New national regulation for industrial chemicals

Key Points:

The Federal Government is proposing a national standard to harmonise environmental risk assessment of industrial chemicals throughout Australia to better protect the environment.

The Australian Department of the Environment has released a discussion paper on a new National Industrial Chemicals Notification and Assessment Scheme (NICNAS). This is a response to the Productivity Commission's research report which "highlighted that management of environmental risks from industrial chemicals across jurisdictions was fragmented and inefficient, and less effective than other chemical risk management regimes".

The scheme provides for a harmonised assessment of industrial chemicals in Australia based on the chemical's level of concern to the environment: "high concern", "moderate hazards" and "low hazard" chemicals. The chemicals will then be further categorised into 1 of 8 schedules based on publicly available criteria and given a number of outcome