Draft:Chemintro

Chemintro is software as a service (SaaS) developed after Australia's Parliament passed the Industrial Chemicals Act (2019). The Act changed the way chemicals were to be introduced.

'introduced' and 'introduction' have special meaning under this law. They mean: manufactured in or imported into Australia.

The Act also specified categories of introduction according to ascending levels of calculated health and/or environment risk. Thos levels are Exempted, Reported and Assessed. There are other categories which account for various special cases perhaps requiring Ministerial or Execute Director authorisation.

It also changed the responsibility for categorising chemicals for human health and environmental management from government to the introducer.

This change is analogous to the responsibility to calculate and pay your own tax where the Australian Taxation Office is merely auditor and enforcer.

The Act established the Executive Director of the Australian Industrial Chemicals Introduction Scheme (AICIS) in the Department of Health. AICIS replaced the previous NICNAS system where government scientists evaluated introductions.

Cost motivation

The Act transferred the bulk of the scientific work of categorising chemicals from the government to manufacturers and importers in the chemical industry. This is a "user-pays" motivation.

Much like tax and other law, chemistry regulation is complex.

AICIS has documented the Act and associated regulations and their own guidance material in considerable detail on their website.

It is that detail which Chemintro applies to chemical characteristics provided by an introducer in order to categorise a chemical.

Because the introduced quantity of a chemical is one of those characteristics and products contain many chemical ingredients it is also necessary for Chemintro to manage product quantity, chemical proportion and keep track of other products containing the same chemical.

Competitors

As of February 2025, there are no known competitors for Chemintro other than AICIS itself and the expertise of individual consultants who typically use flowcharts, spreadsheets, checklists and experience referring to the legislation.

Conflict of Interest

The author of this article is also the author of Chemintro (https://chemintro.com) which was developed in collaboration with one of those established chemistry consultants.