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Vienna.....for romantic souls the city of the endless waltzes floating on the tones of the music created by Johann Strauss Jr. For die hard ecotoxicologists, however, Strauss may be quicker linked to the  waterflea Daphnia magna Strauss and its role in assessing risks from biocidal products :-). Whatever, the emotions the word Strauss may evoke, Vienna provided a splendid scenery for hosting the 14th international conference on biocides. 

 

The main points to be noted from this conference are the following:

  • The deadline of the review process of active substances has been postponed to 2025.
  • The Biocidal Products Regulation will probably take effect in September 2013. Until that day the BPD remains in force and there will not be any transitional arrangements.
  • Annex I of the BPR will not be taken over from the BPD. It will contain a list of “harmless substances”. For products containing these actives there will be a simplified authorization procedure, provided that they also meet the criteria for low risk biocidal products (Article 17 of COM(2009)0267).
  • The list of approved active substances will remain, but it will not be presented as an Annex to the legislation.
  • PT (product type) 20 has been eliminated so there will be only 22 PTs. The old PT23 will become PT20.
  • There was a lot of interest from industry in the requirements for Biocidal Product Families. Apparently the criteria are not so flexible as industry would have hoped. This will probably be a major topic on the next conference.
  • A new version of the R4BP (online register for biocidal products) will become available in Q1 2012. It is the intention to include a possibility for uploading documents into this system and in the future the IUCLID format should be used although the platform, which will be established by ECHA, is not yet available.
  • An interesting tidbit is that the total number of biocidal products in Europe is estimated at 55,000.

Not only have we learned much about the current status of the review process of active substances and products and the BPR, we can also be proud to have added a new word to our vocabulary: triologue (or should it be trialogue?). From a search on the internet we can find that the word "trialogue" derives from term "dialogue," which comes from the two Greek words dia (across) and logos (word), and literally means "words across." Just as di-a-logos means "words between two persons," tri-a-logos means "words among three persons. In the biocides world it is used for describing the discussions between the European Commission, the Parliament and Industry. 

 

For more information on our services on Biocidal Product Registration contact hilde.dosogne@arche-consulting.be

Keep track of our latest news

  • New Soil PNEC calculator is available!

    A new updated version of the soil PNEC calculator is available for download on our website. Apart from a new layout, this new version now also includes data for Co and Mo. All calculations are now based on the data and methods selected for the EU REACH dossiers (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals; Regulation EC No 1907/2006) for Cu, Ni, Zn, Pb, Cd, Mo and Co, as available in August 2012."

     

    UPDATED SOIL PNEC CALCULATOR

  • From Soil screening values to Metal Clean-up values

    Dr. Koen Oorts (ARCHE) is invited by the North American Metals Council (NAMC) to actively participate in a workshop on "Ecological Soil Levels-Next Steps in the Development of Metal Clean-up Values"  scheduled for September 17-20, 2012 in Utah. The workshop's main goal is to provide regulators with the methods and processes developed over the last ten years to move from soil screening values to clean-up values.

  • SPERC tool for metals is updated!

    The first version of the metal SPERCs was published in 2010 for the purpose of the 2010 REACH registration deadline and underwent a review process conducted by Lüskow et al. (2011) on behalf of the Federal Environment Agency of Germany (UBA). The second version of the metal SPERCs were improved based on the recommendations by Lüskow et al. (2011) and Tolls et al. (in press) and were further updated with new data for the purpose of the 2013 REACH registration deadline.  This second version is currently undergoing a scientific review process but can already been find on this website.

     

    UPDATED SPERC TOOL

  • Our QSARCHE model is released

    Vertebrate testing under REACH is discouraged by promoting use of alternative non-testing approaches such as QSARs (Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships). Many QSARs are available, however, robust REACH compliant QSARs predicting chronic ecotoxicity to fish are largely lacking. ARCHE filled this data gap by the release of its QSARCHE fish toxicity model. Click to the right to read on.

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