28 countries participate in ECHA Forum's REF-3 phase one

01 Apr '14

2 min read

During its seventeenth meeting in Helsinki on 25-27 March 2014, the Forum elected its chair and vice chairs for new term. Ms Szilvia Deim (HU) will be chairing the Forum for the next three years and will be supported by Ms Katja vom Hofe (DE) and Mr Eugen Anwander (AT) as vice chairs.

In anticipation of the upcoming sunset dates, the Forum also decided to engage in a pilot project on authorisation. The project will address substances with sunset dates that will soon elapse. The focus will be on gathering experience and building practice and processes for enforcing the authorisation-related obligations. The project will be set up in 2014 with inspections taking place in early 2015.

Forum’s third coordinated enforcement project (REF-3) focuses on checking the registration obligations of manufacturers, importers and only representatives in close cooperation with customs authorities. The project is organised in two phases. The first phase finished in 2013 with the second phase just starting in February 2014.

During this plenary meeting, the members discussed the draft report of the first phase, in which 28 countries participated. Preliminary results show that inspectors checked 528 companies and 3 065 substances across European countries.

3% of the checked companies did not register any of the substances which they were supposed to register and 14% of companies were incompliant only with some registration duties. Non-compliance was found most frequently among only representatives and least frequently among manufacturers. The final report of the first phase of REF-3 is expected to be published in mid-2014.

The Forum also adopted its Multi Annual Work Programme for the period 2014-2018, which will be published on ECHA's website in mid-2014.

ECHA

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