REACH Article 33 substance declarations

REACH Article 33 (1) requires contract manufacturers and distributors who supply an article which contains more than 0.1% weight by weight (w/w) of any Candidate List Substance of Very High Concern (SVHC) to provide their industrial customers with:

sufficient information, available to the supplier, to allow safe use of the article including, as a minimum, the name of that substance.

Some contract manufacturers and distributors have written to ENVIRON stating that this wording allows a passive approach to compliance, for example

In my review of the regulation and guidance documents I did not find a situation that would require active surveying of my suppliers in order to meet the requirements of Article 33(1) and in fact the words ‘available to the supplier’ in Article 33(1) suggests a passive approach is acceptable

It is clear that this contract manufacturer had not read the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) Guidance on Requirements for Substances in Articles. In particular section 5,3 on page 9 which states

Whenever standard information from suppliers is not sufficient to check compliance with REACH, companies have to obtain the necessary information by pro-active requests in the supply chain.

Adopting a passive approach to REACH Article 33 also represents significant compliance risks and business risks.

Under the REACH Regulation, if a contract manufacturer or distributor provides no information on these high concern substances to its industrial customers, this is equivalent to stating that the products do not contain > 0.1% w/w of any of these substances. To avoid this exposure, many contract manufacturers and distributors are stating that this information is not available to them. However, if they do then supply a component containing one of these high concern substances > 0.1% w/w they would be required to defend why this information was not available.

If the contract manufacturer or distributor can show that they followed the ECHA Guidance and requested this information from their suppliers, but it was not provided, then this provides an adequate defence. However, if they followed a passive approach and had made no effort to actively survey their suppliers then they have no defence at all.

Managing responses from suppliers requires a systematic approach, particularly as ECHA has indicated the Candidate List will be updated every six months from August 2009 and that around 25 new SVHCs will be added to the list each year. Manufacturers and suppliers using the BOMcheck (www.BOMcheck.net) substances declarations web database are already well prepared for this. The industry-led open-access database enables suppliers to share their substance declaration data directly with multiple industrial customers. The system’s regulatory compliance tool trains suppliers and keeps them up-to-date as new substances are added to REACH.

For further information, please contact Dr Aidan Turnbull
Head of WEEE, RoHS & EcoDesign on +44 (0)1225 748420