Asia’s age of regulation

By May next year, the European Chemicals Agency (Echa) will have collected data on 25,000 substances under the Reach (registration, evaluation, authorization and restriction of chemicals) programme. That data will become ‘the most comprehensive chemicals database in the world’. The agency will then begin the arduous process of assessing each substance. It’s an impressive achievement, but it’s taken 10 years to get here. Other jurisdictions are only just beginning similar processes, particularly in Asia, where each country has a different regulatory regime, language, priority and each is at a different stage of implementation