Generating business value through regulatory compliance | Valmet case study

Tracking your company’s obligations under chemical regulations can be quite complex. In the EU, it is important to know how your duties under REACH overlap with obligations under national laws. If your company has multiple roles in the supply chain, this can be even more complicated. We spoke to Arto Huuskonen and Victoria Larsson from Valmet, a global developer and supplier for the pulp, paper and energy industries, to find out more about the challenges their company faces in collecting reliable data.

Aligning REACH and the single market - The complex regulatory landscape can make it difficult for companies to understand how to follow national legislation and still comply with their obligations under REACH.

There are national duties for managing chemicals in many Member States that overlap with REACH requirements. And substances in articles are regulated by various EU regulations that can often set different concentration limits and even give different ways of calculating concentrations.

“Let’s take food contact materials as an example. Substances are regulated under REACH across the EU, but there are also EU-wide regulations on plastics that affect plastic food contact materials. There are, however, no EU-wide regulations for food contact materials made of paper. Some Member States have created national legislation for these, but this differs in each Member State. It quickly becomes difficult to know which regulation to follow in all situations,” says Mr Arto Huuskonen, the health, safety and environment (HSE) manager for the automation business line at Valmet. “There needs to be an alignment between the single market and REACH, so any national regulations overlapping with REACH should be removed to secure the single market’s functioning,” he says.

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