Australia consults on Draft Evaluation Statements for 187 industrial chemicals

On 12 October 2022 the Australian Industrial Chemicals Introduction Scheme (AICIS) opened consultation on 18 draft evaluation statements covering 187 industrial chemicals. Industry has until 7 December to comment. This type of consultations has been held by the AICIS on two prior occasions, first in October 2021 (1387 substances) and then in May 2022 (157 substances).

The evaluations are a part of Australia’s evaluation roadmap for 2024 and beyond, published in September 2021 and the accompanying rolling action plan for prioritizing chemicals for evaluation. Both were implemented to accelerate the risk assessment process for industrial chemicals that can be used in the country. The aim of the evaluation roadmap is to evaluate at least 20 % of the chemicals on the Australian Inventory of Industrial Chemicals (AIIC) for which a current risk assessment is not available by 30 June 2024. This would be approximately 4200 chemicals.

Under Australia’s Industrial Chemicals Act 2019, any chemical that meets the definition of an industrial chemical (or class of industrial chemicals) may be subject to evaluation. Evaluations can cover a single chemical, a class or group of chemicals, a specific use, a specific hazard, a specific exposure, or specific circumstances of a chemical introduction.

The list of draft evaluation statements provides an overview of the evaluations including the proposed outcomes for each chemical. The substances in list cover a wide range of substances from 15 aluminium salts used in deodorants (human health risk assessment) to two aromatic hydrocarbons, pentachlorobenzene (PeCB) and hexachlorobenzene (HBC), that are known persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and that have been banned globally by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in 2009. The draft evaluation statements for these 2 compounds suggest that they should be removed from the AIIC and thereby banned from manufacture and import in Australia.