Seoul to categorize chemical substances for flexible application

[Photo by Lee Chung-woo]

The South Korean government will study revisions for the country’s strict chemical substance treatment and management laws in response to growing calls from the chemical industry for flexibility.

Given that the Ministry of Environment’s ultimate goal is to protect people and to preserve the environment, it will go all out to make changes in any outdated regulations for the sake of the country’s science and technology development, said Minister Han Wha-jin at the MKGC forum on Thursday.

Han hinted that the government is seeking to revise the “Act on the Registration and Evaluation of Chemical Substances” and the “Chemical Substances Control Act” to apply different regulations on various chemical substances’ use and management based on three toxicity categories.

The two laws were first enacted in 2015 after humidifier disinfectant-linked deaths in Korea. The regulations required chemical substances to be evaluated, registered, and managed before being imported.

The rules were uniformly applied regardless of toxicity categories of different chemical substances and their different hazardous impacts to humans and environment.

Since the one-size-fits-all regulations went into effect in October 2020, there have been numerous on-site crackdowns and penalties, meeting strong opposition from companies in the industry.

The Ministry of Environment is seeking to classify chemical substances into three types of toxicity - acute toxicity, chronic toxicity, and environmental toxicity – and to make regulations specific to each type.

“As the European Union (EU) legislation assigns hazardous chemicals into toxicity classes, we expect that domestic laws will soon do the same,” said an official from Korea Enterprises Federation.

[ㄏ Maeil Business Newspaper & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]