Chemical industry majors trial REACH data system

Montreal, Quebec - Atrion International Inc. is claiming positive results at seven multinationals involved in beta testing its system that supports registration under the REACH legislation. The clients, including DSM and Akzo Nobel, validated the practicality of the REACHexchange system for exchanging data between Atrion’s Intelligent Authoring (IA) application and local instances of a company’s IUCLID 5 tool for registering substances under the EU chemicals safety legislation, the Canadian firm said.  

“The European Chemical Bureau’s IUCLID 5 license agreement prohibits companies from directly interfacing a third party system with IUCLID 5, which could potentially result in redundant and inconsistent data, and in the long run affect a company’s reputation," said Patrick Lavoie, president of Atrion. "We developed REACHexchange to enable companies to overcome this limitation, all while working within the confines of the IUCLID 5 license agreement."

According to Atrion, its IA application automates the creation of globally compliant and multi-lingual Material Safety Data Sheets (M)SDS, labels, hazard summary sheets as well as documents related to transportation, inventory reports and more. REACHexchange in combination with Atrion’s IA application allows the transfer of data and necessary classification information to the central IUCLID 5 system.

The beta testers confirmed that the interface eliminated risks associated with inconstant data between registration dossiers and SDS’s, due to duplicate data entry. This is an important, costly and time consuming hurdle to overcome for companies, especially as they begin to devote scarce internal resources in order to prepare for REACH pre-registration which starts on 1 June, said an Atrion statement.

Gerard Kulk, team leader, materials compliance support at Akzo Nobel, stated: "With REACHexchange, we can calculate the first aid, storage and handling and transport in Atrion’s IA application and export it to IUCLID 5 via REACHexchange. This enables us to leverage the same data across both systems saving our organization considerable time."

The company also cited an - unnamed - DSM product safety advisor as confirming that the way in which data was exported from IUCLID 5 and imported into the IA application via REACHexchange "demonstrated the accuracy of entering data only once, thus eliminating errors associated with redundant data entry."