Council of the Paint, Printing Ink and Artists’ Colours
Industry (CEPE), the industry’s European trade association.
However the actual number of coatings manufacturers could
be well over 2,000 because of the many SME producers of decorative and industrial paints.
There are an estimated 250,000 businesses which could be
classified as downstream users of paints. A large proportion of
these are small operators in the interior decoration segment.
Coatings producers apply a total of approximately
10,000 different products in their formulations, with an
average of 20-30 in each one. Large paint manufacturers
may utilize as many 3,000 substances while even with
small ones the total could be as high as 500. With each
chemical there are multiple uses at the formulation and
application stages for each of which exposure scenarios
may be needed.
The coatings industry had been hoping that the
European Commission, the EU’s Brussels-based executive,
and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) in Helsinki,
which is responsible for the registration process and the
operation of the REACH scheme, would propose ways of
simplifying the procedure for exposure scenarios.
When the Commission recently issued a guidance document on exposure scenarios it made the industry even
more confused.
“We’re not at all happy with this document,” said Jacques
Warnon, technical manager at CEPE, which has complained to both the Commission and ECHA about it. “It is
very long and complex. It is does not give a clear direction
to SMEs who are in the most need of guidance.”
Now both the industry and the chemical suppliers led by the
European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic), the trade association for chemical producers, have decided to come together to
provide their own advice and assistance on exposure scenarios.
“The best thing to do is for the industry to work out its
own specific guidance on this matter by providing tools to
International Coatings Scene
EUROPE
simplify the whole process,” said Warnon. “The
Commission’s guidance is only a set of proposals. We just
have to make sure that what we put forward is in line with
the REACH legislation.”
Both representatives of the coatings sector and of chemical suppliers seem to agree that a system needs to be
devised which will enable information about uses and
applications of chemicals in paints to be passed easily up
and down the supply chain.
“We need to help companies to develop exposure scenarios which can be communicated without difficulty between
each part of the chain and the key to doing this is to have
a system of standardized data,” said Jacques Wille, an IT
specialist on REACH at Cefic. It has already started collaborating with chemical distributor organizations on putting together a software program on exposure scenarios.
The solution to the problem of collecting data on uses is
seen to be generic exposure scenarios which cover a range
of similar applications. Experimental work on generic scenarios has already been carried out by coatings associations in Scandinavian countries and is now been further
developed by CEPE.
“It is a complex task,” sais Warnon. “We hope to reach a common position with the chemical suppliers so that we can provide guidance to our members on the issue by early next year.”
CEPE’s target is the drawing-up of tens rather than
hundreds of exposure scenarios which will be able to
embrace approximately 90% of uses without being too narrow or broad in their scope.
“We will not be able to cover everything,” Warnon
explained. “There will be specialist uses for which companies will have to develop their own scenarios.”
A crucial requirement of the generic scenarios is that
they should be short, clear and easy to understand.
Otherwise, health and safety experts in the industry warn,
workers using paints will not bother to read them. CW
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