Controlled Chemical families and Generic statements
Ensuring chemical compliance for industrial chemicals is important for the safety, health, and environmental protection of workers, consumers, and the general public. It is also intrinsically essential to mitigate the risk factors associated with non-compliance, including regulatory repercussions, fines, and so on. Various parties are involved in this process, including manufacturers, importers, distributors, end-users, regulatory authorities, third-party auditors and consultants, and industry associations. Each of these stakeholders plays a role in ensuring the safe and responsible use, handling, and disposal of industrial chemicals, ultimately contributing to the protection of human health and the environment.
Barriers to Compliance
Companies face several challenges in ensuring compliance with international chemical regulations, including varying regulations across jurisdictions, frequent updates and changes to those regulations, the complexity of chemical substances, supply chain transparency, and the fact that they often suffer from limited resources.
Is your chemical regulated? It is deceptively simple question to answer, given the sheer scope of regulations within a single jurisdiction that you must check. Controlled Drugs and precursors, Strategic Export controls, Chemical Weapons Convention covering Dual Use Chemicals, Ozone Depleting, PIC Rotterdam, REACH SVHC – to name a few. Usually, the lists of chemicals contained in these regulations are just common examples from a wider chemical class.
If shipping internationally, you will need to declare accurate Industrial Chemical HS / CN codes on the shipping paperwork. The Harmonized Tariff System, maintained by the World Customs Organization (WCO), is designed to facilitate the identification of chemicals subject to specific regulations, import/export controls, and tariffs. However, HS codes are not a comprehensive solution for ensuring chemical compliance, as they are primarily designed for customs and trade purposes.
You may also need to consider if the chemical could be considered Dangerous under Dangerous Goods Transport regulations or potentially energetic or explosive when used in chemical reactions and scale up. This information is often easily obtainable for well-characterized bulk chemicals but missing or difficult to obtain for smaller amounts of niche or proprietary chemicals on milligram to gram scale.
The Importance of Software Solutions in Ensuring Chemical Compliance
Software solutions can help overcome the challenges of ensuring compliance with international chemical regulations. Some software solutions provide a crude name lookup solution to a snapshot in time for regulatory, trade and safety information. While this may work for common and well-known chemicals, it tends to fail with more novel and less well-known and proprietary chemicals or when the regulations are updated.
For these, Compliance Hub by Scitegrity can play a crucial role in facilitating trade, safe chemical scale-up and shipping and identifying regulated chemicals. Compliance Hub consists of several modules focusing on different regulatory challenges, such as obtaining HS codes and checking if a chemical is regulated or potentially self-reactive, energetic or explosive.
What is unique about Compliance Hub is that rather than being a database of information scrapped from various sources and lists, it actually understands the wording of chemical regulations and also chemistry. This means that it performs assessments dynamically in real-time against the legislation as it stands right now. It computationally assesses your chemical, even if it is completely novel. No CAS RN, no chemical name, no problem - you still get instant, accurate answers
Overcoming the barriers and limitations to Compliance with Compliance Hub.
At Scitegrity, we understand the challenges companies face when ensuring compliance with international chemical regulations. Founded by former Pfizer, Roche, and GSK drug discovery scientists and data managers, our mission is to make all chemical regulations searchable by chemical structure.
Our solutions are designed to simplify the process of identifying regulated chemicals, dangerous chemicals and HS codes and ensuring compliance with chemical regulations. With worldwide coverage, with the ability to search by chemical or common name, also working on proprietary and novel chemicals. Our cloud-based offerings cater to the needs of various organizations, from SMEs to large enterprises.
By leveraging the power of our compliance hub platform, companies can overcome the barriers to compliance and ensure the safe, responsible use of industrial chemicals. With our software solutions, you can trust that your company is adhering to the highest standards of safety and regulatory compliance in the global chemical industry.
