The management of chemical substances implies growing safety, performance and compliance challenges.
In an ever more constraining regulatory environment, the volume and the complexity of the data to handle induce significant risks for companies. In return, effective control and monitoring processes improve safety and reduce costs.
The REACH regulation (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals), one of the most stringent regulations worldwide in terms of chemical substances control has been adopted by the European Parliament. The REACH regulation imposes on firms the registration of 30,000 substances when they are produced or imported in volumes exceeding a ton a year. The European Chemicals Agency, located in Helsinki, will centralize all data. This regulation will come into force on June 1st, 2007, in all European countries and will affect all companies doing business with and within the European Union.
With REACH, companies now have to prove their products are not harmful for health and environment.
The REACH regulation is complex and difficult for companies to implement, since they now have to rethink their organization, processes and information systems to be able to gather, manage and declare large sets of information about the chemical substances they use and produce.