ChemicalScan — EU Chemical Safety Data Made Accessible
106,213 European chemical substances distilled into clear profiles: hazards, GHS pictograms and REACH regulatory status, searchable by name, CAS or EC number.
Why this product exists
Europe's chemical regulation produces a wealth of open safety information — hazard classes, restriction lists, substances under scrutiny — yet reading it demands regulatory vocabulary and tools aimed at specialists. ChemicalScan removes that barrier: it ingests ECHA's public datasets and republishes them as plain-language substance profiles, so anyone can tell within seconds what a chemical is, which hazards it carries and where it sits under EU law.
It belongs to my portfolio of self-owned data products: I set the roadmap, run the ingestion and grow the organic reach of its six-figure page count.
Key capabilities
- Autocomplete search across all 106,213 substances by name, CAS number or EC number.
- At-a-glance substance profiles combining identifiers, hazard classification, GHS pictograms and regulatory flags on a single page.
- Browsable regulatory lists: the SVHC candidate list, the REACH Annex XIV authorisation list (79 substances) and Annex XVII restrictions (1,401 substances).
- Reference catalogues for all 97 hazard-statement H-codes and every GHS pictogram, each explained in plain English.
- A–Z substance index, long-form guides to REACH, CLP and GHS, and a topical blog.
The database in numbers
Coverage spans 106,213 substances, of which 14,634 are recorded as registered with ECHA — alongside 311 SVHCs, 1,401 restricted entries and 79 requiring authorisation. Every figure is taken from the underlying EU regulatory data, and list pages deep-link into individual profiles so context is never lost.
Profiles additionally flag the registered tonnage band — above or below 100 tonnes per annum — and the homepage surfaces notable dangerous substances, from 1,2-dichloroethane to 1,2,3-trichloropropane.
Engineering notes
The platform is custom-built end to end: a Laravel + PHP backend over a MySQL schema modelled to answer fast even with six-figure record counts and several intersecting classification axes (hazard, pictogram, regulatory list, alphabetical index). No CMS, no off-the-shelf theme, no plugins.
Programmatic SEO carries the rest: every substance, H-code and regulatory list mints a stable URL with generated metadata and internal linking, while controlled re-ingestion from the source keeps the corpus current.
Why I run it as an own product
There is no client and no brief behind ChemicalScan — niche, data model and every product call are mine. That forces me into problems ordinary agency work never reaches: normalising chemical nomenclature, reconciling four regulatory lists, keeping six figures of URLs fast.
Operating the platform feeds straight back into client engagements: anyone who hires me for a data-heavy build inherits patterns already battle-tested in production.
ChemicalScan FAQ
What is the data source behind ChemicalScan?
Public data published by ECHA, the European Chemicals Agency. ChemicalScan normalises it into readable substance profiles; the project is independent and not affiliated with ECHA.
What does a substance profile include?
Identifiers (name, CAS number, EC number), hazard classification with H-codes, the applicable GHS pictograms, and EU regulatory standing: registered, restricted, subject to authorisation, or on the SVHC candidate list.
What does SVHC mean on the site?
Substances of Very High Concern — chemicals flagged for properties such as carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, reproductive toxicity or persistence. The platform tracks the 311 candidate-list entries and cross-references them on every profile.
Who is ChemicalScan for?
Researchers, students and safety professionals who need to grasp quickly what a substance is, how it is classified and whether the EU regulates it — without wrestling with specialist regulatory tooling.