REACH-EN-FORCE are different projects established by ECHA to check if, how and when the subjects involved in the REACH Regulation (manifacturers, importers, downstream users and so on) comply with their duties. These information are used to better implement the REACH process.
REACH-EN-FORCE 3 project was coordinated by ECHA’s Enforcement Forum and implemented in close cooperation with national customs authorities. Its focus was the investigation of the registration obligations of manufacturers, importers and only representatives with regard to REACH regulation articles 5 and 6, in particular the principle “No data, no market”.
The project lasted two years and was developed in two steps: the first one involved 28 Member States, the second one 24. In total 1169 companies and 5746 substances were investigated. The approach considered using data on substances and mixtures from import declarations to target the inspections of importers and only representatives.
At the end, 13% of companies did not fulfil some of their registration obligations. In most of these situations, the companies failed with registration duties related to one or two substances from their portfolio. Most of all, 2% of companies had not registered any substances at all !!!
The following table shows the non-compliance rate of the inspected companies and inspected substances as found out during the REACH-EN-FORCE 3 project.
| Non-compliance rate | % |
| Inspected companies | 13 |
| Inspected companies with missing substance registrations | 9 |
| Inspected companies with all substance registrations missing (“free riders”) | 2 |
| Inspected substances | 5 |
| Inspected substances with a missing registration | 3 |
It seems that importers and only representatives (who should register substances on behalf of extra-EU companies thus giving the chance to downstream users to import substances and/or mixtures) are more likely to be in breach of their REACH obligations than other registrants. In more than one Member State, dedicated investigations was set and carried out along the supply chain. 104 only representatives were inspected and 32% of them did not comply with their obligations, specifically with their only representative information duties according to REACH Article 8.
Poor was also found the information flow in the supply chain between only representatives and importing downstream users. Since the respective importers could not specify the correct only representative and the only representatives did not keep reliable records of represented importers, it was often difficult to establish the structure of the supply chain.
ECHA’s Executive Director Geert Dancet comment saying that the high rate of non-conformance for only representative and importers needs to be addressed by this type of companies and their stakeholder organizations. He also strongly advice extra-EU companies to keep their only representative informed annually about the exported volumes to all their importers within the EU/EEA so that registration obligations are correctly identified.
REACH-EN-FORCE 3 project demonstrates that REACH enforcement authorities have established an effective cooperation with customs in the 28 participating countries, cooperation that allowed the enforcement authorities to make use of data from individual customs declarations for their inspections. This encourages enforcement authorities and customs to continue this type of cooperation in the future.
source: ECHA website www.echa.europa.eu
To get the ECHA’s document click on the following link:
http://www.echa.europa.eu/documents/10162/13577/ref_3_report_en.pdf
