Assessing the human health and environmental safety of polymers

Why

Polymers pose technical/scientific challenges for risk assessment.​ Polymers are versatile and complex, and generally not present as mono-constituent substances, but as complex polymer products consisting of the polymeric substance (polymeric macromolecules), intentionally added substances (IAS; e.g.stabilisers) and non-intentionally added substances (NIAS; e.g. impurities).

Conventional risk assessment approaches may not apply to the majority of polymers.

Objectives

• Considering existing risk assessment approaches (e.g. food safety regulation, EU Technical Guidance Document/REACH Guidance, international polymer assessment frameworks), develop a conceptual framework for human health and environmental safety assessment of polymers
• Liaise with stakeholders and contribute to relevant initiatives.

Timeline and Deliverables

Work started in September 2023 and the Task Force published the following Technical Reports from 2019 – 2021 ((complete reports are available for download from the column on the right)):

• TR 133-1 in May 2019 (Conceptual Framework for Polymer Risk Assessment (CF4Polymers))
• TR 133-2 in March 2020 (Applicability of analytical tools, test methods and models)
• TR 133-3 in September 2021 (Case-studies putting the CF4Polymers into practice)​

The Task Force actively contributed during 2020 - 2022 to the CARACAL subgroup (CASG) on Polymers.

A manuscript on a Three-tiered approach for standard information requirements for polymers requiring registration under REACH (Otte JC and Hollnagel HM et al., 2023) was published in October 2023.