REACH 2018: Find your co-registrants

REACH 2018: Find your co-registrants

ECHA/PR/15/14

Companies manufacturing or importing the same substance will need to work together to prepare their registration. This is an obligation under the REACH Regulation. Therefore, companies preparing for the 2018 registration deadline need to find their co-registrants and establish substance sameness early enough.

Helsinki, 17 November 2015 – The second phase towards successful REACH registration is about finding co-registrants and preparing to work together. Companies need to find each other, agree that they are registering the same substance and get organised in a substance information exchange forum (SIEF)*. How this will work depends on whether the substance is already registered or not. This can easily be checked on ECHA's website.

If the substance is already registered, the SIEF has already organised data sharing. The first step is to contact the existing registrants in that particular SIEF and confirm that the substance as agreed in that SIEF is the same. Afterwards, the data-sharing negotiations for the joint registration can start.

If the substance is not registered, the pre-registrants will first need to establish that they intend to register the same substance. Companies who have pre-registered the same substance can find each other's contact information in the IT tool REACH-IT. They need to contact each other to see who will register and if their substances are in fact the same. If they are, then they are part of the same SIEF.

Step-by-step instructions on how to find the other SIEF members are now available on ECHA's website.

A webinar on the second phase of the REACH 2018 Roadmap will take place on Wednesday 18 November at 11:00 (Helsinki time). It will offer a basic understanding of how to retrieve pre-registrations in REACH-IT and how to check if a substance has already been registered. It will guide companies on how to find the lead registrant or co-registrants. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions from ECHA's experts.

*A SIEF is a specific group that registrants and pre-registrants of the same substance are part of. They share data for the REACH registration in the SIEF.

Background

The last REACH registration deadline will be on 31 May 2018. This deadline concerns companies that manufacture or import chemical substances in low volumes, between 1-100 tonnes per year.

In January 2015, ECHA published its REACH 2018 Roadmap, which splits the registration into seven phases, and describes the milestones of each phase and support activities that the Agency plans to give to the registrants.

Companies should start their preparations early enough. ECHA's REACH 2018 web pages serve as a one-stop-shop for all material to help companies prepare.