China announces program to enhance production safety of hazardous chemicals during 14th Five-Year Plan period

On March 10, China’s Ministry of Emergency Management released on its website a National Program to Enhance Production Safety of Hazardous Chemicals during the 14th Five-Year Plan period. The program specifies key areas and targets for 2025 in production safety of hazardous chemicals based on the analysis of the circumstances and issues of production safety during the 13th Five-Year Plan period.

It aims to:

• implement a 2D (two-dimensional) barcode-based product management system called the “One Company, One Item, One Code” system,
• find out every potential risk, and
• increase companies’ responsibility for production safety of hazardous chemicals

in order to:

• reduce the numbers of accidents and their fatalities in chemical production as well as the numbers of major accidents and their fatalities by at least 15 percent each from the 13th Five-Year Plan period by 2025,
• ensure at least 90 percent of industrial parks achieve the “D level” safety (fairly low safety risk) by 2025, and
• enhance China’s production safety of hazardous chemicals to the level of developed countries by 2035.

Increased responsibility of companies

• Increase the production safety responsibility of the legal representatives, de facto managers and production personnel of companies.
• Encourage companies to establish a system where they evaluate safety risks for themselves before starting machines, set up a safety management technical team and appoint a certified safety technician.
• Advance the classification-based management of the credit and risks of hazardous chemical producers and strictly maintain the list of companies that have committed illegal acts.

Inspections of high-risk areas and chemicals

• Conduct regular inspections of key industries and also conduct special inspections to find out every potential risk in large events.
• Select key processes (high-risk processes) from the list of 18 hazardous chemical production processes and key chemicals from the list of 74 hazardous chemicals and the list of 20 hazardous chemicals subject to special management to perform special inspections of these key processes and chemicals.

Chemical registration and risk evaluation management

• Organize the chemical registration by chemical and pharmaceutical companies and develop a reliable database of chemicals.
• Keep the “One Company, One Item, One Code” management system in operation so that information on hazardous chemicals will be readily available.

Strict management of serious risk sources of hazardous chemicals

• Revise the current interim rules for the management of “serious risk sources of hazardous chemicals”.
• Promote the development and implementation of advance alert systems for serious risk sources using online monitoring.
• Classify these risk sources into three levels, namely special management (“red”), careful monitoring (“yellow”) and regular management (“green”).
• Implement management based on the safety risk levels of serious risk source companies.

The full text of the program for hazardous chemical production safety (in Chinese) is available at
https://www.mem.gov.cn/gk/zfxxgkpt/fdzdgknr/202203/t20220321_410001.shtml