ECHA Found 35% of Safety Data Sheets Non-Compliant: What EU Chemical Companies Must Do Now

ECHA’s enforcement follows a structured escalation path. First, ECHA conducts a compliance check on your REACH registration dossier. If deficiencies are found, ECHA issues a formal data request requiring you to provide the missing or corrected information within a specified deadline. In 2024, ECHA issued 208 data requests from 313 compliance checks. Companies that fail to respond adequately are referred to their national enforcement authority — which happened to 30% of non-responding companies in 2024. At the national level, enforcement measures range from written recommendations for minor issues to administrative orders, fines, market access restrictions, and in serious cases, product withdrawal from the EU market. Criminal charges have been filed in some cases. The key point: referral to national authorities is not a warning — it is the beginning of formal legal proceedings.

The ECHA REF-11 enforcement project covered 28 EU-EEA countries and examined more than 2,500 safety data sheets in 2023. The 35% non-compliance rate is an aggregate figure across this full geographic scope — not a single-country finding. Inspectors focused specifically on requirements arising from changes in Annex II of REACH (EU Regulation 2020/878), including nanoform information, endocrine-disrupting property data, and alignment with UN-GHS Revisions 6 and 7. The fact that over a third of SDSs failed across such a broad sample — spanning manufacturers, importers, and downstream users in 28 countries — indicates a systemic quality issue in EU SDS documentation, not a localized problem in a few member states.

Under EU Delegated Regulation 2023/707, existing substances already on the EU market must be reclassified against the new hazard class criteria — endocrine disruptors (ED HH and ED ENV), PBT/vPvB, and PMT/vPvM — by November 2026. Existing mixtures must comply by May 2028. For each substance that meets a new classification threshold, every downstream mixture containing that substance must be recalculated. Every affected SDS must be regenerated in every applicable language and market. Every label must be updated with new hazard statements and potentially new GHS pictograms. And every updated document must be redistributed to downstream users with a traceable audit trail. For companies with large portfolios — thousands of products across dozens of markets — the volume of required updates is substantial. A €122M+ coatings manufacturer with 15,000+ products across 50+ countries handles this through mass recalculation on a cloud platform, processing 500,000 data items in 20–25 minutes.

Cloud SDS platforms with mass recalculation capability are purpose-built for the kind of portfolio-wide cascade that PFAS restrictions will trigger. When a PFAS substance is restricted or reclassified, the platform automatically identifies every mixture containing that substance, recalculates the hazard classification for each affected mixture across every applicable GHS jurisdiction (20+ supported), regenerates every SDS in every required language (47 available), regenerates every label, and flags which downstream recipients need updated documents — with automated distribution and a full audit trail. For a company managing thousands of products, this process takes minutes on a cloud platform. Manually, the same cascade — identifying affected mixtures, recalculating each one, regenerating documents in multiple languages, and tracking distribution — is measured in weeks per restriction event. With 10,000+ PFAS substances potentially affected and EU legislation expected in 2027, the mass recalculation infrastructure must be in place before the restriction triggers, not after.

REACH and SDS compliance are directly linked. REACH requires registrants to provide accurate data in their dossiers and supply current, compliant SDSs to downstream users. When ECHA conducts compliance checks — 313 in 2024 alone — the SDS is often the document where non-compliance surfaces. If a substance’s classification has changed but the SDS has not been updated, or if exposure scenarios are missing or incomplete, these gaps appear in ECHA’s review. Additionally, ECHA’s Enforcement Forum found that one-third of substances in imported mixtures failed EU REACH import requirements. For importers, this means customs authorities are increasingly checking whether SDSs for imported products comply with EU requirements. Cloud SDS platforms that centralize compliance data and automate distribution with audit trails ensure that regulatory data is current, complete, and auditable — the three qualities ECHA inspectors verify. See also REACH Restriction 78: what the EU’s microplastics regulation means for your business for another example of how REACH restrictions cascade into SDS obligations.