In an press release published on February 28, 2019, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) presented results from their annual Evaluation Progress Report of REACH and also provided recommendations to registrants. ECHA reported to have checked the compliance of 286 registrations, with many of the checks focused on registrations for substances of potential concern. “ECHA verifies key information requirements which allow authorities to identify if the substance is carcinogenic, mutagenic and reprotoxic; or persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic.” Similar to previous years, the evaluation found that “in the majority of registration dossiers that ECHA checks, important safety information is missing.” Of the 286 registrations checked, in 211 cases the agency asked for more information to show the substances are used safely. After requesting the additional information, ECHA said that most registrants updated their dossiers with information that is compliant.

ECHA director Bjorn Hansen commented on the evaluation report saying that “we will further improve the efficiency of our work on compliance checks, and both ourselves and Member States must do more to accelerate the evaluation process.” He went on to say that companies also need to “to treat their registrations as business cards” since “compliant registration dossiers are their key investment to a predictable and sustainable future.” A study completed last year by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) and German Environment Agency (UBA) found that only 31% of high production volume chemicals had compliant REACH registrations (FPF reported).

Read more

ECHA (February 28, 2019). “REACH data compliance needs to improve.

Luke Buxton (February 28, 2019). “Information missing from three-quarters of REACH dossiers.Chemical Watch

EEB (March 1, 2019). “Major safety gaps for most chemical files — official.

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