As the second phase of REACH, with a deadline of 31 May 2018, gears up, the agency charged with administering the EU chemicals legislation, ECHA (Helsinki / Finland; http://echa.europa.eu), is offering a "Substance Information Exchange Forum" (SIEF). The platform on the agency’s website is designed to help companies navigate this final hurdle in the registration requirements, which concerns those manufacturing or importing chemical substances in volumes of 1-100 t.

The first step, ECHA says, is to identify which companies are handling the same substance. This information will be put into a database, from which all can draw. After registering on SIEF, the next step is for participants to contact other listed registrants to confirm that the substance is the same. Those that have pre-registered the same substance can find each other's contact information in ECHA’s IT tool REACH-IT. If a substance is not registered, the pre-registrants will need to do the groundwork themselves. Step-by-step instructions on how to find other SIEF members have been made available on the website.

In January 2015, ECHA published its "REACH 2018 Roadmap" – see Plasteurope.com of 19.01.2015 – which splits registration into seven phases and describes the milestones of each phase and support activities the agency plans to give to the registrants. A webinar on the second phase of the Roadmap, aimed at offering participants a basic understanding of how to retrieve pre-registrations in REACH-IT and how to check if a substance has already been registered, was held on 18 November.