REACH Metals Gateway

Sign In

Attention: all documents on the member’s area website are for internal use only

Forgot Your Password?
Your password contains 8 to 20 characters, including at least 1 capital, 1 lowercase and 1 digit.

SPERCs tool for metals

For the environmental exposure assessment under REACH, default worst-case release factors to the environmental compartments water, air and soil are provided by ECHA Guidance documents, enabling first tier emission estimation. Because a wide variety of processes, substances and uses have to be covered, these default release factors often lead to significant over-prediction of releases and hence over-predicted environmental exposure concentrations and risks. In practice, however, unrealistic and worst case predictions do not support a more efficient management of releases and risk.

The Specific Environmental Release Factors (SPERCS) for metals and metal compounds provide a more realistic approach to characterize the environmental releases from manufacture, processing and downstream uses of the metal (compounds) in the EU. A database consisting of more than 1,300 (1993-2010), site-specific measured release factors to air and water of 18 different metals (and their compounds), from various EU Member States was compiled. The metal SPERCs can be used as advanced tier instrument in environmental safety assessments, increasing the realism of the estimates while still keeping a sufficient level of conservatism. The individual SPERC fact sheets can be downloaded from the respective links below. Please always refer to the version number when using SPERCs.

The first version of the metal SPERCs was published in 2010 for the purpose of the 2010 REACH registration deadline and underwent a review process conducted by Lüskow et al. (2011) on behalf of the Federal Environment Agency of Germany (UBA). The second version of the metal SPERCs were improved based on the recommendations by Lüskow et al. (2011) and Sättler et al. (2012) and were further updated with new data for the purpose of the 2013 REACH registration deadline.  This second version underwent again a scientific review process and is published in Verdonck et al (2014).

You can find a document that provides background information to the SPERC factsheets here.

You can find the Eurometaux SPERC report here.

Download CHESAR 3 SPERC files here.

To be kept posted on future updates please email your contact details to Dr. Frederik Verdonck at frederik.verdonck@arche-consulting.be or visit : https://www.arche-consulting.be/tools/spercs-tool-for-metals-2/

The metal SPERCs can be used as advanced tier instrument in environmental safety assessments, increasing the realism of the estimates while still keeping a sufficient level of conservatism. The individual SPERC fact sheets can be downloaded here. Please always refer to the version number when using SPERCs. The background document can be downloaded here.

 

Note that some SPERCs developed by other sector organizations can also be covering metals and metal compounds. For example, A.I.S.E. developed SPERCs for industrial use of metal salts in conversion coating; ECMA developed a SPERC for manufacture of metal-containing catalysts.

Last page update: 25 November 2019