About Chesar

Chesar is a plug-in to IUCLID 5 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.

To use Chesar a registrant needs to have sufficient information available on the properties, volumes of use and conditions of use of the substance. 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. Chesar also supports the use of other exposure estimation tools or measured data.

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. In addition Chesar enables the user the creation of the full Chemical Safety Report (CSR), once the hazard assessment and (if required) the exposure assessment are finalised.