GHS in Korea

                                                                                         

Unfortunately GHS regulations in the Republic of Korea are not straight-forward, as there are three major agencies involved, with two major and several minor pieces of legislation to comply with. Unfortunately the two major pieces give different dates for full GHS implementation.

December 2006 the Ministry of Labor published Public Notice No 2006-36 implementing GHS and giving June 30, 2008 as the date for full compliance. Full details were given in early 2008 in Public Notice No 2008-01 which published the Standard of Classification, Labeling and MSDS of Chemicals. Later in the year two public notices were published changing the implementation dates. The final of the two, Public Notice 2008-29 amended the dates for full compliance to be June 30, 2010 for pure substances and June 30, 2013 for mixtures (which had been June 30, 2015 in the first of the two notices). Those dates for compliance have not changed and stand at June 30, 2010 for pure substances and June 30, 2013 for mixtures.

A second piece of legislation was released around the same time as Public Notice 2008-29. This Toxic Chemicals Control Act through the Ministry of Environment gives compliance dates of June 30, 2011 (not 2010) for pure substances and June 30, 2013 for mixtures. To add to the confusion, the two regulations as published did not use identical GHS building blocks. For instance, the standard through the Ministry of Labor only recognizes category 1 flammable gases, whereas the standard through the Ministry of the Environment recognizes both category 1 and category 2 flammable gases.

Both the Ministry of Labor and Ministry of Environment standards discuss GHS labeling, whereas the authoring of Safety Data Sheets is covered under Article 41 of the Ministry of Labor’s Industrial Health and Safety Act.

Overall this has created a confusing scenario where companies operating in South Korea must deal with conflicting regulations and multiple government agencies.

In order to comply with these regulations, companies must familiarize themselves with both the UN’s purple book and the major pieces of legislation. Then they must begin the work of classifying their products in accordance with the various regulations, which can be quite time intensive for companies with thousands or tens of thousands of products.

The major initiative the Korean government has had in assisting companies has been to extend the deadline for full compliance from 2008 to 2013 for companies with mixtures, in recognition of what a time consuming project this will be for many companies.

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