Helsinki - The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) is offering to help companies finding it difficult to comply with the requirements of REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals), Europe's comprehensive chemicals regulation programme.
But they must register for assistance as soon before the 30 Nov. deadline as possible, using a webform available at: the ECHA website. And, of course, companies will have to provide detailed justification of their situation and an explanation of the measures they have taken to comply with their REACH obligations.
Upon receiving this information, ECHA will provide instructions as to how to submit a registration by the deadline.
This will only be allowed in exceptional cases, the ECHA stressed in a 27 Sep press announcement, such as where there are:
* Difficulties in providing data required in Annex VII and Annex VIII in due time, or difficulties for importers of mixtures to obtain compositional and analytical data of the substances in the mixture from their suppliers (Issue No. 10);
* Impossibility of transferring pre-registrations or submitting a late pre-registration due to legal entity changes (Issue No. 15);
* Failure by the lead registrant to submit a fully REACH compliant dossier (Issue No. 20);
* Downstream users are obliged to become importers, as a substance is not registered by any EU based supplier (Issue No. 21); and
* Registrants need to accommodate new/updated guidance and hence have difficulties to provide data in Annex VII and Annex VIII in due time (Issue No. 10).
Companies potentially affected by the scenarios outlined above are invited to familiarise themselves with the summary paper outlining the solutions established by the DCG, as well as the notice laying out the prerequisite information that companies claiming to find themselves in such an exceptional situation will need to submit.
The new DCG web section on the ECHA website also describes how a genuinely affected registrant should contact ECHA at: <http://echa.europa.eu/help/dcg_en.asp>.
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