Classification and labelling of substances has been part of EU law for more years than most of us have worked, and it has gone through many step changes. We are used to the hazard warning labels found on household bleach and some other household chemicals, but we know we don’t find these labels on all domestic cleaning products. That’s because household bleach has a measurable effect in terms of eye damage – in other words it’s classified as hazardous. Common salt (sodium chloride) makes your eyes sting but does not have a strong enough effect to damage your eyes – it’s not classified as hazardous.
This sorting of chemicals into those of concern (hazardous) and those we can be relatively relaxed about is known as classification and it can only be done with some information about the properties of a chemical. The REACH regulation has made it possible to have more information available for classification. For many chemicals the classification for health and environmental effects is done on the basis of the data which is available – and this includes consideration of similar chemicals or chemicals of the same group. This leads us into the stepwise procedure of classification; but first we need to remember that all this has been going on for a long time and maybe someone has done the job before!
We hope that this guidance will help our subscribers to notify their substances directly in REACH-IT. If you don’t need to claim confidentiality on the IUPAC name of your substance, the REACH-IT wizard is perhaps the quickest and easiest method to notify within one month of first placing the substance ...
