REGULATION (EU) No 259/2012 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 14 March 2012 amending Regulation (EC) No 648/2004 as regards the use of phosphates and other phosphorus compounds in consumer laundry detergents and consumer automatic dishwasher detergents
 

“Synergies” is a window to the synergies process, and serves as a single point of entry for the synergies-related decisions, joint programme of work and joint activities of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions.  It presents the proposal for the organization of the secretariat, management reports, a meetings calendar and much more.

“Synergies” may be accessed through any one of three addresses:
URL:   http://synergies.basel.int, http://synergies.pic.int, http://synergies.pops.int

 
 

COMMISSION REGULATION (EU) No 109/2012 of 9 February 2012 amending Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) as regards Annex XVII (CMR substances)

COMMISSION REGULATION (EU) No 125/2012 of 14 February 2012 amending Annex XIV to Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (‘REACH’)

The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has informed on its website that:

"Over three million submission records covering more than 90,000 chemical substances are now freely accessible from the ECHA website.

Today, ECHA has launched the Public Classification and Labelling (C&L) Inventory with the information coming from REACH registrations and CLP notifications so far received by the Agency.

The publication of the Inventory is a key milestone set out in the CLP Regulation and represents a significant step forward towards transparency on the physical, health or environmental hazards of chemical substances. The Inventory provides a wealth of information from Industry on how they have self-classified chemicals and shows how some companies have classified the same substance differently. ECHA has not filtered or quality checked the information provided.

"With this increased transparency, we are contributing to a more effective communication on the hazardous chemicals to workers and ultimately to consumers" said Geert Dancet, Executive Director of the European Chemicals Agency. He also encouraged Industry to use the Inventory data as a common ground for discussions between companies to reach agreement on the self-classification and labelling of hazardous substances. To provide support for the hazard communication process, ECHA is planning to develop an IT platform to facilitate contacts among notifiers of chemicals to give them the opporunity to discuss reasons for differences and, where appropriate, agree on a uniform classification.

The Public C&L Inventory represents the largest database of self-classified  substances available globally. A number of options are available for searching the Inventory, based on both the substance identity and its classification. Future updates of the Inventory will continuously improve the search functions in order to enhance access to the information.

The Inventory is maintained by the Agency and the data will be refreshed on a regular basis with incoming and updated C&L information."

COMMISSION REGULATION (EU) No 71/2012 of 27 January 2012 amending Annex I to Regulation (EC) No 689/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council concerning the export and import of dangerous chemicals
(OJ L 26/23 of 28.01.2012)

On 18 October 2011 the Commission adopted the Recommendation on the definition of a nanomaterial. According to this Recommendation a "Nanomaterial" means:

A natural, incidental or manufactured material containing particles, in an unbound state or as an aggregate or as an agglomerate and where, for 50 % or more of the particles in the number size distribution, one or more external dimensions is in the size range 1 nm - 100 nm.

In specific cases and where warranted by concerns for the environment, health, safety or competitiveness the number size distribution threshold of 50 % may be replaced by a threshold between 1 and 50 %.

By derogation from the above, fullerenes, graphene flakes and single wall carbon nanotubes with one or more external dimensions below 1 nm should be considered as nanomaterials.

The definition will be used primarily to identify materials for which special provisions might apply (e.g. for risk assessment or ingredient labelling). Those special provisions are not part of the definition but of specific legislation in which the definition will be used.

Full text of Commission Recommendation can be found here.

The aim of this study is to assess the Impact of REACH on the Innovativeness of the European chemical industry. This involves a survey of firms across the European Union. A summary of the survey results and the report will be made publicly available by the Commission services.

This project is being carried out for the Commission by CSES (The Centre for Strategy and Evaluation Services). You may recently have completed a survey on a related topic: the impact of REACH on Competitiveness and the Single Market. The focus of this survey is on innovation.

In this survey innovation is defined as: “The implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), or process, a new marketing method, or a new organisational method in business practices, workplace organisation or external relations”.

The survey should be completed by a person in your business with experience of the implementation of the Regulation and understanding of how this impacts innovative activities. This could be, for example, the owner of the business, or the head of R&D or Marketing, or Health & Safety/ Compliance.

The questionnaire can be accessed by clicking on this link.

The survey should take about 30 minutes to complete. It has been set up so that you can start, save, and come back to it later – but to do this your computer must be configured to accept cookies. Alternatively, it might be useful to print a PDF version of the questionnaire to complete manually and then input it electronically at a later stage. As the questionnaire is targeting a very wide range of businesses, not all questions may be relevant to your specific enterprise. In such cases, please select the 'Not Relevant' option and continue.

FINAL DATE FOR COMPLETION OF THE SURVEY: 07.10.2011

“On the REACH road”  5^th Anniversary of REACH

The International Conference “On the REACH road” is organised by the Ministry of Economy,  in cooperation with the Bureau for Chemical Substances and the Polish Chamber of Chemical Industry. As the year 2011 was designated by UN as the International Year of Chemistry (IYC 2011) and 2011 is also the year of celebration of the 100^th Anniversary of Maria Skłodowska-Curie’s Nobel Prize in chemistry (MSC100) – the Conference was appointed as one of the activities undertaken to celebrate the IYC 2011, MSC100 as well as the 5^th Anniversary of the adoption of the REACH regulation.

The conference examines the five years period of REACH implementation as a step towards innovation management and safe use of chemical substances. The aim of the conference is also to assess the industry and policy makers activities on both European and global scale.

This two-day conference will take participants through the following topics:

• industry experience with REACH (including the situation after the first phase of registration and the SME situation before the second phase of REACH registration);
• the REACH review process (including possible ways of future development of the regulation’s provisions);
• activities undertaken in order to improve the innovation and competitiveness of the chemical industry;
• influence of the REACH regulation on other international activities in respect of strategic management of chemicals.

The Conference is to be held in Warsaw, Poland, 23 – 24 November 2011. The event will provide a dynamic environment for information exchange and will bring together the representatives of governmental institutions, non-governmental organizations, industry, scientists and chemical experts across Europe and from around the world. It will also provide
a great opportunity for delegates to establish business relations for future collaboration on the global, chemical market.

For more information please visit www.5-reach.pl

An upgraded version of IUCLID is available.

A minor upgrade of IUCLID has been published: version 5.3.1. This release includes bug fixes but also brings new functionalities such as:

- 'Go to UUID' feature: a field has been added in the IUCLID task list to enable accessing a document using its UUID.

- In the query results pane, multiple entries can be selected simultaneously to perform actions like print, delete or export on a set of documents instead of on each document individually.

No change to the IUCLID 5 data format has been made since IUCLID 5.3.0 and no migration of existing data is needed to install this upgrade.

Details are available in the IUCLID 5.3.1 release note.

Download the latest version of IUCLID.