CHESAR, CHEmical Safety Assessment and Reporting tool

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Original link http://chesar.echa.europa.eu/home

Chesar is a tool developed by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) which aims to help companies carry out their Chemical Safety Assessments (CSA) and prepare their Chemical Safety Reports (CSR).

For this purpose the principles relating to chemical safety assessments as described in the “Guidance on Information Requirements and Chemical Safety Assessment” (available on the ECHA website: http://guidance.echa.europa.eu/guidance_en.htm ) have been converted into an IT application.

Chesar provides the structured workflow for carrying out a standard safety assessment for the different uses of a substance. At the same time, the tool is flexible enough to also accommodate assessments in more specific situations. The tool also helps to structure the information needed for the exposure assessment and risk characterisation which will facilitate the generation and updating of a transparent CSR.

Based on these inputs the tool calculates exposure estimates that are compared to the predicted no-effect levels. The purpose of this comparison is to determine whether safe use of a substance can be established. Workers’ exposure estimations provided by Chesar are calculated using the “ECETOC TRA worker” tool (available on http://www.ecetoc.org/tra ). Environmental exposure estimates provided by Chesar are based on the EUSES 2.1 fate model (see below).

Chesar also supports the use of other exposure estimation tools or measured data (has they defined a way to import data exposure?).

Chesar enables re-use of assessments already carried out by the registrant or prepared by industry associations via its data exchange functionality. This functionality supports cross-industry standardisation of the description of uses and of the safe conditions of use.

Technical data:

  • Chesar works as a plug-in to IUCLID 5.2.
  • CHESAR 1.0 does not yet generate a full CSR or the Exposure Scenarios for the extended Safety Data Sheets.
  • Chesar 1.0 is only available for the stand-alone version of IUCLID 5.2.
  • The first upgrade of Chesar including the full CSR generation functionality and the capacity for use with the distributed version of IUCLID 5.2 is planned to be available in July 2010.

EUSES -> European Union System for the Evaluation of Substances.

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