Partners Ensuring Compliance with Rising QSHE Standards

Partners Ensuring Compliance with Rising QSHE Standards 

As a result of more demanding environmental, health, and safety laws and regulations all over the world, adequate storage, handling, and transport of chemicals will increasingly drive the success of chemical distributors. 

For example, once implemented, the European Commission s new chemicals policy REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals) -endorsed in 2003 - would require manufacturers and importers of over one ton per year of any chemical substance to gather information on the properties, hazards, and use of that substance, and submit the data to the European Chemicals Agency. The Agency would then determine if the chemical substance needed to be further regulated, restricted, or banned from use. It is estimated that about 30,000 existing chemicals produced in or imported into Europe would be subject to REACH. Key objectives of the European Commission s initiative on the reformulation of chemicals policy are to raise human and environmental safety levels as well as to simplify and standardize the current legislation. 

Although chemical distributors are not likely to experience a significant direct impact from REACH, they may indirectly be affected by REACH S impact on the entire chemical industry, such as cost increases, product availability, and restrictions on global trade. 

Distributors could, on the one hand, benefit from opportunities to differentiate themselves as reliable business partners with a strong commitment to these high- 

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