The Proactive Alliance members are jointly striving to reach a cross-sectoral harmonisation of how to report on Substances in Articles along the supply chain at a global level. After two years of working together, the Proactive Alliance formulated a set of recommendations for achieving this goal in a Policy Document. This will eventually result in the following benefits for the stakeholders along the supply chains:

Meeting existing legal requirements for supply chain communication and consumer information, e.g. under

• general product safety and liability,
• the EU REACH Regulation and its Article 33 (1)/(2) as well as Article 7 (2), and
• data transfer to the SCIP database under Article 9 (1)(i);

Meeting contractual obligations towards the customer;

Being prepared to be compliant with legal requirements  and contractual obligations including in the future; e.g.

• EU REACH Regulation Article 59 (10)
• legal requirements resulting from EU Green Deal such as developments enabling a Circular economy. In this respect, SiA communication along the supply chain to end of life actors gains importance and is essential to enable efficient material recycling.  

Enhanced manageability in terms of the aforementioned tasks and challenges;

Reducing the burden on supply chain stakeholders through cross-sector cooperation based on a common understanding, and finally

Saving costs through effective communication systems

As stated in its mission statement, the main outcome of the Proactive Alliance is this policy document with recommendations for the development of a global cross-sector standard for the communication of Substances in Articles (“Article” as defined by the EU REACH regulation). The intention is not to create a new standard but to build on existing standards and, where required, to enhance existing ones where these, e.g. show gaps, with the aim of producing a harmonised global cross-sector approach.

Proactive Alliance will speak at the Chemical Watch Global Business Summit in March 2020 in Amsterdam. PA will provide a pre-publication overview of the draft policy recommendation that will enter an internal review phase starting in April and afterwards will be shared with the public for external review.

Tenth meeting and at the same time third physical meeting of Proactive Alliance took place on 5th November 2019 in Brussels.

• PA took note of the progress reached in its four working groups, reflected on the outcomes and agreed on future steps.
• The PA confirmed that beside the two major aspects relevant for SiA reporting standards, and already covered by WGs (Substance Reporting Lists and material reporting rationales/formats), there is a third aspect (“pillar”) to be addressed adequately: the framework conditions that are relevant with regard to data quality – including accuracy of SiA-data in terms of change of the material composition or new reporting requirements – and data security, verification (auditing) etc. The group aims at defining core requirements in this respect on order to gain the entire set of benefits linked to the cross-sectoral material reporting approach.
• The group refined the timelines (with a view at the CW GBS in Amsterdam, March 2020, and the SAICM conference in Bonn in autumn 2020):

The Proactive Alliance started to reflect its role in creating industry awareness of the implications standardization.

• First drafts for recommendations to harmonize the criteria for creating a Substance Reporting List (SRL) are ready (Working Group 1)
• Draft policy document for internal discussion is planned to be ready by November 2019
• Proactive Alliance Membership: Onboarding documents for new and interested members are ready and soon to be published on website (partly) (Working Group 3)
• The Proactive Alliance starts to reach out to organizations outside of Europe (Working Group 4)
• Proactive Alliance representatives will speak at CW GBS in Amsterdam in March 2020

After the initial meeting at the Chemical Watch Global Business Summit in April 2018 in Amsterdam, sofia organised a series of technical meetings.

• Minutes of the first meeting in May 2018

The Proactive Alliance developed its Mission Statement (charter) outlining the general motivation behind the group and its objectives as well as the commonly agreed Terms of Reference (ToR).

One year after its inception, the group was invited to speak at the Chemical Watch Global Business Summit,  26-27 March 2019 in Brussels. Prof. Dr. Martin Führ (sofia) and Stéphane Content (Cefic) presented the Proactive Alliance and its ambitions as well as highly topical insights into the working progress.

The Proactive Alliance agreed to prepare regular progress reports.