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On November 25 and 26, 2021, the Chemical Safety Civil Partnership Network (CSN) and REACH24H co-hosted an online forum on chemical management, in which experts were invited to analyze the legislation of the Law on Safety of Hazardous Chemicals (hereinafter referred to as the law), as well as what can be done by NGOs and enterprises to promote its enforcement.
The drafting of the law was initialized in the wake of the 2015 Tianjin blasts, the first draft of which was published earlier in September 2017, and then accelerated in June 2019, following the 2019 Xiangshui chemical plant explosion. The second draft was released to a limited range of entities (including emergency management administrations at various levels, relevant departments of the State, some central enterprises and industry associations, etc.) for an internal consultation from January to May, 2020 (ChemLinekd news). On October 2nd, 2020, the Chinese Ministry of Emergency Management (MEM) published the revised draft law to solicit public comments and suggestions (ChemLinked news). In February, 2021, the draft Law, a legislation poised to regulate China's hazardous chemicals in place of Decree 591, was submitted for deliberation at the executive meeting of the Ministry of Emergency Management (MEM). The official version of the law is currently waiting to be released.
With a focus on clearly dividing responsibilities and guarding against safety risks at the source, the draft Law will definitely wield a tremendous influence over the chemical sector. However, in practice, the law often fails to provide for all issues in the chemical industry. The reasons behind this can be best explained from the following three aspects, as shared by Icey Nan, Regulatory Consultant from REACH24H, and Ding XiaoYang, Director of Health, Safety and Environment, Novartis Asia.
Ambiguous scope of regulation
In the storage of hazardous chemicals, it is not clear whether the chemicals listed in the Catalogue of Hazardous Chemicals (hereinafter referred to as the Catalogue) or the chemicals conforming to the principles in the Catalogue shall be regulated under the law. Besides, the different requirements for transporting dangerous goods and hazardous chemicals and the regulatory scope for importing non-dangerous goods that are hazardous chemicals are not clarified.
Untimely information transfer
Enterprises or consumers often do not have access to information of hazardous chemicals in the use and storage of them, which hinders the transfer of hazard information. To address the problem, the Guangdong province has piloted the new Hazchem registration online platform from July of 2021. Based on the principle of "one enterprise, one chemical product, and one QR code", the new platform allows manufacturers or importers that obliged to complete Hazchem registration to generate QR code online automatically.
The platform is expected to be rolled out nationwide next year. However, the lack of attention from companies may hinder the promotion of the platform. In addition, in China, there is no official website or databasethat publishes and maintainsallchemical regulations and reveals information about the hazards of chemicals. The existing website of China's National Registration Centre for Chemicals (NRCC) is also far from being perfect to meet these needs.
Lack of a joint regulatory mechanism
As the regulation of hazardous chemicals safety involves various authorities, there is regulatory overlap in practice, making the regulatory process cumbersome and intensifying the workload of enterprises. Therefore, inter-ministerial cooperation and information-sharing needs to be strengthened and supervision be conducted jointly.
So, how can NGOs and enterprises participate in promoting the implementation of the law and how can they cooperate with each other to promote the management of hazardous chemicals under the law?
First of all, law enforcement depends on legislation. In the early stage, more engagement with enterprises is recommended on NGOs’ part for collectingopinions on safety management. According to Mr. Ding, there is still much room for improvement in the formulation of the law. He shared his insights, for example, on the name of the law, believing that its naming needs to focus more on "risk" than "safety", as the word "risk" is not only limited to work safety, but also indicates environmental risks.
In order to promote the supervision of law enforcement, NGOs can engage in the discussion with law enforcement departments, including regulatory and registration departments, to build bridges between enterprises and them. The implementation of the law depends on the efforts of local authorities, while many provincial and municipal environmental protection departments do not have full-time officers for chemical management supervision. Shanghai has done a good job in this aspect, so local enforcement can be effectively promoted by learning from Shanghai's experience.
Finally, only by popularizing the law can the implementation of the law be promoted, especially for companies that lack awareness of work safety of hazardous chemicals. There is also a need to improve the public information platform for chemical substances. The law needs to be more refined and the regulatory scope needs to be clearer in order to convey more accurate information to enterprises and guarantee its implementation.
