ECHA Corrects CLP Notification Numbers

The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has corrected the number of notifications it received for substances under the CLP Regulation.

The actual number of substances that ECHA received notification of is 107,067, instead of the previously announced number of 24,529, chemist Kal Kawar reports.  The deadline for CLP notifications was January 3, 2011.

The change in number from 24,529 to 107,067 substance notifications is significant, but because both the REACH and the CLP regulations and processes are so young, the error is unlikely to incur significant backlash. The discrepancy was due to some bulk files being counted as single substances.

According to industry experts, it’s likely that a handful of new statistical anomalies will emerge as ECHA gets used to managing chemical ingredients data.

For the January 3 deadline under the CLP Regulation, the most CLP notifications came from:

• Germany: over 800,000
• United Kingdom: over 500,000
• France: nearly 300,000

Over 6,600 companies notified of at least one substance. Germany is usually in first place, indicating its robust manufacturing sector as well as its penchant for following greener industrial paths.

The CLP notifications “went extremely well,” said Geert Dancet, executive director of ECHA. “We got over three million submissions of classifications in time by the deadline.”

His colleague, Jack de Bruijn, ECHA’s director of risk management, said that the chemical data received via notifications will go into a public version of the inventory.  ECHA hopes to have public data available in May of 2011.

The collected C&L data will be held in a central inventory. The public version will include substance identifiers as well as specific concentration limits or multiplying factors for each substance.

As described in the REACH Regulation (Article 119.1), the C&L inventory will include classification and labeling information on substances submitted to ECHA through REACH registrations and CLP notifications, and a list of substances that have harmonized classification in the EU.

Companies that missed the deadline and are not sure how to proceed can get information on the ECHA notification portal.

This article is reprinted by permission from Kathleen Hurley, executive producer of the Actio Communications Network. Actio is a Portsmouth, NH based technology company whose mission is to provide software tools for product stewardship functions such as chemical management and supplier disclosure risk management in an era of REACH, RoHS and Green Chemistry.