ECHA announced on September 4, 2013 the results of the second REACH enforcement project. The ECHA Forum’s second enforcement project (REF-2) focused on checking the compliance of downstream users, especially formulators of mixtures, with the essential requirements of REACH and CLP.
The report of the second REACH enforcement project contains a number of interesting facts and statistics regarding safety data sheets (SDSs) in the EU, including:
- 97% of all companies inspected had the required SDSs available on site.
- Relevant information from SDSs/exposure scenarios was accessible for 93% of workers. But with more in-depth examination about workers’ access in practice, the rate was significantly lower (79%).
- Although SDSs were available in the inspected companies, the quality of the SDSs was frequently insufficient as defects of various types and to various extents occurred in the checked sections. In total, 52% of SDSs were defective.
- Among non-compliant companies, deficient SDSs occurred at nearly the same rate in all company size groups. Thus company size does not seem to influence the quality and reliability of SDSs.
- 68% of companies have sufficient competence and structures within the company to prepare SDSs.
- 19% of companies have outsourced the elaboration/preparation of their SDSs to external contractors.
- 78% of companies that were checked for the issue had the necessary systems for distributing SDSs to their customers/recipients.
- Companies distribute SDSs through many methods to their recipients/customers: on paper, electronically, via links to websites, through commissioned external contractors and others. The main method is in paper form (69%), but this often occurs in combination with an electronic distribution of the SDSs (54%).
- 80% of companies were found to have adequate structures/instruments in place to enable archiving and fulfilling the information duties in line with REACH and CLP.
- Inspectors detected deficiencies for 24% of all SDSs when evaluating for correspondence of the information in Section 15 or Section 2 of the SDS with the label.
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