On Apr 4th, 2019, China’s Standardization Administration (SAC) announced on its website that 44 compulsory national standards (GB standard) were to be revised or formulated in one or two years. As scheduled, a new GB standard concerning the classification and labeling of desensitized explosives will be formulated by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) in 12 months.
In 2015, an additional hazard class for desensitized explosives with new H statements H206 to H208 was incorporated into the UN GHS Rev.6 [1]. The desensitized explosives were defined as solid or liquid explosive substances or mixtures which are phlegmatized to suppress their explosive properties in such a manner that they do not mass explode and do not burn too rapidly and therefore may be exempted from the hazard class “Explosives”.
China’s current GHS classification and labeling criteria of chemicals, namely the GB 30000-2013 series, were formulated in line with the UN GHS Rev.4. MIIT in April 2018 consulted on its own schedule for drafting a classification and labeling standard of desensitized explosives (CL news[2]) and it was recently included in SAC’s schedule. It will be a new GB 30000.XX standard named as “Rules for Classification and Labelling of Chemicals- Part XX: Desensitized Explosives”.
