High Production Volume Chemicals in the IUCLID Database: the Results of 3 Years of Data Collection for the EU Risk Assessment Programme.

In persuance of a EU regulation on existing chemicals, the European Commission is collecting data on high production volume chemicals as support to risk assessment. The producer and importers of chemical substances are by law obliged to supply data on all chemical substances produced or imported in quantities higher than 10 tonnes a year. The data are submitted in a pre-defined format on floppy disks, and loaded into a central databank at the European Chemicals Bureau, a unit of the Commission's Joint Research Centre. The second phase of data collection ended in June 1992, and the processing of the major part of the collected data has been finished. The paper outlines the organisation of the data collection and of the data distribution from the central databank to the National Authorities, as well as the availability of the non-confidential parts of the data to other interested parties. The paper further discusses in some details the composition of the data actually present in the database, and finally addresses the use of these data for priority setting and risk assessment.JRC.(EI)-Environment Institut