A number of non-governmental organisations (NGO’s) provide lists of chemicals deemed to be toxic to humans/harmful to the environment. These tend to be more wide reaching than lists covered by current legislation/regulations. Despite using similar nomenclature to instruments like REACH, there is no legal obligation to avoid chemicals on these lists, unless of course a particular chemical is also on a regulatory list. Nevertheless, these lists can be useful to identify chemicals which have potential issues, and might be subject to regulation in the future. To some extent they are designed to pressurise legislators into faster and broader application of regulations like REACH.
These NGO lists are often accompanied by useful tools for substitution of harmful chemicals, the ability to search for specific compounds and similarity searches. An example of the above is ChemSec, which produces and maintains the Substitute It Now list – the SIN list, and related tools such as SUBSPORT, the Substitution Support Portal.
