The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA, Helsinki / Finland; www.echa.europa.eu), the EU authority that administrates REACH, will step up its monitoring programme to assure compliance with the chemicals legislation, its executive director, Björn Hansen, said in the agency’s “Progress Report 2017”. The checks will begin after 31 May 2018, with the end of the 11-year transitional period in which all phase-in substances manufactured in or imported into the EU in volumes of more than 1 t/y must have been registered and the database of existing substances is completed.

In addition to examining the testing proposals of the last phase-in dossiers, ECHA will begin selecting for compliance checks at least 5% of the dossiers submitted, along with the newly submitted low-tonnage dossiers. Altogether, these could total 3,000. The sheer tonnage to be evaluated will present “a whole new challenge” for the agency, Hansen said, especially in view of the high rate of non-compliance found up to now when addressing tonnages over more than 100 t/y. In REF-4, the fourth REACH-EN-FORCE project of the ECHA forum dating from 2016 and just recently published, for example – see Plasteurope.com of 19.02.2018 – nearly 20% of the inspected toys were found to contain restricted phthalates at levels above those permitted.

Since 2008, ECHA said it has checked the compliance of 1,952 registrations, mostly to evaluate suspected data gaps. For the most part, these involved missing safety information related to prenatal development toxicity, mutagenicity or genotoxicity, reproduction toxicity and long-term aquatic toxicity. The agency currently carries out 300 to 350 follow-up evaluations annually, focusing on substances of potential concern. Safety information has improved over the ten-year period, but more still needs to be done, Hansen said.