FEATURE
REACH OUT
Eighteen years ago a process started that today means distributors in the cleaning supply chain are facing a business critical issue. ‘REACH for the cleaning supply chain’, a conference on 21 June being organised by the Cleaning & Hygiene Suppliers Association (CHSA) and the British Association for Chemical Specialities (BACS) will help distributors in the sector address the challenge.
The year is 1998; Michael Meacher, the then Environment Minister, addresses an informal meeting of EU Environment Ministers in Chester during the UK’s Presidency of the EU. The topic is managing the risks from chemical exposure and finding a solution for a number of problems which persist with the existing legislation.
The first problem was (at the time) reasonably high profile. Many of the environmental pressure groups had been publicly campaigning on the topic for some time. Most of the chemicals on the EU market dated from the days before significant legislation was in place. As a result, not much was known about how safe they were. High profile cases involving CFCs, asbestos or leaded petrol had demonstrated that at least some historic chemicals could be harmful, and were there more examples of problematic chemicals still to be found?
A second problem was also troublesome. Existing legislation, such as COSHH, required the employers of staff at the end user level to estimate the exposure of their workers to the chemicals they were using. But in practice, this was a very technical job and the skills to perform these exposure assessments really weren’t
44 | Tomorrow’s Cleaning June 2016
widely available. A way had to be found to move the burden of demonstrating the safety of the chemicals being used onto the substance manufacturers.
In response to this meeting, the European Commission published a White Paper on a Strategy for a Future Chemicals Policy which ultimately led to the creation of one of the largest pieces of chemicals legislation ever written: REACH.
REACH requires the creation of a common data set for all chemicals on the EU market and pushes the requirement of exposure, and ultimately risk, assessments up the supply chain to those placing chemicals on the market.
Much of the work in REACH has now been completed. But the COSHH laws have not changed so how do the two now work together? And at the same time chemical labelling legislation, CLP, has been brought in to harmonise labelling on a global basis, so how does this affect worker safety?
Pete Woodhead is the Technical Director of Selden Research Ltd and a past Chairman of BACS, and has been working in the industry on this topic for the last few years. At the BACS/ CHSA conference – ‘REACH for the cleaning supply chain’ – he will open
up the event with a brief explanation of what these laws are, how they interact and what the cleaning supply chain’s new obligations are.
Pete’s introduction to REACH will then be expanded on by Martina Williams, the BACS consultant working in this area, who will define the scope and timelines for the supply chain’s REACH-based obligations.
Much of these obligations are related to the communication within the supply chain of key information. Simon Bradshaw, from the safety data sheet authoring software specialists Lisam, will give a presentation on the supply chain’s obligations and will describe the likely change in the volume of updates which the REACH legislation will require.
Finally, as some of the key REACH information which must be communicated does not have a format imposed by the regulators, Randi Hanstveit from Sealed Air will describe a project which started in the Netherlands to provide a common format across industry for communicating this information.
The conference will be held on 21 June 2016 at the Lea Marston Hotel in the West Midlands and booking forms are available from the BACS office at
enquiries@bacsnet.org.
twitter.com/TomoCleaning
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