BCF Blog: Poison Centres Update

By Wayne Smith, Director of Regulatory Affairs 

The CARACAL meeting on 18 September agreed the first amendment of Annex VIII to CLP (the poison centres requirements). This postpones the first compliance date from 1 January 2020 to 1 January 2021 and will now be passed to the European Parliament and Council.  It will, therefore, be published by early December, in time to enter into force before 1 January 2020. The other 2 compliance dates of the harmonised rules remain unaffected by the draft regulation.

This will give ECHA time to address the strong concerns on the workability of some aspects of the rules and will allow more time to get the supporting resources in place. It will also give companies and the authorities more time to adjust to the harmonised rules. Until the first compliance date, the current national rules in some countries would continue to apply.

The final report from Wood on the study of workability issues in CLP Annex VIII has been made available. CEPE has drafted a paper for input to the CARACAL sub-group meeting on 25 September proposing simplified procedures for paints and inks. This has been sent round to members’ poison centre contacts. It includes a proposal that there should be no notification for a final bespoke mixture at point of sale, only labelling with the single UFI of the base paint, less restrictive use of the generic component identifier ‘colouring agents’ and the possibility to notify an ‘interchangeable component group’ for technically equivalent raw materials e.g. that may come from different suppliers. We await the outcome of the discussions with interest.

For more details, please contact Wayne Smith.