European Federation of Concrete Admixtures Associations AISBL
EFCA
To act as the official representative of the European concrete admixture industry when approaching authorities, institutions or other competent bodies at European and international level.
ID: 200215413337-34
Lobbying Activity
Response to Amending Regulation (EC) No 1272/2008 relating to emergency health response
13 Aug 2019
According the new Annex VIII (Regulation EU 2017/542), all the mixtures which are classified as hazardous based on their health or physical effects, fall under the submission requirement. Concrete admixtures fall under these requirements.
The Workability study promoted by the Commission evaluates several important issues raised by industry that would affect compliance.
These issues have been consistently identified across different sectors demonstrating in some cases the impossibility to ensure legal compliance.
For construction admixtures, one of the major workability issues is the small incremental changes made to product formulations. These changes would not have any impact on products’ health or physical effects, therefore rather than making a high number of individual poison centre notification every time these small changes are made to products, the industry would prefer to use a General Product Identifier solution.
Also the concrete admixtures producers would like to use Generic UFI numbers for interchangeable raw materials. The criteria for interchangeable raw materials can be defined as discussed with the consultants at the last workshop organised by EU commission in February 2019. This can result in the reduction of number of UFIs generated for high number of finished products, subsequently it can reduce the administrative burden and associated cost implications that the construction industry overall, may struggle to handle.
For these reasons, the postponement of the deadline for the application for the harmonised reporting to Poison Centres to 1st January 2021, is welcome and essential to solve practical issues to insure a smooth implementation.
Even with the postponement of one year of the deadline to apply the Annex VIII provisions, there is still a significant amount of work ahead.
The European Federation of Concrete Admixtures have participated in various meetings and the workshops, representing the construction industry and will continue to support the further development of Annex VIII, working together with all the construction industries involved, to arrive at workable solutions for the identified challenges.
EFCA is the European Federation of Concrete Admixtures Associations. EFCA is a partnership of 12 National Admixture Associations, representing the voice of the European admixture producers – EFCA’s total membership provides in excess of 80% of admixture sales within Europe and represents all the major admixture manufacturers.
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