LRWA ChemReg – Have you notified Poison Centres to get your UFI extension?

The deadline for submitting your product information to benefit from the transitional period until 2025 is January 2020.

Background
As you should be aware, due to changes in regulation, there are some essential changes coming to the packaging of products containing hazardous properties. All packaging must contain a UFI number, a 16-character code which will be used by poison centres for emergency health response purposes in the case of incidents involving the product.

Your company will be obligated to have created and notified poison centres of the UFI number and other product information by the following deadlines:

  • 1 January 2021 for products intended for consumer use (this has been postponed from the original January 2020 date)
  • 1 January 2021 for products intended for professional use
  • 1 January 2024 for products intended for industrial use only

Products already on the market can benefit from a transitional period, until 1 January 2025, if you register your product data and Safety Data Sheets (SDS) with the applicable poison centre for each EU member state your product is sold into.

Although the first compliance date for products intended for consumer use has been postponed to 2021, the current advice is to still register your product data to the member state poison centres.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO NOW:
Register products to benefit from the transitional period!
You can benefit from the extended transitional period by registering your product data and SDS now with the applicable poison centre for each EU member state your product is sold into. You have until 1st January 2020 to submit this data; otherwise you will have to abide by the above deadlines.

For the UK, the appointed body is National Poisons Information Service (NPIS): http://www.npis.org/. This just involves simply sending over your branded SDSs to sds@npis.org. The list of poison centres for other EU member state can be found here: https://poisoncentres.echa.europa.eu/appointed-bodies

This will give you an extended period for the generation of your UFI codes, submission of a Poison Centre Notification (PCN) to ECHA , and the printing of appropriate product labels. These will need to be carefully planned into schedules – this is why we highly recommend submitting this data and benefiting from the extended transitional period.

If you place our product on the market as your own branded product, we highly recommend you register your product now. This means you will have until 1 January 2025 to transition.