The SVHC Candidate List has been updated. How to find out which of your products are affected

When the Candidate List is updated, one or more substances are added to it. The only authoritative place to see the current list is the regulator. For the EU that is ECHA, and for Great Britain it is HSE. Start there, note the date of the current version, and work from that. This sits inside the wider documentation burden in the chemical and process industries, and it is one of the most predictable recurring parts of it.

A new listing matters to you if one of your products contains the substance above the relevant threshold. The figure commonly cited for a Substance of Very High Concern in an article is 0.1% by weight, and there are communication duties in the supply chain under REACH Article 33 when that applies. The exact basis, and how it maps onto your specific products, is something to confirm against the regulation text and the relevant authority rather than take from any summary, including this one.

The list is public. The duties are written down. The hard part is entirely internal: knowing which of your own products contain the substance. For most suppliers that answer is not in one place. Composition data sits across an ERP, formulation spreadsheets, and the safety data sheets your own suppliers sent you, some of which are themselves out of date. Answering the question means pulling all of that together, every cycle, under time pressure.

1. 1Get the current list from the source. Download or view the current Candidate List from ECHA and, for Great Britain, from HSE. Note the update date on the day you check. Do not work from a copy someone saved last year.
2. 2Pull your composition data into one place. For every product you supply, you need to know what is in it. That data usually sits across an ERP, formulation spreadsheets and supplier safety data sheets. Getting it into one view is most of the work.
3. 3Match substances by identifier, not by name. Match on the substance identifier (such as the EC or CAS number) rather than the chemical name, because names vary and synonyms hide matches. A name-only search will miss things.
4. 4Check the threshold for each hit. For a substance on the list, work out whether it is present above the relevant threshold in the item you supply. The commonly cited figure for a substance in an article is 0.1% by weight, but confirm the exact basis and how it applies to your product against the source.
5. 5Record the decision and its basis. For each product, write down the conclusion and why, with the data you relied on. That record is what lets you answer a customer or an auditor later without redoing the work.

The reason this hurts is that the answer is rebuilt from scratch each cycle. The fix is to hold your product composition data in one maintained place, mapped to substance identifiers, so that when the list changes you run the match against your data instead of gathering the data first. The gathering is the expensive part, and it is the part you only have to do once if you keep it current.

When a listing does affect a product, it often triggers a safety data sheet revision, so the two jobs are worth connecting rather than running separately.

Since the UK left the EU, Great Britain runs UK REACH with its own Candidate List maintained by HSE, alongside the EU list maintained by ECHA. The two can diverge. If you supply both markets, check both, and do not assume a change in one has happened in the other. The practical consequences of running both regimes are covered in our UK REACH vs EU REACH comparison.

Confirm the current Candidate List and the wording of any duties against the primary authorities before relying on them. This article is practical guidance, not legal advice.

• ECHA — Candidate List of Substances of Very High Concern
• HSE — UK REACH