The Act on the Registration and Evaluation of Chemicals in South Korea, known as Korea REACH or K-REACH, came into force on January 1st, 2015. K-REACH focuses on the registration and evaluation of substances. K-REACH closely mirrors REACH and has adopted many of the same concepts including pre-registration, registration, evaluation, authorization and restriction of chemical substances. 

Effective from June 2018, the Korean Ministry of Environment (MoE) will reduce the requirements for registration data for substances currently classed as “non-hazardous” under the UN globally harmonized system (GHS) classification. This comes as a reaction to industry’s complaint that it does not make sense to require the same test data regardless of a substance’s hazardousness. The number of required tests for non-hazardous substances will now be reduced from 47 to 15.

In addition, no tests will be required for chemicals that only appear as temporary intermediate products in annual volumes of under 1,000 tonnes during the manufacture of other products. For intermediates occurring in volumes of 1000 tonnes or over the simplified dossier including 15 tests will be sufficient. Moreover, substances with similar properties will be treated as a single substance. This so-called cluster registration follows examples from the OECD and EU where some metallic compounds have been grouped together.

• Reduced data requirements announced for South Korea’s K-REACH,
  Sunny Lee,
  Chemical Warch 2017.