REACH deals with the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemical substances, and entered into force on June 1, 2007. The aim of REACH is to further improve the protection of human health and the environment through the better and earlier identification of certain chemical substances. It is legislation from the European Union, and applies to all suppliers (inside and outside Europe) that want to sell, import or manufacture chemicals and/or products containing certain chemicals in the European Union.
Philips supports the objective of REACH to further improve the European Union’s regulation on chemicals, including the aim to advance public health and safety and to protect the environment. We have requested our chemicals suppliers to (pre)register the chemicals they supply us with, in order to ensure compliance and no interruption of the supply flow. The limited number of chemicals that we produce and import ourselves has been entered into the pre-registration process already. Additionally, we have requested our component or finished products suppliers to provide us information on the relevant chemicals in their supplied products. This enables us to provide our customers and consumers with information about so called substances of very high concern (SVHC) from the candidate SVHC list of the REACH regulation, as required by article 33 of REACH (if those are present in a concentration of more than 0.1% of the weight of a product). From 2010 onwards, we started to use BOMcheck, an industry platform that allows companies to collect chemical composition information from their suppliers in a standardized way. Philips uses BOMcheck primarily as a regulatory compliance tool designed specifically to collect declarations for RoHS, REACH, and any other restricted and declarable substances legislation through detailed substances reports. The substances included in BOMcheck are aligned with our Philips Regulated Substances List. Philips also encourages their suppliers to provide Full Material Declaration (FMD) of their articles through BOMcheck, as this will minimize their maintenance effort. Philips will use FMD data in the future to better anticipate regulatory developments and improve our ecodesign processes. | 