Clarification on REACH legislation
REACH is a recently introduced European Community regulation relating to chemical substances and their safe use.
However, there has been some confusion over which products are affected. International Union of Leather Technologists and Chemists Societies (IULTCS) secretary, Dr Campbell Page, has helped to clarify the regulation.
“The key word in the whole REACH regulation is that this law is specifically for substances - these are defined as the pure chemical species or chemical entity that can be isolated by a manufacturing process,” he says. “The more general term "chemicals" covers a much wider range of definitions. Amongst others, it can include mixtures of chemical substances. For example, in the leather industry practically every leather chemical (such as dyes, syntans, fatliquors, etc) is a mixture of several chemical substances.”
He explains that REACH requires the chemical supplier to separately register each of the individual chemical substance components in a mixture or formulation, which are called "preparations" in the REACH literature.
