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South Korea’s Ministry of Environment (MoE) issued draft amendments to the Enforcement Decree of the Act on Registration and Evaluation, etc. of Chemical Substances (hereafter referred to as K-REACH Enforcement Decree) on June 3, 2021 by MoE Notice No.2021-420. The public consultation will end on July 13, 2021.
The revision proposal was made to establish procedures for designation of chemicals subject to authorization, strengthen inter-departmental cooperation for joint enforcement, facilitate hazard information communication between upper and downstream links, impose accumulatively fines on violations, etc.
So far there is no chemical subject to authorization has been designated under K-REACH. The draft proposal specified that the authority will select candidate substances, consult on stakeholders, conduct hazard assessment, and if necessary investigate their current circulation status in advance. Consortium involving manufacture, import and use of such chemicals may be established for soliciting opinions on designation of chemicals subject to authorization and determination of the sunset date.
Another main change is that to confirm whether an enterprise has fulfilled the obligations of registration and notification of chemical substances, the MoE can request data of import, export and return from the Customs. By joint enforcement with the Customs, illegal activities of import and export enterprises will be cracked down.
For provisions about passing down registration number, the draft proposal stipulated that for chemical substances that have finished registration/notification or those only pre-registered and granted with grace period, the assigned registration number, notification number (for new chemical substance below 0.1 t/y), or pre-registration number shall be indicated on the MSDS and passed down to downstream links.
In addition, heavier penalties for violations of K-REACH are introduced according to the recommendations of the Korean National Human Rights Commission on administrative sanctions. The standards for calculating fines will be based on the number of the same violations committed in the last 2 years.
