Substance regulations cause confusion in coatings market

“UK and EU implementation has been agreed to take place over several years,” said BCF chief executive Moira McMillan, who has received considerable feedback from members over the confusion in the market concerning GHS compliance.

“However, some of the countries have already started implementing the scheme, causing problems for shipping companies over here,” she said.

The European Regulation on the Classification, Labelling and Packaging of Substances and Mixtures (CLP) will bring all the proposals on the classification, labelling and packaging of substances, agreed at the 2002 UN World Summit held in Johannesburg, into European law.

BCF spokesman Wayne Smith said the biggest problem was finding out what stage other countries are at in their implementation of GHS.

“All we can say is that it’s a case of speaking to whoever’s importing on your behalf in that country,” he said. “In the EU the Regulation is 13,000 pages long, so you can see it’s not very easy to find out what’s happening in other countries.”

In Europe, the regulation will replace the Dangerous Substances Directive and the Dangerous Preparations Directive when it comes into force for substances on 1 December 2010 and 1 June 2015.

These established directives were implemented in the UK under the Chemicals (Hazard Information and Packaging for Supply) Regulations, known as CHIP.

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