I learned that his company specialized in dealing with substitution and chemicals management, and as soon as new substances were added to the SIN List the company saw a huge influx of new business requests in the form of concerned downstream users looking to get rid of the said chemicals.
“We have named 94 percent of the chemicals on the Candidate List well before the authorities did so”
This consultancy is just one example of the trickle-down effect the SIN List has created all over the globe.
It all started almost ten years ago, before there were any substances on the official Candidate List, when ChemSec was approached by a number of large, progressive corporations who wanted to know which chemicals we thought REACH would encompass. Soon we launched the first version of the SIN List as an answer to that question. So far, I think we have done a pretty fine job in predicting which chemicals would end up on the EU Candidate List – we have named 94 percent of the chemicals on the Candidate List well before the authorities did so.
Today the SIN List has evolved into one of the world’s most widely known chemical standards, with endorsements from authorities, UNEP, scientists, NGOs and several of the world’s largest corporations. All in all it has well over 13,000 unique users every year – a number I think is quite high if you consider what it offers. I mean, let’s be honest here, it’s not exactly Friday entertainment or a Netflix movie night we are offering, it’s a database of chemicals. Looking at the user data we can actually see it is stone dead during weekends and this tells me two things:
- The list is being used by professionals in their line of work and,
- Fortunately, people have more exciting things to do in their free time than to browse through CAS numbers of toxic chemicals.
In the coming years we will double down and increase the usefulness of the list even more. New features, updated design, new problematic chemicals and custom APIs (a solution that lets users “hook up” to the SIN List and feed the data straight into their own IT systems – a feature that large retailers have already started asking for) are just a few examples of what we are planning.
“The elephant in the room is of course the blatant lobbying from parts of industry that plagues every political process in the chemical world”
But it hasn’t been all roses and rainbows. The SIN List has received its fair share of criticism. A couple of years ago a chemical producer repeatedly threatened to sue us if we didn’t remove a certain chemical from the list. Another company flew in to Sweden with a five-man team from the US, two of which were lawyers, to have us remove a substance that created unwanted attention for them, as it is present in one of their flagship products.
ChemSec has great confidence in the foundation of the SIN List and its transparent methodology. That’s why we welcome all forms of criticism and feedback on the list. The latest entity to scrutinize the SIN List is the European Chemicals Agency, ECHA.
In a recent analysis, the chemical agency states that the majority of the substances on the SIN List “are regulated or under scrutiny”. But since the SIN List contains 912 chemicals, which ChemSec has identified as Substances of Very High Concern (SVHCs), and the Candidate List only contains 174, it naturally prompts people to ask why there is such a big difference.
Let’s start by looking at the biggest chunk of SIN List chemicals, almost half of all substances, that the ECHA considers to be of low priority for regulatory action: the non-registered ones.
Even if these chemicals are not produced in the EU they are still of importance as they can enter the EU in imported articles. It’s understandable to overlook them from a prioritization perspective, but it is misleading to conclude that a majority of the SIN List chemicals are under scrutiny when so many non-registered chemicals have been excluded from the total tally.
