Coatings World - January 2009

International Coatings Scene

EUROPE

showing REACH compliance,” said Chapell. “If a manufacturer or importer cannot sufficiently demonstrate that they have pre-registered a particular substance, the buyer may wish to look for alternative suppliers. There is the risk that the authorities would discover the existence of a non-REACH compliant substance and the buyer would then have to find a new supplier at very short notice.

“Furthermore, if there were problems with the substances further down the supply chain, the substance could then be traced back to the buyer who may have to answer some potentially very embarrassing questions as to why they were handling non-REACH compliant substances,” Chapell continued.

Companies which have been openly trying to ensure that they keep within the rules of REACH are likely to be more leniently treated by the enforcement agencies.

“Enforcement authorities may take into account the efforts made by companies to comply when deciding what kind of action to take,” said Chapell. “If this should involve bringing legal proceedings, courts are likely to take into account mitigating circumstances surrounding a breach of law.”

By midnight on December 1, over 2.5 million pre-registrations had been submitted to ECHA, almost 15 times more than the agency’s original estimates when the pre-registration period started in June 2008.

Also the number of individual substances pre-registered at approximately 100,000 was well above the EU’s original calculation that approximately 30,000 chemicals would meet its annual output threshold of one ton or more.

“The coatings industry was estimating three to four years ago that it would be approximately two million,” said Newbould. “We knew there were more substances on the market than the agency thought and that there were more suppliers, especially importers, than it thought. The supply chain is more complicated than the agency realized.”

One major distributor, supplying the coatings and other industries, was reported to have pre-registered approximately 100,000 substances because it included chemicals it did not currently market. It wanted to ensure that all chemicals it might want to sell some time in the future were pre-registered.

BASF, the world’s largest chemicals company, which is both a coatings manufacturer and a producer of coatings raw materials, revealed that it had submitted approximately 40,000 pre-registrations although its product portfolio amounts to only approximately 8,000 chemicals.

The underestimates by the agency does seem to show that all substances on the market above the one ton-a-year threshold will have been pre-registered and will now start the process of being fully registered. But for coatings manufacturers the important aspect of pre-registration is not so much the provision of data to ECHA on the substance itself but on the producers and importers supplying it.

CW

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