A new European Union Observatory for Nanomaterials (EU-ON) database is set to go live in summer 2017. Its establishment will relieve the cosmetics industry, which had feared earlier proposals to create a mandatory nanomaterials register.
The observatory has been created to give objective safety information on nanomaterials on the EU market, reflecting environmental health concerns over including particles of between 1-100nm in personal care products.
The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), which will host EU-ON at its Helsinki, Finland headquarters, says the main aim is “better access to relevant and understandable” information about nanomaterials for both experts and the general public. The observatory’s creation follows ECHA’s 7 December signature of a delegated authority with the EU’s executive European Commission granting the Helsinki agency additional funding to its normal budget to cover the running costs until 2020.
EU-ON is to be rolled out in three phases, with the first kicking off this summer. In the first phase EU-ON will explain what