The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has amended the Prior Informed Consent (PIC) Regulation, EU 64/2012, to add 27 pesticides and eight industrial chemicals into Annex I, bringing the total to 295. As a result, EU exporters are now required to notify their intentions to export them from 1 November onwards.
ECHA has published its fifth triennial report on the use of alternatives to testing on animals for REACH. Based on data from 12,439 registered substances up until 31 July 2022, it concluded that progress is being made and alternatives are widely used when assessing the safety of chemical substances.
Within the Restrictions Roadmap under the EU’s Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability, ECHA has released its Regulatory Strategy for Flame Retardants (FRs). This refers mainly to halogenated FRs and organophosphorus-based FRs, which make up about 70% of the organic FR market.
The strategy identified aromatic brominated FEs (BFRs) as candidates for EU-wide restriction on five classes of aromatic BFRs that are already or will be confirmed to be persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic, or very persistent and very bioaccumulative, or identified as substances of very high concern.
An EU-wide project by ECHA’s Enforcement Forum carried out in 2021 has found that most users of substances of commonly controlled very high concern (SVHCs), mainly SMEs, already comply with the authorisation requirement to control risks.
The authorities of all 28 member countries undertook 690 inspections at 516 companies, mostly SVHCs. The most common SVHCs checked were chromium trioxide and strontium chromate, which are used mainly in surface treatment and chrome plating.
The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has published a proposed restriction of around 10,000 per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) on its website. Its scientific committees for Risk Assessment (RAC) and Socio-Economic Analysis (SEAC) will now start evaluating the proposal.
This followed three years of investigations by the national authorities of Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. In a report submitted to ECHA on 13 January, they concluded that the risks from PFAS are not adequately controlled and should therefore be restricted.
ECHA’s has released the fourth report under its Integrated Regulatory Strategy, which aims to speed up data generation, identification of groups of substances of concern and regulatory action by integrating different regulatory processes into one coherent approach.
The EU’s Risk Assessment Committee has assessed glyphosate’s hazardous properties against criteria in the Classification, Labelling & Packaging Regulation and concluded that its classification should not be changed. This is consistent with the proposal of the four member states currently assessing the substance and RAC’s own 2017 opinion.
