ECHA Increases the Rate of Compliance Checks on REACH Dossiers

In the future, the ECHA wants to check four times as many REACH dossiers as it currently does. That’s the information the Agency provided in a press release. According to REACH, Article 41, Point 5, the ECHA is obligated to check 5% of REACH dossiers for conformity with the law in terms of the data the dossiers contain. Accordingly, the Agency examined about 2,700 dossiers for compliance over the past 10 years.

The action plan that the ECHA wants to publish in June 2019 calls for checking all registered chemicals with a tonnage band greater than one ton by 2027. Action is still needed, as shown in the ECHA report published at the end of February. According to the report, three of every four dossiers inspected are incomplete.

The German REACH Compliance Project reached a similar conclusion. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung: BfR) worked with the Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt: UBA) to examine more than 3,800 REACH dossiers and reached a sobering conclusion. In tonnage bands greater than 1,000 tons, more than every third dossier did not conform with the law. For tonnage bands of 100 to 1,000 tons, almost every fifth dossier was non-compliant.

In its announcement, the ECHA emphasizes that it is not authorized to refuse access to the market to companies that fail to comply with their legal obligations for specific chemicals. That’s much more a matter for national authorities. In his appeal, ECHA director Björn Hansen repeatedly called on nations and the companies responsible to act. In his article in the ECHA Newsletter (2-2019), he emphasized the importance of sound chemical data, saying “ultimately, industry can only implement the right risk management measures if they have the right data.”

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