Brussels, 20 January 2016. European Chemical Employers Group (ECEG) and industriAll European Trade Union welcome the launch of the infocards. This innovative method ensures easier access to the information about everyday chemicals on three layers of complexity: the simple infocard, the more detailed brief profile and the full source data.

Social partners share ECHA’s Executive Director Geert Dancet’s view that ECHA is moving from collecting information to making much better use of it for the general public as well as for regulators throughout the world. Moreover, we fully agree that the current launch is an important step towards safer chemicals by 2020 and a great contribution from the EU to the goals of the United Nations' World Summit on Sustainable Development set in 2002.

1/The infocard gives a summary of the key information on a chemical substance in plain English. Users can read about the chemicals they are exposed to, where they are commonly used, whether they are hazardous and the precautions that they might need to take.

2 /The brief profile goes deeper into the environmental, human health and physico-chemical properties of the chemical. It provides a user-friendly overview of the information collected for each substance under the different chemical regulations. This will be most useful for employers, workers, academics and regulators.

3/The source data, includes the raw data submitted by companies to ECHA in REACH registration dossiers and notifications to the classification and labelling inventory.

This three-level approach improves the transparency and traceability of data on chemicals. ECHA is not reducing the amount of information, adding or approving the collected data but making it much more accessible.