ECHA Clarifies SCIP Database Reporting Requirements at Stakeholder Workshop in Helsinki

By Aidan Turnbull, managing director, BOMcheck; Kelly Scanlon, director, EHS policy and research, IPC

At a recent stakeholder workshop in Helsinki, Finland, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) shed more light on its upcoming Substances of Concern in Products (SCIP) Database and how IPC standards factor into it.

Starting January 5, 2021, all manufacturers will be required to report information into the new ECHA SCIP Database if their products include articles that contain REACH Candidate List substances above 0.1%. At the recent workshop, ECHA confirmed that a prototype database will be available in Q1 2020, which will enable companies to start getting used to it, and a production version, coming in October 2020, will enable companies to begin entering data.

Together with other leading industry groups, IPC has been using its development of the new IPC-1752B Materials Declaration Management standard and the IPC-1754 Materials and Substances Declaration for Aerospace and Defense and Other Industries to road-test the data fields needed in supplier materials declarations. Various members of IPC’s Materials Declaration Task Groups, which, for example, are responsible for development of the IPC-1752B and IPC-1754 standards, have made recommendations to ECHA.

At the workshop, ECHA confirmed that some of the recommendations are already being implemented for the prototype release in early 2020, and others need further discussion.

For example, companies can protect confidential business information about their supply chains by using their own part numbers for articles they are notifying, instead of using their suppliers’ identifiers. The company part number can be multi-sourced from several alternate suppliers, provided that the supplier part numbers are not materially different as regards REACH Candidate List substances.

Materials Categories and Articles Categories (TARIC/CN Codes) are now provided with unique Pick List IDs by ECHA in IUCLID, and they will be updated annually in October. The Materials Categories and the TARIC/CN Codes are managed by ECHA and the European Commission, respectively. The TARIC/CN Codes update will be based on the TARIC list published by the European Commission in July each year.

If Materials Categories are provided, then Mixture Codes are optional. Additional Material Characteristics is now a separate optional list, which users can use to declare further details about the materials an article is made of. The objective is to describe the materials as accurately as possible and/or to describe the applied mixture in which the Candidate List substance resides.

Also, the Candidate List entries will be provided as reference substance data sets rather than as Pick Lists because the REACH Candidate List is updated at least twice per year, which is more frequent than the IUCLID annual update. Each version of the Candidate List is identified as a Pick List in IUCLID.

In future updates to the SCIP database, ECHA is planning to provide an enumerated list of Safe Use Information text strings, with an ID for the list and an ID and description for each entry in the list. ECHA is looking forward to developing such a list together with IPC and other leading stakeholders.

The new IPC-1752B standard will help companies collect the necessary information from their supply chains so that they can start reporting into the ECHA SCIP database any products that include articles that contain REACH Candidate List substances above 0.1%.

To help you learn more, IPC and Chemical Watch are partnering on a free webinar, “Update on New IPC-1752B Supply Chain Standard,” which will take place on December 5 at 10:00 am EST.

Speakers Aidan Turnbull and Patrick Crawford will provide an update on the reporting requirements for the ECHA SCIP database and explain how your company can contribute to standards development. Click here to learn more and register today.

Thank you to Materials Declaration Task Groups for their involvement with standards development, ECHA’s development of the SCIP database, and their contributions to this blog post. And special thanks to Walter Jager, ECD Compliance, for his input on this blog post.