About hazard and risk assessment: Regulatory approaches in assessing safety in the European Union chemicals legislation

Hazard classification and labelling is the main and basic requirement for all industrial and consumer chemicals in the European Union, if they are not regulated under more specific legislation such as drugs, food ingredients or cosmetics. The first approach in hazard classification is hazard identification describing the hazardous properties of chemicals. Refinements in the classification criteria include the assessment of toxic potency (hazard characterisation) where feasible and the possibility to set higher or lower specific concentration limits for classification. In the past only a minor portion of the classified chemicals underwent a risk assessment including exposure assessment and risk characterisation. Risk assessment will become more frequent with the implementation of REACH. However, as risk assessment is rather labour-intensive even under REACH risk assessment will be performed in a targeted approach for a selected number of chemical substances while hazard classification and labelling will remain the basic approach for all chemicals.