CONCAWE has long recognised the value of disseminating the information needed to enable the safe use of petroleum products. To this end CONCAWE has issued a series of product dossiers(available on this website) summarising the physical and chemical properties and toxicological, health, safety and environmental information for petroleum substances. These dossiers have become reference documents in the industry.

For many years CONCAWE has also provided recommendations for the health and environmental classification and labelling of petroleum substances in accordance with existing legislation. These recommendations are published as CONCAWE reports and updated as new information becomes available or the legislation is amended or changed.

One of the key areas of CONCAWE’s traditional activities is to monitor developments in the area of chemicals legislation that affect the CONCAWE inventory of petroleum substances. These include, among others, the Dangerous Substances Directive, the Dangerous Preparations Directive and the Existing Substances Regulation. With the entry into force on 1 June 2007 of the Regulation concerning the Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals (REACH) and the Commission’s proposal for a Regulation to implement the Globally Harmonised System of Classification & Labelling (GHS) in the EU, the framework of EU chemical legislation is in the midst of significant change.

The REACH Regulation will radically transform the responsibilities of industry and of the authorities for the control of chemicals in the years ahead. In particular, the responsibility for undertaking the health and environmental hazard and risk assessment on substances will shift from the authorities to industry. Recognizing the challenges that lie ahead, CONCAWE has taken the voluntary initiative to undertake a programme of risk assessment of petroleum substances, including development of risk assessment methodologies. These risk assessments will form the basis for the preparation of the registration dossiers that will be required under REACH (additional information on REACH may be found on the Commission’s website).

It is foreseen that the registration dossiers will also be offered via licensing agreements to non-members or importers who will also face the obligation to register petroleum substances under REACH. Lastly, a REACH Helpdesk has been created on our website and may be used to contact CONCAWE for REACH related issues regarding petroleum substances.

The EU Regulation on classification, labelling and packaging of substances and mixtures, known as CLP, came into force on 20 January 2009 and aligns previous EU legislation on classification, labelling and packaging of chemicals to the GHS (Globally Harmonised System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals).

The work done by CONCAWE on risk assessments of petroleum substances, in conjunction with the existing CONCAWE classification and labelling reports, will form the basis for the necessary re-classification of petroleum substances under GHS.

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