ECHA offers support to registrants in exceptional cases

Press Release
ECHA/PR/10/19
Media enquiries: ECHA Press

Companies facing exceptional situations that are likely to prevent them from registering on time should inform ECHA well ahead of the deadline of 30 November 2010.

Helsinki, 27 September 2010 - In five specific scenarios, the Directors' Contact Group has agreed that ECHA can offer help either by relying on its discretionary rights under REACH or by providing companies a transparent means to demonstrate good faith. Every affected company will need to submit a web-form as far ahead of the deadline as possible, providing detailed justification of its situation and an explanation of the measures that it has taken to comply with its obligations under REACH. Upon receiving this information, ECHA will provide instructions as to how to submit a registration by the deadline.

The Directors' Contact Group (DCG), the European Commission, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) and participating European industry associations have identified exceptional scenarios in which affected registrants may ultimately face a situation where a fully REACH compliant registration cannot be submitted on time.

The DCG has identified the following instances where such pressing and exceptional circumstances could apply:

• Difficulties to provide 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).
• 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).

The solutions to these problems involve ECHA showing flexibility to registrants who, through no fault of their own, find themselves in difficulty submitting a full registration dossier by 30 November 2010, the upcoming registration deadline. For instance, in accordance with Article 20(2) of the REACH Regulation, ECHA may be able to take circumstances beyond a registrant's control into account when setting a "reasonable deadline" within which the registrant has to complete his registration. In other instances, ECHA can provide a mechanism whereby companies can notify ECHA of their relevant difficulties. This can then be referred to in case of inspection by a national authority.

The situations in which ECHA can recognise cases of exceptional hardship of registrants providing sufficient justification of their individual situation are further enumerated in a Notice that can be accessed via a new DCG web section on the ECHA website.

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. Using dedicated web-forms, each affected company will be given the means to submit the prerequisite information relating to its exceptional case to ECHA. It should do this as far ahead of the registration deadline of 30 November as possible. This will permit ECHA to review the requests on a case by case basis and to instruct affected companies as to how to submit their registrations on time. Once ECHA has successfully processed the registration and received the corresponding fee, it will inform each affected company individually as to the new deadline for completing its registration dossier.