Wednesday, December 1, 2010

The Final REACH Registration Numbers Are In - ECHA Reports Nearly 25,000 Registrations

Yesterday (November 30, 2010) marked the first deadline for registration of chemicals under the European Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) program.  And the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has quickly issued a press release summarizing the results - "ECHA had received 24,675 registration dossiers, submitted for nearly 3,400 phase-in substances."

While companies have had almost 3 years to prepare dossiers on their chemicals, most of that time was spent working with other companies in consortia and navigating the new idea of SIEFs (Substance Information Exchange Forums).  According to ECHA:

T"the numbers of registrations increased steadily throughout the year, but from September 2010, the trend changed. Numbers soared dramatically - incoming registrations in a single month totalled four times the number of dossiers previously registered. The increase became more gradual again in October – an increase of 7% percent - with statistics increasing again over the last month."



About 12% of dossiers were submitted by "Lead Registrants," i.e., the company who volunteered to present the data developed by consortia and other groups of companies manufacturing or importing the same chemicals.  About 82% of the submissions were from "Member Registrants," those companies who contributed to consortium development of the dossier submitted by the Lead.  Only 6% of the submissions were from individual registrants, i.e., single companies that provided all the data for a chemical.


Nearly a quarter of submissions came from one country - Germany - which shouldn't be too surprising given the number of larger firms located there.  Most of the submissions (86%) came from large companies, with medium, small, and micro sized companies accounting for only 9%, 4%, and 1% of the submissions, respectively.


Only 580 of the nearly 25,000 dossiers contained testing proposals, for a total of 1,548 proposed tests.  ECHA will review all of these and any test proposed on animals will be subject to public consultation.



More details can be found in the ECHA press memo and registration statistics.

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