Candidate List
By 2020, as part of the SVHC Roadmap implementation plan, the EU has committed to include all relevant, currently known SVHCs in the Candidate List for authorisation as part of the REACH authorisation process to ban substances and to and to promote substitution. This means that the Candidate List will grow from 161 substances to over a thousand, a development which will greatly impact the business around substances and formulations used to manufacture tape.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled in September 2015 that the 0.1% threshold for notifying SVHCs in articles applies to “each of the articles incorporated as a component of a complex product” rather than to the entire article. Read article
Impact: High
Afera is working through the CheMI Platform (for downstream users of chemicals in manufacturing industries) on interpreting and adopting this ruling in guidance documents, which explain that tapes are complex articles which cannot be compared to other articles that can be divided in smaller parts. Adhesives raw materials suppliers are being recruited to provide their input as it is inevitable that this issue will travel up the adhesive value chain. It is important that adhesives suppliers convey this information to their customer base, tape manufacturers.