The Chemical Business Association (CBA) has questioned new rules for pre-registration outlined by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) in its 19 September announcement.
Peter Newport, director at the CBA, said: 'Prior to this statement, the advice from the European Commission and ECHA to companies at numerous conferences and industry events has always been 'if in doubt, pre-register.
'Now the ECHA is saying that companies should only pre-register the substances they ultimately intend to register under the Reach provisions.
'The ECHA is changing the rules to suit its own administrative convenience.
'It has no power under the Reach provisions to make such rulings or to dictate how many substances can or cannot be pre-registered.' He added: 'The reason behind the ECHA's ruling is that one UK company and one German company have pre-registered the full EC inventory of chemicals - a total of around 100,000 substances.
'It should be noted that there is nothing in the Reach provisions to prevent these companies pre-registering this number of substances.
'Prior to Reach coming into force, the ECHA was advised at several public events that some companies may well take a considered view that this number of pre-registrations would be necessary to protect the strategic interests of their businesses.
'We are now about halfway through the pre-registration period and the fact that throughout Europe only two companies have so far chosen to adopt this approach should not provoke this knee-jerk response from the ECHA.
'These companies are merely applying the commercial equivalent to the precautionary principle in order to safeguard their futures.'
