SCIP reference
A SCIP reference can be recorded. It cannot be looked up. If you are holding a product in one hand and a barcode in the other, there is no route from that identifier to a SCIP dossier, and the reason is the way the database is built rather than the way anyone has searched it.
On this page
What a SCIP reference is
SCIP is the database of Substances of Concern In articles or in complex objects, run by the European Chemicals Agency. When an article placed on the EU market contains a substance on the REACH Candidate List above 0.1 per cent by weight, a notification goes into it, and the notification has a reference.
Two separate instruments meet at that sentence and it is worth keeping them apart. The duty to notify comes from Article 9(1)(i) of the Waste Framework Directive, Directive 2008/98/EC. The 0.1 per cent threshold that triggers it belongs to REACH Article 33(1), which the Waste Framework Directive points at rather than restating.
A passport field for a SCIP reference is therefore a pointer to somebody's notification, not a statement about what is in the garment.
Recorded, never discovered
This is the one field on a textile passport where the honest answer is that there is no route, and where that sentence is supportable rather than merely convenient.
Five properties of the interface, each of which alone would be an inconvenience and which together close the door.
- SCIP is positive only. It records notifications that were made. Nothing in it distinguishes an article with no notifiable substance from an article nobody notified.
- There is no public API and no bulk download.
- There is no reuse licence covering the contents.
- Dossiers do not carry a product identifier. There is no field in which a GTIN would live even if the rest were solved.
- The identity of the submitter is legally suppressed.
So a reference can be recorded, by the person who made the notification, and it cannot be discovered by anyone else starting from a product. A design that proposed to query the agency by barcode was rejected on those grounds before anything was built, which is cheaper than discovering it afterwards.
That is a structural absence rather than a failure to look, and the distinction is the whole of the evidence page. Almost every other absence in this estate is written as we did not find it. This one is written as there is no route, and the five bullets above are the reason it is allowed to be.
What we refuse to do with an empty field
Nothing generates a reference. A well-formed identifier that points at nothing is worse than an empty box in every respect that matters, so none is ever constructed.
A reference the merchant supplies is checked for shape and nothing else. Where it is malformed it is recorded exactly as given rather than corrected, because a tidied identifier may be somebody else's real one.
And not knowing is not the same as not applicable. An empty field here means one of three things, and the passport says which.
| State | What it means | What produced it |
|---|---|---|
| Not established | Nobody has told us whether a notification exists, and there is no route by which we could find out. | The default, and the state on every variant of our current test catalogue. |
| Not applicable | The duty does not arise for this article. | A positive statement from a supplier that nothing on the Candidate List is present above the threshold. Recorded as partial, attributed to the supplier and never marked complete. |
| Resolved | A notification exists and this is its reference. | The merchant's own notification record. |
The middle row is the one that gets abused. A supplier's declaration that nothing is present is evidence about what the supplier knows. It retires the notification duty as far as anyone can tell, and it is not a laboratory result, so it never reaches the completeness a measurement would.
On the current 34 variant test catalogue this field resolves for nobody. It is a test catalogue rather than a customer, and the zero is not a defect. It is what a passport looks like when the evidence has not been created yet.
Whether the duty arises at all
The question of where you sell runs before the question of what is in the product. The notification duty attaches to articles placed on the EU market, so a business that does not place goods there is answering a different question.
That check is wired to fail closed. Where the markets are unclear the duty stays live rather than switching off, because switching a duty off on an assumption is the expensive direction to be wrong in. Shipping settings are not evidence of selling into a market either. A shop that will post to Belgium has not thereby placed goods on the Belgian market.
One part of this is our reading rather than settled law, and it is worth naming. We treat a brand owner as the actor carrying the notification duty for its own articles. REACH describes the duty as falling on a supplier of an article, and whether a brand owner that never physically handles the goods is that supplier is not obvious from the text. We act on the reading above and we would change it against a better one.
Who carries what, across the wider passport duties, is set out on the applicability page.
How the evidence gets created
One mechanism creates evidence that does not otherwise exist, and it is a legal one rather than a technical one.
REACH Article 33(2) gives a consumer a right to ask whether an article contains a Candidate List substance above 0.1 per cent by weight, with a response period of 45 days. Article 33(1) is the corresponding obligation running down a supply chain, and it is the right instrument for a brand asking its own supplier rather than the consumer route.
Every other approach we have looked at either reads something already published or infers something nobody wrote down.
The list itself moves
The Candidate List stood at 253 substances at its 34th update when we last retrieved it on 21 August 2026. It is revised roughly twice a year, usually in January and June, so a count quoted without its update number and date goes stale without anybody noticing.
Sources
-
Art. 9(1)(i)In forceRelevant provisions reviewed
The instrument that creates the notification duty. The threshold it operates on belongs to REACH rather than to this directive.
-
Art. 33(1), Art. 33(2), Art. 3(33)In forceRelevant provisions reviewed
Article 33(1) carries the 0.1 per cent threshold and the supply chain duty. Article 33(2) carries the consumer right and the 45 day response period. Article 3(33) defines supplier of an article, which is where our reading in the section above sits.
-
34th update, 253 substancesRegulator dataReviewed in fullChecked 21 August 2026
Retrieved through the agency's own interface. Revised roughly twice a year, so a count quoted without its update number and date goes stale without anybody noticing.
-
Regulator dataPublic interface assessed August 2026
The five interface properties in the second section were established against the public database itself. Each is a property of what the database publishes rather than an inference about it.