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In mid-March 2021, Australia’s parliament passed the Industrial Chemicals Environmental Management (Register) Bill 2021, part of a package of five bills to establish a national framework to manage the ongoing use, handling and disposal of industrial chemicals in the country.
In conjunction with the Australian Industrial Chemicals Introduction Scheme (AICIS) [2], which was established to regulate the import and manufacture of industrial chemicals in Australia in place of the former National Industrial Chemicals Notification and Assessment Scheme (NICNAS), the Bill is formulated with an aim of further advancing a national approach to industrial chemical management.
Principally, the Bill:
l provides decision-making principles that define characteristics for the categorization of industrial chemicals according to their level of concern to the environment based on their use;
l enables the Commonwealth Minister for the Environment to make scheduling decisions to categorize an industrial chemical and set out applicable control measures;
l establishes a register of scheduling decisions for industrial chemicals;
l establishes the Advisory Committee on the Environmental Management of Industrial Chemicals;
l includes provisions dealing with confidential information, the use and disclosure of protected information and other information sharing matters.
Notably, the register, which is aimed at reducing the regulatory burden for relevant stakeholders, classifies industrial chemicals into seven schedules based on their hazards, as shown in the table below:
The Register will maintain a record of scheduling decisions such as decisions to list a chemical or its industrial use in a Schedule or Schedules, as well as any prohibitions or restrictions, and applicable risk management measures.
