Cefic president Hariolf Kottmann and ECHA’s executive director Bjorn Hansen sign a joint statement outlining the future cooperation of the two organizations. (Image courtesy of ECHA.)

Now that the third and final registration phase for existing substances under the EU’s chemicals legislation has come to a close, ECHA and the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic) have agreed on plans to cooperate on REACH’s implementation.

A formal agreement was signed today — a commitment from both industry and ECHA to focus on improving the scientific assessment of some substances or groups of substances, further enhancing safety information and its communication across the supply chain.

“We welcome this cooperation very much as it shows that together we can make REACH work to the benefit of industry and ECHA, and the wider stakeholder base,” said Marco Mensink, Cefic’s director-general. “Industry will help ECHA to improve the quality of dossiers to help monitoring and enforcement and to improve the scientific quality of the process.”

The joint statement “shows European industry’s commitment to REACH and ECHA’s commitment to work with industry,” said Bjorn Hansen, ECHA’s executive director. “The commission has asked us in their recent report to work with industry to increase efficiencies in implementing REACH and this is a step in doing so. As ECHA is committed to openness and transparency, this work will be done in close collaboration with Member States and our other accredited stakeholder organizations, representing NGOs, trade unions, consumers and academia.”

The two organizations have also agreed to work jointly to solve scientific and technical challenges by facilitating technical discussions between experts and to improve the transparency on the quality of dossiers.

Posted by Leslie Burt, Chemical Matters