New tool available: chemicals inventory
A chemicals inventory is the crucial tool to any corporate chemicals risk management. It provides a structure for organising and updating data on chemicals. It should allow searches for specific information, such as which input materials contain SVHCs or in what products an input material is finally used in. It could support communication to customers on SVHCs or guide decision making on chemicals risk management priorities.
To support companies in their chemicals risks management, in particular smaller ones that use a limited number of chemicals, the LIFE FitforREACH-2 project published a free MS Access®-based inventory tool. It provides several functionalities that extend beyond what a simple MS Excel® file can offer. It is recommended for companies that
- do not have an IT solution for organising their chemicals data or
- experience that their current chemicals data management is not sufficient and/or does not fulfil all needs and
- do not want to invest into sophisticated IT programmes.
The inventory tool allows inputting data on purchased chemicals as well as the products a company produces, i.e. mixtures or articles.
Using a set of defined “reports” it is possible to extract information for different purposes from the inventory, such as lists of
- all input materials containing SVHCs,
- articles produced by a company that contain a particular hazardous chemical
- all chemicals with outdated SDSs
- chemicals and related data that should be reported to the national authorities.
The current version is a beta version that will be improved according to feedback received from users. Amongst others, an option will be created to import data into the inventory (March 26) and additional options to analyse and extract data with the aim of analysing progress in chemicals risk management.
The inventory can be operated with a free version of MS Access® (c.f. guidance) and it is available in 6 languages: English, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and German.
