Shanghai, China, 13-14 Oct 2014

From October 13th to 14th this year in Shanghai, the REACH24H’s fifth annual conference of chemical regulations, known as CRAC 2014, received utter success. The meeting poised to in-depth discussion of global regulatory affairs, mulling over chemical controlling measures sprouting across major economic powerhouses—China, EU, Asia-Pacific, etc., and examining the progress of regulatory licensing and registration mechanism imposed on various industry sectors, such as food, cosmetics and pesticides. As the largest congregation of contemplating regulatory compliance, the CRAC 2014 boasted the variety of its guests—the present encompass decision-makers of multi-nationals, corporate EHS affair supervisors, relevant experts and managing directors of enterprises. The insightful opinions and sensible advice emerged during the two-day assembly blazed a way for affected companies to come up with solutions intuitively when confronting regulatory drawbacks, in order to ensure stability of production and trade while facilitating economic cooperation and development between countries and regions..

CRAC 2014 is hosted by REACH24H, in collaboration with ZIS(Zhejiang Institute of Standardization), ZJTBT (Zhejiang Information Platform of Technical Barriers to Trade) and ChemLinked—the overarching regulatory information platform in Asia-Pacific region. It is created to mainly serve the passage of latest regulatory information and compliance research achievements to participants by enabling exchanges between officials representing major regulatory regimes around the world and enterprises with a goal to promote their regulatory compliance work. Further indicative of such ramping up of communication is its inherent vision to the realization of establishing fitter market criteria for an array of products—industrial chemical, cosmetic, food, agrochemical, etc., so as to carve out a better environment. CRAC is a REACH24H’s solely-owned brand conference which was once dubbed as “International Chemical Regulation REACH Workshop”. Beginning in 2009, it has since become once-in-year massive gathering hailed by competent authorities and companies worldwide, which enjoys colossal recognition in international chemical regulatory community and industry sectors.

The meeting is a multi-faceted one, which unfolds with two divergent sessions scrutinizing chemical regulations and China’s food and food contact regulations respectively in the first day. Ms. Elina Karhu from ECHA talked about “substance evaluation under REACH & SVHC Roadmap to 2020”, followed by Ms. Lu Ling of China MEP in her presentation of “the implementation of new chemical notification in China and management trends of the regulation” and Ms. Sun Jinye’s interpretation on “MEP Order 22: Progress in the implementation of measures for environmental management registration of hazardous chemicals”. Representative from NRCC also brought the latest progress of hazardous chemical implementation in China, alongside expert from Korea Chemicals Management Association (KCMA), whose opinions largely illuminated companies in dealing with K-REACH.

The food session breathed a strong air of pragmatism with experts from entry-exist inspection & quarantine bureau, China national center for food safety risk assessment and inspection team of local food and drug administration explained in a most figurative and lucid manner a heap of headlines, including GB-compliant testing for importing food samples, importing food labeling (including dairy) and case studies on violation of relevant laws and regulations, with sufficient interpretations on mythology and solid practical solutions. It also marked as tremendous opportunity of delivering the academic and research outcomes from high-ranking institutes and organizations, delineating issues concerning regulation of new ingredient in food, food contact regulation, China’s regulation on health-care good and GM food regulation.

Regulations of agrochemicals and biocide featured the second day meeting with topics allocated specifically to article compliance issues under EU REACH and BPR, cosmetic regulation compliance at a time when the long-awaited “REACH24H Chemical Regulatory Annual Symposium 2014–“The Supreme Gathering for Regulatory Experts in China” was due to take place, then REACH24H’s global regulatory affair director, to enhance companies’ compliance capability while improving chemical regulations in China, so as to contribute to regulatory development in a sustainable manner. Three European experts, Mr. Joost Casper Van Galen from “Ctgb” of the Netherlands, Mr. Pierre Choraine and Liu Qintao PhD in turn pondered over the “Active Substance Approval and Product Authorization under BPR”, “The New Biocidal Products Regulation Overview of the main principles and provisions”, and the “Cosmetics Safety Assessment Methodology and Safety Assessors in EU”.

A consensus is achieved after CRAC 2014 that the conference provides unique communication and networking platform for government agencies, industry associations and representatives from home and abroad, while helping distribute regulatory information to all the relevant parties within this highly volatile regulatory environment by setting up dialogue between stakeholders and competent authorities, a direct and immediate approach to enhance awareness of regulatory compliance, which is growing to become an indispensable element to take into account should any tangible prospect to be envisioned by a player in modern industry communities.