On Aug 2nd, 2018, Vietnam Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT) announced that the National Chemical Database of Vietnam was officially launched and operational. The database has the following functions:
Support the management of administrative procedures of chemicals;
Deliver the information of chemicals management from MOIT;
Collect and analyze the data for chemicals risk assessment;
Prepare the data for chemical emergency plans;
Share the information of the hazard properties and classifications of the chemicals.
Besides the 5 annex chemicals lists in Decree No.113/2017/ND-CP, the database also includes the Chemical Risk Information Platform (CHRIP) of Japanese National Institute of Technology and Evaluation (NITE). So the total amount of included chemicals in the database is 170,654. This is almost 4 times of the size of China’s Inventory of Existing Chemical Substances (IECSC). There’s no doubt that a very large part of the included chemicals haven’t been imported into or manufactured in Vietnam yet. But MOIT hasn’t issued any rules regarding existing chemicals or new chemicals with the announcement. So it still remains unknown how Vietnam’s authorities would classify these chemicals and regulate the corresponding obligations.
Figure 1. Chemicals list of the database
As Figure 1 shows, the database provides the CAS number, English name, and Vietnamese name of the chemicals and in which list the chemical is included. When the users click into the detailed information, they can also see the hazard properties of the chemical (as Figure 2 shows). And the users can search for their chemicals by some filter settings (as Figure 3 shows).
Figure 2. Hazard properties of formaldehyde
Figure 3. Search filters
