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On September 2nd, 2019, China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) made two notifications to the Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade under World Trade Organization (WTO) of its Measures on the Environmental Management of New Chemical Substances [1](hereafter referred to as the Measures, Notification No. G/TBT/N/CHN/1351 [2]) and the Environmental Risk Assessment and Control Regulation for Chemical Substances [3] (hereafter referred to as the Regulation, Notification No. G/TBT/N/CHN/1350 [4]).
It is noteworthy that the two notification drafts are just notified to the WTO for comments and the final date for comments will be 60 days from notification. According to the WTO notifications, the proposed date of entry into force for these two drafts are yet to be determined.
The notification draft of the Measures on the Environmental Management of New Chemical Substances remains the same with its earlier draft revision published by the MEE on July 9th, 2019 (See CL News [5]and Article[6], the English version of this draft is also available on ChemLinked, please click here [7] to access).
Nevertheless, the notification draft of the Environmental Risk Assessment and Control Regulation for Chemical Substances includes a lot of updates compared to the previous draft revision (See CL News[8] and E-Translation [9]), and entails optimized mechanisms for environmental risk assessment and control of chemical substances in China.
Compared with the draft revision, the notification draft of the Regulation has expanded the application scope, endowed enterprises with more responsibilities, added the contents on CBI, information on reporting and made some updates on the environmental risk assessment and control of existing chemical substances and environmental management registration and environmental risk control of new chemical substances, etc.
In terms of environmental risk assessment and control of existing chemical substances, the notification draft of the Regulation stipulated that Enterprises shall report the names, applications, quantities of chemical substances produced, processed, used and imported in the previous three years to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment under the State Council every three years. The notification draft of the Regulation also contains more contents on the inventory management which is also the core of the environmental risk assessment and control of existing chemical substances. The restricting and prohibiting measures for inventory of chemical substances under strict restraint and inventory of prohibited chemical substances have also been stipulated by the notification draft.
As for the environmental management registration and environmental risk control of new chemical substances, the notification draft of the Regulation has added the details on the simplified registration, regular registration, the change, cancellation and revocation of registration certificate, the management after registration and new usage management, as well as the procedures for listing into the IECSC. Relevant details of the environmental management registration and environmental risk control of new chemical substances can also be found on the draft revision of MEP (now MEE) Order 7.
