REACH: ORs Can Apply for Authorization

ECHA now accepts applications for authorization under REACH from Only Representatives, contrary to previous guidance. more

Six chemicals are now on the Authorization list and require application to continue use beyond their sunset dates: list.  More to come here.

TSCA CDR Update – FAQs & Byproducts

EPA has posted FAQs on the Chemical Data Reporting rule here.  Companies can now access the electronic reporting tool, CDX for the rule: here

A meeting was held January 19, 2012, with EPA trying to explain how CDR applies to byproducts:

Some good news:  EPA is backing off of recycling as manufacture requiring reporting.  As long as all you are doing is separating out (e.g., distilling) a raw material or product (refining) you don’t have to report.  Refining and processing a chemical product further to remove impurities is not reportable.  Only if you extract or create a substance by chemical reaction do you have a reporting responsibility.  Bottom line:  A chemical has to have been manufactured by you; a change in CAS# has to have occurred.  Solvent recyclers are off the hook!

Muddled further is the situation with impurities that are created by your chemical reactions and how your chemical products, co-products and byproducts are described by CAS#.  Are they mixtures of known discrete chemicals or UVCB?  It sounded like EPA was saying that it doesn’t matter if a substance is an impurity – if produced by chemical reaction, the only way to avoid CDR reporting as a manufacturer is to meet one of the exemptions: <25,000 lbs, polymers, burned as fuel, TSCA exempt use, disposed.  Another CDR exemption is if the chemical isn’t on the TSCA Inventory.  Of course, if the byproduct is not otherwise exempt and it’s not on the TSCA Inventory – because everyone considered it to be a non-reportable impurity – you may have a PMN violation.

EPA seemed to be trying to avoid problems it had created in its earlier guidance by considering products and byproducts as mixtures, where the unwanted byproduct components get used in exempt ways or disposed and so don’t require reporting.

The webinar and materials will be posted shortly.

Congressmen Shimkus and Upton are asking EPA to extend CDR some more since there is still confusion.  This webinar only confirmed that. http://www.bna.com/upton-asks-epa-n12884907277/

 
EHS Strategies, Inc. will be tracking this issue and can assist you.

REACH Intentions

If you want an advance look at what ECHA will be considering for Substances of Very High Concern and for Authorizations and restrictions under REACH, check out this site.  Each of these chemicals will be offered for public comment before it gets officially listed, but checking this site will give you time to prepare a response.

EHS Strategies, Inc. can help you decide how to deal with these listings.

REACH: SVHC in Articles

Controversy remains on the notification and communication requirements for Substances of Very High Concern (SVHC) in articles.  Do you calculate the >0.1% wt/wt SVHC  according to each component or for the finished article as placed on the market?  Several countries (AUSTRIA, BELGIUM, GERMANY, FRANCE, NORWAY, SWEDEN ) say it’s by component and tough luck on importers: “Once an Article – Always an Article.”  ECHA says it’s the entire article.  The court will have to decide. But no lawsuits yet.

Here’s Germany’s guidance on the matter: pdf

EHS Strategies, Inc. can help you decide how to deal with these requirements.

What Sustainability Means continued

A very intense and challenging piece you might want to ponder as you think about what “sustainability” means  (hang in there for the last half of the article):

Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth

Like all of us, I am a foot soldier of empire. It is the empire of Homo sapiens sapiens and it stretches from Tasmania to Baffin Island. Like all empires, it is built on expropriation and exploitation, and like all empires it dresses these things up in the language of morality and duty. When we turn wilderness over to agriculture, we speak of our duty to feed the poor. When we industrialize the wild places, we speak of our duty to stop the climate from changing. When we spear whales, we speak of our duty to science. When we raze forests, we speak of our duty to develop. We alter the atmospheric makeup of the entire world: half of us pretend it’s not happening, the other half immediately start looking for new machines that will reverse it. This is how empires work, particularly when they have started to decay. Denial, displacement, anger, fear.

The environment is the victim of this empire. But the “environment”—that distancing word, that empty concept—does not exist. It is the air, the waters, the creatures we make homeless or lifeless in flocks and legions, and it is us too. We are it; we are in it and of it, we make it and live it, we are fruit and soil and tree, and the things done to the roots and the leaves come back to us. We make ourselves slaves to make ourselves free, and when the shackles start to rub we confidently predict the emergence of new, more comfortable designs.

Kingsnorth describes the current obsession with eliminating carbon emissions as leading to “… the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy” as we rush to grow crops for biofuels and wind farms.  He feels “environmentalists” have lost their way.

As I’ve blogged before – humans are part of the natural ecosystem.  It continues to evolve and change as it always has but the growing population of humans is causing change at a faster and faster rate.  The challenge is to avoid a series of crises and cataclysms and allow for gradual adaptations that preserve the ecosystem to thrive.

REACH: 13 Recommended for Authorization

ECHA has recommended 13 SVHC chemicals to the EU Commission to require authorization for use.  These are not on the final list yet, but be prepared.  Once adopted, manufacturers/importers must apply for and justify continued use that may or may not be granted.

• Trichloroethylene .
• Chromium trioxide
• Acids generated from chromium trioxide and their oligomers (group containing: chromic acid, dichromic acid, oligomers of chromic acid and dichromic acid)
• Sodium dichromate
• Potassium dichromate
• Ammonium dichromate
• Potassium chromate
• Sodium chromate
• Cobalt(II) sulphate
• Cobalt dichloride
• Cobalt(II) dinitrate
• Cobalt(II) carbonate
• Cobalt(II) diacetate

EHS Strategies, Inc. can help you understand the impacts to your business.

REACH: 20 More SVHC

ECHA has added 20 more chemicals to the Substances of High Concern (SVHC) list: more lead, chromate and arsenic compounds, phenolphthalein, dichloromethylenedianiline, BCME, EDC, anisidine, technical MDA, refractory ceramics and more.
The full list of SVHC is here

For these newly listed chemicals European importers and manufacturers must inform their downstream industrial users and respond to customer inquiries about the presence of these SVHC.  In addition, the batch listed in June  2011 are now subject to notification to ECHA for articles with >0.1% of those chemicals (along with all the other chemicals previously listed) unless the use in the articles were registered under REACH in November 2010.  More information is available from ECHA here.

EHS Strategies, Inc. can help you understand and deal with these requirements.

 

 

TSCA CDR News

EPA has released a total of 4 out of 7 planned training modules here for the Chemical Data Reporting (CDR, formerly IUR) rule.

The fourth module tells you how to register for CDX – the online reporting tool – for CDR.  Each individual who will be filing information on a chemical for a company must be registered.  There is one authorizing official who signs the completed form and certification, but there can be multiple support registrants who actually fill in the form.  If  you are already a CDX user, you need to “add a program”: Submissions for Chemical Safety and Pesticide Programs (CSPP)

The fifth module is on the electronic tool and actually using it and will publish in January.

Intriguingly, Module 7 is on Byproduct Chemical Substances.  I can’t wait!
EHS Strategies, Inc. can help you with CDR.

REACH: ECHA Website Revised

ECHA has revamped its website to make it more “intuitive.”  Not so sure.

Check out the new Guidance on REACH and CLP page.  They’ve changed some links if you’ve bookmarked items, so beware.  Ones I use that have changed (I’m sure there are more):

Nutshell Guidance

Navigator

Candidate List

Substances in Articles

Also, stay tuned for new Candidate List chemicals and Authorization chemicals coming week of Dec 19, 2011.

REACH Enforcement Report

20% noncompliance was reported by ECHA for April-May for 800 companies.  Problems:

• no pre-registration or registration of manufactured or imported chemicals
• incorrect information on the pre-registration
• SDS were missing entirely
• SDS were in the wrong format or languages

Enforcement ranged from “blame and shame” to administrative orders to fines and 3 criminal complaints.  REACH is pretty easy to inspect for compliance.  Know what you are required to do and don’t dawdle.

EHS Strategies, Inc. can help.