Coatings World - February 2008

EUROPE

BY SEAN MILMO EUROPEAN CORRESPONDENT MILMOCW@RODPUB.COM

REACH: Preparing for the
pre-registration phase
Industry gets
ready for the
first phase of
REACH to
begin later
this year.

The European Union’s REACH scheme for the registration, evaluation and authorization of chemicals goes through its first vital stage later this year with the pre-registration of substances.

The registration of the 30,000 chemicals covered by the project will take ten years to complete but already suppliers of substances to the coatings sector and other downstream industries are having to take precautionary action well in advance to ensure their products are not severely affected by the legislation.

In the six-month pre-registration process starting in June producers and importers will have to give minimal details of the chemicals they plan to register. Various deadlines for registration have been set through to 2018, depending on the total output of the substance.

Pre-registration will alert downstream users and coatings producers and other downstream users as to which chemicals will be withdrawn from the market because their producers or importers do not want to register them, probably because the registration costs no longer make them commercially viable.

However coatings companies are not only worried about which chemicals they use will be registered with details of their applications. They are also perturbed that some of those which are registered will have to go through REACH’s authorization procedure for substances about which there is a ‘very high’ level of official concern because they are a potential hazard to human health and the environment.

Uses of chemicals which are authorized will almost certainly be restricted but more significantly will in most cases be expected to be substituted within a specified period by safer alternatives.

Chemical producers aim to ensure, if possible, that their products are not even subject to evaluation for authorization. Even borderline substances could be placed on the candidate list for authorization, which could amount to

as many as 1500-2000 substances and which will be accessible to the public.

The Helsinki-based European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) is expected to recommend next year its first authorization candidates to the European Commission, the EU executive, which is ultimately responsible for what is on the list.

There are fears among chemical companies that the candidate list will effectively be a black list on which substances will languish for years because of the slow pace of the authorization procedure.

Some coatings companies have already indicated that they will try to find alternatives to chemicals on the list. In order to give paint makers plenty of opportunity to look for replacements, some trade associations representing coatings companies, particularly those in Scandinavia, have already drawn up their own lists of chemicals which they believe will be authorization candidates.

Coatings producers want to ensure that if a key chemical is to disappear from the market they will have as much time as possible to reformulate their paints. With the coatings sector estimated to use a total of approximately 10,000 different chemicals—approximately a third of that covered by REACH—the industry will almost certainly have to do a relatively large amount of reformulating.

Some of the chemicals which have to be authorized will be minor components of paints. But others will have a much greater influence on the performance of a coating.

Certain pigments may have to go through the process. Manufacturers of organic pigments have had to be quick off the mark because of the threat of relatively large numbers of pigments being classified as persistent, bioaccu-mulative and toxic (PBT) or very persistent and very bioaccumlative (vBvP) which would mean their automatic inclusion on the candidate list.