ECHA Releases Chesar 3.9 Update to Improve Chemical Safety Assessments

The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has released Chesar 3.9, the latest version of its chemical safety assessment and reporting tool. This update brings several enhancements to streamline chemical safety assessments for companies complying with REACH.

Improved Compatibility and Functionality

Chesar 3.9 is now fully compatible with IUCLID 6.8 (version 8.0.2 and up), ensuring seamless data integration and consistency across platforms. The main updates include changes to the picklists in Box 2 at the use level, such as the list of technical functions and options for "Physical form of the used product" and "Place of use." These changes are intended to align with the new IUCLID version and improve the user experience without affecting existing assessments.

Bug Fixes and Enhancements

The update addresses several issues from previous versions. In particular, it corrects the generation of the ESCom XML to ensure correct mapping to standard phrases for the unit h/day, and fixes the numbering of uses when exporting to IUCLID. In addition, a new functionality has been introduced to "Export all substances" from Chesar 3, which creates a .zip file with all substances in .chr3 format, together with a text document specifying the export status of each substance.

Known Issues

Despite these improvements, some issues remain in Chesar 3.9. Special characters may occasionally appear in free text fields due to increased security measures. Other known issues include incorrect LEV being values displayed under certain conditions for both simple and complex substances, and various SWED-related issues, such as formatting problems in exported reports and irrelevant warning messages.

Best Practices for Using Chesar 3.9

ECHA provides several suggestions to optimise the use of Chesar 3.9. Users are advised not to set their browsers to remember passwords to avoid connection problems. If the user interface is displayed incorrectly, clearing the browser history may solve the problem. ECHA recommends running Chesar 3.9 with IUCLID 6.8 for best results. For more details on compatibility and troubleshooting, users can refer to the FAQ section on the ECHA website here.

For more information on the new features and to download Chesar 3.9, please visit the official ECHA Chesar page.