By Anthony Clark, Plastics & Rubber Weekly
Crewe, UK -- The Chemical Business Association (CBA) in the UK has called for an urgent review of the funding levels for the European Chemical Agency (ECHA), which carries out registrations under the REACH regulation on registering, evaluating and authorising chemicals, for a fee.
The CBA believes that Helsinki-based ECHA will be massively over-funded, based on the extent to which it misjudged the number of REACH pre-registrations it would receive. Instead of the forecast 150 000 pre-registrations, ECHA in fact received 2.7 million - 18 times more than it expected.
"Time and again, CBA warned that ECHA's estimates for the number of pre-registrations were wide of the mark and it's industry that has had to handle the consequences," said Melvyn Whyte, chairman of CBA's REACH taskforce.
The CBA believes that the volume of pre-registrations poses a serious problem for the effective implementation of REACH, in particular for the Substance Information Exchange Forums (SIEFs) which are intended to allow collaborative compliance with REACH.
"ECHA's error in underestimating the number of pre-registrations has resulted in SIEFs which are completely unmanageable and in some cases have 5000 participants," said Whyte.
"This situation has so distorted the nature of SIEFs that they are clearly not capable of fulfilling their intended function. The whole situation needs to be urgently addressed, otherwise REACH implementation will just grind to a halt."
CBA is also concerned about the number of pre-registrations and the structure of REACH fees having the capacity to over-fund ECHA. The possibility of over-funding was recognised by ECHA during last year's pre-registration period, said CBA.
CBA reported that in June 2008, ECHA's executive director, Geert Dancet, said: "We need to wait and see. Industry must not panic. If our calculations are wrong and we receive massively more registrations than we expect, we will have to review the situation towards the end of 2010. If our revenue stream proves much stronger than we originally forecasted, I expect REACH registration costs to be revised downwards - particularly for smaller firms."
Whyte said: "As it is now a near certainty that the situation Geert Dancet described will actually come about, CBA is calling for the mechanism to review REACH fees to be initiated. This situation is given added urgency by the worsening economic situation the industry is facing."
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