PSE has recently been active to ensure Pioneer’s continued compliance with the European REACH regulation. REACH is the regulation of the European Union, which states that all chemicals which are imported into the EU must be registered at the ECHA (The European Chemicals Agency).

The REACH regulation explained

The REACH regulation is not applicable to polymers. Therefore, there is no need to register our polymer products. However, it is applicable to monomers which are the raw materials to our products.

The REACH regulation gives the opportunity for companies the carry out the registration in phases. The first phase is the pre-registration. The second phase is the final registration.

Pre-registrations
Pre-registrations under REACH are easy to carry out online on the ECHA website and do not cost anything. PSE has already carried out many pre-registrations on behalf of Pioneer. When a substance is pre-registered, then that means that substance can be imported into the EU freely until May 2018. Therefore, a pre-registration is only a temporary status (valid until May 2018), which makes it easy for companies to import those substances before they are fully registered without any other obligations.

Full registrations
The deadline for full registrations is May 2018. All substances which are not fully registered may not be imported into the EU after May 2018. Full registration is a time consuming and potentially expensive procedure. The cost of a full registration of one monomer can be between EUR 100.000 – EUR 200.000. In practice, Pioneer will not have to perform any full registration by itself. Each monomer only has to be registered once, and the monomers have already been fully registered by other companies.

So how does a full registration work for Pioneer? For each monomer that Pioneer wants to import to Europe, PSE must contact the company that carried out the original registration, and ask them to join their registration dossier. All the applicants that join the same dossier will share the cost. The cost will of course be much lower if there are 1000 applicants, than if there are only 10 applicants. Therefore, the most popular monomers will probably be the cheapest to register.

PSE activities

Until now PSE has pre-registered all the monomers which are used in Pioneer products. This means that Pioneer is free to import until May 2018. Next, PSE is working to ensure full compliance after May 2018 as well. For each monomer, a strategical decision must be made to either join the registration dossier or not. Each decision will of course depend on the cost and potential benefit. PSE is gathering all this information for each of our monomers and working towards May 2018, and will continue to make certain that Pioneer’s market presence in Europe will grow each year.

August 16, 2017