Wednesday, February 16, 2011 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM EST you can participate in a  free  webinar  focused on practical issues regarding environmental compliance for electronic products. Principle legislations under discussion will be  RoHS Recast, REACH – Substances of Very High Concern , China RoHS, WEEE Directive , US Proposition 65 , US Mercury restrictions.

Go to: chemicalwatch.com

By 3 January 2011, ECHA received 3.1 million notifications of around 24 500 substances for the Classification and Labelling Inventory. By this deadline, industry had to notify the classification and labelling of all chemical substances that are hazardous or subject to registration under the REACH regulation and placed on the EU market.

Go to: echa.europa.eu

French supermarket Super U says it will stop using Bisphenol A in its cash register receipts by February 2011 in order to protect its staff from potential health risks associated with the substance. Cash register receipts have been found to contain high levels of bisphenol A.

Go to: www.lsa-conso.fr (article in French)

The new manual tells registrants how to derive a public name for a substance for which they request to keep the IUPAC name as confidential, as permitted in certain circumstances in accordance with the REACH Regulation. The rules presented in the manual describe the masking of various structural elements from the IUPAC name in order to derive a public name with a single level of masking.

Go to: Manual (pdf document) or echa.europa.eu

The European Chemicals Agency has added eight chemical substances to the Candidate List of Substances of Very High Concern (SVHC) for Authorisation. Companies are advised to check the potential obligations that result from this listing.

Go to: echa.europa.eu

ReachCentrum experts deliver workshops and webinars on various topics to help keeping up-to-date with the REACH legislation. You can find information about the next webinars on the website of the ReachCentrum.

Go to: www.reachcentrum.eu

Lack of technically sound alternatives is often seen as the bottleneck in the transition towards a toxic free world. This is a misconception, according to an article by Swedish businesses, environmental organisations, and academics published in Sweden’s largest financial newspaper. They urge the Swedish Government to introduce regulations making it profitable to replace hazardous chemicals with alternative solutions.

Go to: www.chemsec.org

A new version of the eChemPortal has been launched by OECD. It provides free public access to information on more than 600,000 records on chemical substances. Improvements include a search by chemical property, in addition to a search by substance name and identification number. The new eChemPortal is a project developed by OECD in collaboration with ECHA.

Go to: www.echemportal.org

The first major registration deadline under the REACH legislation passed on 30 November 2010. 24,675 registration dossiers have been successfully submitted for 4,300 substances including nearly 3,400 phase-in substances.

Go to: echa.europa.eu

The report “The Fight to Know?” was published by the European Environmental Bureau (EEB). It is based on a campaign run by EEB, Europe’s largest federation of citizens’ environmental organisations. The report reveals that big retailers are breaching the EU’s flagship regulation on chemicals REACH, while many products such as school supplies, sports accessories and sex toys are shown to contain high concentrations of ‘substances of very high concern’.

Go to: The Fight to Know? (pdf document) or www.eeb.org