News HSE Update
Due to the covid-19 situation, the autumn 2020 HSE meeting was held once again as a web conference. We discussed widely the submission to Poison Centres coming into force in 2021 for mixtures for consumer and professional use and in 2024 for industrial used mixtures. The HSE group welcomed the opportunity for group submissions, so-called ICG, which allows the exchange of components without a new submission. Grease manufacturers have to extensively advise their workers who come into contact with isocyanates, which is one of the conditions that ECHA stipulates for further use of this substance. On microplastics, members debated whether the lubricants industry will be affected by the upcoming restriction of the use of intentionally added microplastic particles to consumer or professional use products of any kind and the general consensus was that the industry will not be impacted. On paragraph 5, the opinion of the Committee for Risk Assessment (RAC) states that [Paragraph 1] “shall not apply to the placing on the market of: substances or mixtures containing microplastic where the microplastic is contained by technical means to prevent releases to the environment during end use”.
TC/CC Update The Technical and Competition Committees’ Chairs and their members are committed to keeping up the good work on the 21 cases currently open. On the advocacy side, the Committees ended last year by participating in an online survey, commissioned by the European Commission and carried out by TRL and fka GmbH, which looked at updating the requirements on repair and maintenance information. Early this year, the Committees focused their efforts on preparing UEIL’s response to a second public consultation launched by the European Commission on the evaluation of the Motor Vehicle Block Exemption Regulation. The consultation, which opened on 12th October 2020, closed on 25th January. The European Commission is now expected to publish its evaluation report which will mark the
42 LUBE MAGAZINE NO.161 FEBRUARY 2021
end of the retrospective evaluation of the current regime. The second phase of the process, namely assessing options for the future and choosing between them, will then begin.
Taxation Task Force Update The European Commission is currently reviewing the Energy Taxation Directive that was withdrawn by the European Commission in 2015 (as the file was blocked in Council) and will publish a revised Energy Taxation Directive, probably in Q2 2021.
Related to UEIL’s objective to prevent the inclusion of lubes under EMCS, certain EU Member States are concerned about increased fraud with lubes in Europe and are once again increasing the pressure to include lubes under EMCS. Therefore, UEIL will continue its outreach to EU Member States in the coming months and to the Portuguese EU Presidency. The European Commission will probably propose a new definition of ‘light lubes’ under EMCS in the second half of 2021.
Furthermore, the European Commission decided from the 1st of January 2020 to set a quota of 400 tonnes annually for Gp II. UEIL is actively lobbying against this decision, as it will have a negative impact on the competitiveness of SMEs in Europe.
At the last technical European working group meeting in December, EU Member States decided to extend the quota on Gp II for 200.000 tonnes until 30 June 2021 and to discuss a possible extension after June 2021 at the next EU technical working group meeting. The Netherlands and the European Commission prefer to stop the quota from the 1st of July 2021, while Belgium and Germany want to extend the quota to have a proper phasing out period.
LINK
www.ueil.org
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