Registration, Evaluation, Authorization of Chemicals (REACH) Penalty around the world

Today’s active laws and directives, Registration, Evaluation, Authorization of Chemicals (REACH) and Reduction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) among them, are government-sanctioned. If your company should fail or refuse to comply with them, the penalties will be immediate. Frequently, they will be extremely harsh, too, as the record shows.

For example, when a number of Apple’s products did not comply with environmental regulations, many countries in the EU were forced to stop purchasing them, resulting in heavy losses of revenue on both sides of the value chain. The same thing happened when Palm, Inc. failed to comply. One of their major products is no longer available to the European market.

If you are a company doing business in or with the United Kingdom, it can cost up to £5,000 per instance for failing to comply with RoHS. The same goes for failing to submit compliance documentation to any authority that requests it. The retailer Boots, for example, was penalized for not having informed its customers that a percentage of its profits are put into a product recycling fund.

In Germany, regulators fine noncompliant businesses 50,000 and ban their products from the market. In France, companies can be fined 7,500 for an infraction. Spain and Ireland, on the other hand, are off the charts when it comes to fines: In these countries, you can suffer penalties of upwards of 1.2 million and have your products removed from your customers’ shelves!

A penalty was issued against a Dutch producer that refused to comply with the Waste Electrical and Electronics Equipment (WEEE) directive; another was levied against municipal authorities for failing to create a municipal recycling location. Sony used more cadmium in their PlayStations than is allowed for by RoHS in the Netherlands and paid for the mistake dearly: When the country refused to sell the product in 2001, Sony lost an estimated $110 million in revenue.

source: SAP GRC for dummies