Chemicals Agency, known as ECHA, in Helsinki were delighted by the strong response of manufacturers, importers, users, and distributors to the midnight Jan. 3 deadline for submitting data on chemicals that are hazardous or subject to REACH registration and meant for the EU market. The data will be entered into the Classification and Labelling Inventory.
ECHA announced Jan. 4 that 3,114,835 notifications of 24,529 substances were submitted by the deadline. "It went extremely well, given that we got over 3 million classifications by the deadline. I think it's a real success," Geert Dancet, ECHA's executive director, says in a video interview posted on the ECHA website. Jack de Bruijn, the agency's director of risk management, in the same interview says the public inventory should be available by May 2011.
The Classification, Labelling and Packaging (CLP) regulation governs chemical substances as well as mixtures, and it introduces into the EU the criteria of the United Nations' Globally Harmonized System for classifying and labeling chemicals. The regulation aims to improve protections for human health and the environment; manufacturers, importers, users, or distributors must classify, label, and package any substance or mixture, regardless of its annual tonnage, in accordance w ith the regulation.
Germany provided more notifications than any other country, more than 800,000. More than 500,000 came from the United Kingdom and nearly 300,000 from France. Overall, more than 6,600 companies notified at least one substance, according to ECHA.