IT must prepare for new manufacturing rules

New legislation will make IT firms wake up to chemical constraints

The IT industry will need to prepare now for environmental legislation that will take effect in June next year and have particular consequences for hardware vendors, and possibly IT buyers.

Reach (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical Substances) introduces broad new environmental and safety standards. All European companies importing or manufacturing over one ton of chemicals per annum will have to register the properties of chemical substances. Failure to register a chemical substance with the newly appointed European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) by December 2008 will prevent businesses from producing or importing the substance. The legislation is likely to affect over 30,000 chemical substances and carries implications for all European companies involved in the manufacturing or importation of goods.

Tim Jessel, commercial director of consulting firm ReachReady, said that it will be mostly “downstream users” affected in the IT industry, and primarily hardware vendors. However, even though a business may not be manufacturing or importing a substance itself, it will need to make sure its suppliers are Reach-compliant, he added.

Aad van Keulen, vice president of regulation and compliance vendor Atrion, said businesses need to find out if Reach will be applicable to them and “to digest the relevant paperwork, seek advice and walk the talk.”

Van Keulen said IT buyers preparing for Reach needed to perform product portfolio analysis, gathering information on “who and from where do I buy what and how is it used”.

Kate Geraghty, principal consultant at green consultancy WSP Environmental, said, “Reach requires manufacturers and importers to investigate the hazards and manage the risks arising from the chemicals they are selling. They will need to decide which chemicals will be supported and which are not.” Early preparation is essential because Reach will have “broad impacts across a business, through research and development to procurement”, she added.

But Martin Hojsik, Greenpeace International toxin campaigner, said he was confident that IT would avoid the logistical and supply-chain issues that were caused by earlier environmental legislation such as RoHS and Weee. “IT will cope well with Reach because of lessons the industry learned by conforming to RoHS (Restriction on Hazardous Substances),” he said.

However, RoHS held implications for just six substances and yet compliance proved difficult.