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On June 14, 2022, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW), the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), and the Ministry of the Environment (MoE) announced to join forces with the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (JNIOSH) and the National Institute of Technology and Evaluation (NITE) to start a new project to regularly collect testing data on chemical hazards from the public every year. The schedule is as below:
June to September 2022: for 46 substances that shall be classified in 2022; and
October to the middle of December 2022: for previously classified substances.
The data includes test reports owned by the submitters and literature review. In addition, SDSs can be submitted alongside as reference materials. The SDS is only for official internal use and will not be made public.
The authorities have been classifying chemicals according to Japan GHS and publishing recommended classifications since 2006. As of 2022, more than 3,000 substances have been classified, of which only some substances are mandatorily subject to GHS-related obligations in Japan.
As planned, 50 to 100 chemical substances will be classified per year. However, the official progress in the collection of chemical hazard information has been slow and the number of chemical substances that cannot be classified due to insufficient data is increasing. To this end, this new project is launched to seek the industry's input for helping the authorities classify chemical substances.
The official will not notify enterprises if their testing data is used for the classification. In addition, when publishing the recommended classification results, the name of enterprises will not be disclosed, and it will only indicate “information provided by enterprises”.
Japan mandates the SDS and labelling requirements for only designated substances through three main laws, i.e., the ISHL, the PRTR law and the PDSCL. Although these laws also encourage companies to provide SDSs and labels for other hazardous substances, such provisions are currently not a legal requirement.
