The main goal is the economical sustainability of the REACH regulation, through a cluster based filing system.
Our project suggests a colorants cluster based registration instead of OSOR (One Substance, One Registration), with the double goal of reducing the costs of the process and to explore the possibility of including inside the clusters, those colorants that would have not required the obligation of registration hence less than 1ton/year, resulting in an unchanged technical/scientific gap.
Prof. Emilio Benfenati, research scientist at the Mario Negri Institute in Milan – who collaborates with us for the technical scientific part of this project – explains how it’s technically developed:
The approach we propose is to identify families of dyes that can be grouped together based on their common characteristics, which should be of significance from the toxicological, ecotoxicological and environmental.It is possible that several families are identified for different endpoints.
Typically, these chemicals are mixtures of analogues, and the ability to identify the properties that are shared on the basis of common characteristics, is not only convenient from the point of view of a common mechanism of action, but also from the point of view of the management of products that contain similar chemicals.
This approach should allow you to take full advantage of all available data level, to fill the gaps of information for analogues, which are still closely related to each other. Specific tests for the assessment of similarity are necessary in this perspective, which of course have been planned. Such controls will also address the definition of the required components that modulate the activity within a family, and also the identification of the most relevant risk factors, to allow an evaluation that is based on the principle of security.