Product Safety and Consumer Well-being
To understand and manage the potential health, safety, and environmental risks of our products, we take a careful and considered approach to risk evaluation and assessment. Our corporate regulatory team works with stakeholders, customers and suppliers to monitor and react to changes in hazard properties or exposure of our products. Through careful product stewardship, we aim to deliver innovative and sustainable products with increased performance and value, without harming people or the environment.
Global Chemical Regulations
National and regional regulations are continuously evolving and we work hard to ensure that our products comply with changes in legislation.
In 2022, the European Commission focused on developing further regulation and implementing their flagship Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability (CSS) project – part of the wider European Green Deal.
Staying Compliant with REACH
- EU REACH
- UK REACH
- Turkish and Korean REACH
It is a legal requirement to pro-actively review and update dossiers with the latest information and assess any impact this has on workers, consumers, and environmental safety. We continue with our ongoing commitment as a signatory member company to the CEFIC Dossier Improvement Plan and remain on schedule to complete reviews and resubmissions of all registration dossiers by the 2026 target date and complete all our obligations under the Plan. In 2022, we updated 31 of our registration dossiers.
This change will coincide with an alternative registration model (ATR), proposed in response to stakeholder concerns regarding the cost of acquiring and submitting the required data to complete ‘grandfathered’ registrations. The model will aim to reduce costs to businesses of this transition, while also ensuring high levels of human health and environmental protection remain.
We have successfully completed the initial ‘grandfathering’ of our existing EU REACH registrations into UK REACH. We await the outcomes of the registration deadline changes and ATR proposals before making necessary preparations to complete the UK registration process.
Our regulatory team continue to process with the registration on applicable substances falling under KKDIK, the Turkish REACH program, in line with end of 2023 deadline.
They are also undertaking registration of all applicable substances falling under the Korean REACH Program (K-REACH), in line with the deadline of the end of 2024.
Animal Testing
Compliance with regional and international regulations is non-negotiable and replying promptly and professionally to checks from the European Chemical Agency (ECHA) on our EU REACH registered substances is an integral part of our compliance commitment.
Unfortunately, many regulatory authorities still require animal testing to assess the (eco)toxicological properties of products. We are committed to eliminating or replacing this requirement by using suitable alternatives when appropriate.
Product Stewardship
Our expert software system Intelligent Authoring® supplied by Sphera® supports our regulatory function underpinning our product stewardship. For example:
- It facilitates the publishing of safety data sheets (SDS) in over 40 languages and generates labels for 5,000+ products
- It is used to cross-check global chemical inventory compliance, such as the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA) in the US
- Importantly, Intelligent Authoring® holds the physical chemical (eco) toxicology, environmental-fate and hazard classification data for over 20,000 individual substances that we continually use and/or monitor