Reach For It

In the true Euro scheme of things, the Reach legislation – now law across the European Union and currently being rolled out in the UK – is a big deal, covering environmental and consumer protection, public health and health and safety at work. The Health and Safety Executive has taken the lead on Reach in the UK.

So is Reach – which stands for Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals – a big deal for the m&e sector? Well, that depends largely on the chemicals we use and how we use them.

For m&e contractors, the practical implications are likely to be the need to find out and tell suppliers more about chemical hazards, uses, changes or bans, linked to the use of particularly hazardous substances.

The latest advice from the HSE for ‘downstream’ users of substances, including contractors, is: “Generally, if you are using [everyday] chemicals or mixtures – cleaning agents, lubricants, adhesives – in the way that is expected, Reach probably won’t mean significant changes.”

Even so, there could be issues if:

• chemical manufacturers decide rising registration costs for some substances means it is not worth making them;
• the ways of using high-hazard substances are restricted;
• some of the higher-hazard substances are banned altogether.

Some might conclude that the risk of restrictions is higher for mechanical, rather that just electrical, contractors, and time will tell. Don’t forget, if you are an offsite manufacturer, in addition to installation, your manufacturing processes will use extra substances. Good advice for any company is to keep in touch with reputable suppliers about any particularly high-hazard chemicals on your inventory.

‘Particularly high-hazard’ can be read as ‘very nasty indeed’. Substances of very high concern (SVHCs) will need an authorisation before they can be used. SVHCs include carcinogens and substances that are “mutagenic or toxic to reproduction [CMRs] categories 1 or 2; persistent, bio-accumulative and toxic substances [PBTs]; and substances that are very persistent and very bio-accumulative [vPvBs]”.

The HSE says: “If your company relies on using unusual chemicals, be sure that these will still be available in future. Consider contacting your supplier to find out if the substance in question will be registered by whoever makes or imports it. It is possible that some companies may decide not to register chemicals that have been previously supplied.”

It is possible that some companies may decide not to register chemicals that have been previously supplied

Reach aims to keep high-hazard chemicals out of the EU market, provide better information along the supply chain, move responsibility for identifying risk control measures on to manufacturers and suppliers, and restrict certain uses of hazardous substances.

The regulation is there to shift the responsibility for proving and dealing with chemical risks on to manufacturers and away from governments, which take many years to ban harmful substances, which effectively is shutting the door after the horse has bolted.

Under Reach, chemical suppliers, not the contractors, decide on when and how their products should be used – what is known as ‘supported use’. Users must implement the control measures specified by the supplier.

Significantly, Reach also covers the movement of information back up the supply chain – from contractors via suppliers to makers. This provides a new channel for recording a user’s experience of ‘real life’ chemical hazards, and passing these to manufacturers or importers.

Although Reach will eventually replace the UK law on safety data sheets, it will not replace that hardy perennial, the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH) Regulations. COSHH aims to control (mostly airborne) risks from hazardous substances at work, including activity or process-based risks such as welding fumes that are beyond Reach.

Contractors still need to do risk assessments under COSHH, but the aims of the different types of risk assessment are different: the Reach assessment aims to prove that the chemical is being used safely so that the activity can be allowed.

Much of this, of course, does not look like core business to an m&e contractor, but Reach has arrived, and in the next couple of years, contractors will be receiving supplier questionnaires about it.

The HSE has issued a factsheet on Reach for chemical users. It is available via the HSE Reach Competent Authority website: www.hse.gov.uk/reach