Inspectors to check duty to notify mixtures for poison centres

ECHA/NR/20/38

The Enforcement Forum has agreed to check the compliance of companies that have a duty to notify mixtures to the Poison Centre Notification portal. The Forum and BPRS also agreed to take steps to make their work more transparent.

Helsinki, 5 November 2020 – The Forum decided that its pilot project in 2022 will focus on how companies comply with their duty to notify hazardous mixtures (e.g. detergents, paints, adhesives) to the Poison Centre Notification portal.

Companies must provide information about the mixtures to relevant national bodies. This information is then made available to poison centres so they can give advice to citizens or medical personnel in the event of a poisoning.

The obligation to notify certain hazardous mixtures placed on the market for consumer and professional use applies from 1 January 2021. The Forum will start preparing its pilot project in 2021 and plans to carry out inspections from the second half of 2022 until mid-2023. The project report is expected in early 2024.

Further to this, the Forum reviewed the results of the REF-7 project on registration, while the Biocidal Products Regulation Subgroup (BPRS) reviewed the findings of the BEF-1 project on treated articles. The reports for these projects are planned for publication towards the end of 2020.

The Forum and BPRS also discussed ways of improving their transparency and engagement with stakeholders and agreed to organise remote workshops for accredited stakeholder organisations after each of their enforcement projects to discuss the results and recommendations for industry. The Forum and BPRS will also, starting from 2021, publish information about the follow-up of recommendations from their enforcement projects indicating what was done to put them into practice.

During its first remote open session involving representatives of 40 stakeholders and five candidate countries, the Forum and BPRS discussed topics ranging from industry initiatives for fast tracking the supply of disinfectants, streamlining the classification of petroleum substances of unknown or variable composition (UVCBs), controls of online sales of products and enforcement of REACH duties to use animal testing as a last resort.

The BPRS also started preparing its second BPR enforcement project (BEF-2) which will focus on biocidal products. Inspectors will check whether biocidal products fulfil required pre-marketing conditions (necessary authorisation, use of allowed active substances in the products or correct labelling). The details of this scope of the project are yet to be defined. The BPRS will prepare the project in 2021, run the inspections in 2022 and publish the report in 2023.

The Forum for Exchange of Information on Enforcement met remotely on 26-30 October 2020 and the Biocidal Products Regulation Subgroup (BPRS) met remotely on 4-5 November 2020.