REGULATION & COMPLIANCE registration deadlines by three years to October 2026 , 2028 and 2030 . Industry naturally supported this .
Chloe Alexander , a campaigner at the environmental NGO ChemTrust , said that she understood the thinking behind this but was concerned about deadlines being “ constantly kicked down the road . With discussions going on about the viability of the current model , what ’ s to prevent further delays as well ?” she asked .
In the longer term , ChemTrust ’ s main worry is the possibility of the UK diverging from EU REACH and offering “ fewer and weaker protections from hazardous chemicals ”, through a lack of operational capacity , data and staff , but also an ideological inclination to ‘ light touch ’ regulation , combined with less transparency around how decisions are made .
“ We ’ re particularly concerned about the gap that has opened up on restrictions , with the UK unable to keep up with the volume and scale of EU restrictions ,” Alexander said . “ The gap could become very wide in the coming years unless measures are put in place to address it .”
ChemTrust favours continuing alignment with the EU and a model that requires full data from registration . The UK should also follow the risk management decisions made by the EU , as the EU regulatory authorities are in possession of the data . Otherwise , the implementation of UK REACH could drag on even beyond the end of the 2020s , Alexander said .
Available data ?
Darren Abrahams , a partner at the pan-European legal firm Steptoe & Johnson , warned of the dangers of confusing two concepts in UK REACH : ‘ available data ’, such as the data that registrants must enquire about before carrying out potentially avoidable tests on vertebrates , and ‘ legitimate possession ’ of data . “ Although we ’ re talking about the first , we ’ re dancing around the second ,” he said .
‘ Legitimate possession ’ refers to data that is still subject to data protection and cannot be scraped and brought into UK legislation simply because it is on the ECHA website . There is also data that is not subject to the 12-year data protection period but is not actually held by the UK authorities . In Abrahams ’ view , if this data can be scraped , it should be done centrally rather than placing the obligation on individual companies .
The ATR approach will apparently involve gathering a second data package from that submitted during EU REACH registration . Will that , if correct , mitigate the burden on industry ? asked moderator Neil Hollis , regulatory affairs manager at BASF UK .
Not necessarily , it emerged . “ Different people in different companies have different definitions of what ‘ publicly available data ’ is and what can be used for what purposes ,” said Mel Biring , global product compliance and advocacy manager at Lubrizol .
The process of gathering , interpreting and using the data could spiral out of control , “ so you may end up no better off – you may even end up with a puzzle because everyone else has taken a slightly different interpretation and come to different results .”
“ Data quality will be a key issue too ,” said Nishma Patel , policy director at the Chemical Industries Association . Some simple substances may have plenty of data publicly available , but complex ones are less likely to .
“ What happens when it comes to read-across or weight of evidence ? How do we bring that from a publicly available source into a registration dossier ?” she asked . Some sort of trade-off between the level of information needed , what can be used and what regulators need appears inevitable .
Coatings companies have acquired registration duties under UK REACH
Downstream challenges
Ciara Dempsey , regulatory affairs manager at the British Coating Federation ( BCF ), said that UK REACH poses major challenges for her members . Under EU REACH , they were mostly defined as downstream users ( DSUs ). Now they are importers of substances and are taking on registrations for the first time .
There would be an issue for coatings companies , she added , if when they import raw materials from the EU and the information on the safety data
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