REACH: why a Brazilian chemical exporter needs an address in Europe

Any chemical substance shipped into the EU at one tonne or more a year has to be registered with the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) under REACH — Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006 — before it can lawfully be placed on the market. The principle is 'no data, no market': an unregistered substance simply cannot be sold, whatever its price or quality. For a Brazilian producer the catch is structural — you cannot register your own substance from São Paulo, because REACH puts the duty on parties established inside the EU, not on the exporter.

That leaves two routes. Either each of your EU importers registers the substance itself, treating your export as its own import; or you, the manufacturer, appoint an Only Representative — an EU-based legal entity that holds the registration on your behalf. The distinction is not cosmetic. When you appoint an Only Representative, your importers are reclassified as downstream users and no longer carry a registration of their own, which is exactly the position most of them will want to be in.

For most exporters the Only Representative route is the commercially sound one, and not merely to spare the importer paperwork. Leaving registration to importers ties your substance to whoever happened to register it first, hands a competitor's distributor visibility over your tonnages, and scatters your confidential composition data across several EU companies you do not control. A single Only Representative keeps the registration — and the business data behind it — in your name, lets you supply several buyers without duplicated dossiers, and means a change of distributor does not put your EU access back to zero. One limit to note: only a manufacturer, formulator or article producer may appoint an Only Representative — a distributor cannot.

Registration is the entry ticket, not the whole obligation. The Candidate List of Substances of Very High Concern is updated by ECHA roughly twice a year, and a substance on it brings communication and notification duties once it is present above 0.1% by weight; some substances move further, into authorisation or restriction, which can cap or close a use entirely. Safety data sheets must travel with the goods in the required form. None of this is a reason to avoid the market — chemicals are one of the corridor's steadier BR → EU flows — but it is a reason to know your substances' status before you quote, not after.

If your route runs Brazil → EU in chemicals, the scan flags which of your substances need registration, whether an Only Representative is the right structure for you, and where an SVHC listing might sit on your critical path.