At a CARACAL meeting (Competent Authorities for REACH and Classification and Labelling) in March 2009 six EU Member States formed an informal working group with the aim of proposing a pre-scanning method and possible grouping of substances, making it easier for individual Member States to select the most relevant substances for inclusion of Substances of Very High Concern (SVHCs) on the Candidate List.

This group of Member States, including the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, France, Sweden and Denmark, has now agreed on a list of 478 substances, corresponding to 90 percent match with the SIN List.

The SIN List has to a great extent used the same grouping of substances as was used within the CLP regulation. In the CARACAL working group these substance groups have been broken up, thereby increasing the number of entries considerably. Moreover substances without a CAS# and EC# (no possibility of positive identification) as well as pesticides (exempted from REACH) have been removed from the SIN list.

- “This list of SVHC substances, clearly inspired by the SIN List and the SIN List Methodology, demonstrates the real impact of the SIN List”, says Anne-Sofie Andersson, ChemSec Director. “ChemSec and the other organisations behind the SIN List are very pleased to note that the Member States are finally starting to raise the issue of including more substanc­es on the Candidate List”.

-“ We are now only waiting for the Member States to also start adding substances of equivalent concern, such as endocrine disruptors” Jerker Ligthart, ChemSec project coordinator, concludes.