Chemical industry ready to start pre-registration

06-05-2008: "For years we have been actively preparing ourselves for the REACH marathon, which starts today with the pre-registration and will last until 2018", said Alain Perroy, Director General of Cefic. "In the chemical industry we did our homework and we provided and continue to provide a great deal of support to our members and even beyond".

The meetings and workshops organised by Cefic and the REACH Centrum, which was established in June 2006, would be too many to count, but over two years already hundreds of company managers have been trained on REACH and its implications for each and every business unit in the companies.

According to Mr. Perroy, some critical factors for success have still to be watched very closely, namely the IT infrastructure underpinning the whole system, meant to navigate the registrants through the complex pre-registration and registration procedures, the guidance documents developed in the REACH Implementation Projects (RIPs) by the Commission together with the stakeholders - and in particular Cefic - and now under the responsibility of the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), and the unequivocal and uniform interpretation of the guidelines by the Member States, responsible for the enforcement of REACH.

These factors will enable all actors in the supply chain to carry out their specific task and guarantee that REACH is indeed the European core legislation to refer to when assessing chemicals in future. Already anticipating the next important step of REACH, Cefic's new subsidiary ReachLink is launching an IT platform supporting the creation and management of the Substance Exchange Information Forums (SIEF).

"We cannot afford to miss this unique opportunity to restore public confidence in chemicals; therefore we rely on a successful implementation of REACH and we will contribute to making the system deliver", concludes Mrs. Lena Perenius, Executive Director responsible at Cefic for chemicals legislation and REACH implementation.