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.
