The European Community number (EC number) is a unique seven-digit identifier that was assigned to substances for
regulatory
Regulation is the management of complex systems according to a set of rules and trends. In systems theory, these types of rules exist in various fields of biology and society, but the term has slightly different meanings according to context. Fo ...
purposes within the
European Union
The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been ...
by the European Commission. The ''EC Inventory'' comprises three individual inventories, EINECS, ELINCS and the NLP list.
Structure
The EC number may be written in a general form as: NNN-NNN-R, where R is a check digit and N represents integers. The check digit is calculated using the
ISBN
The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier that is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency.
An ISBN is assigned to each separate edition an ...
method. According to this method, the check digit R is the following sum
modulo 11:
:
If the remainder R is equal to 10, that combination of digits is not used for an EC number. To illustrate, the EC number of
dexamethasone
Dexamethasone is a glucocorticoid medication used to treat rheumatic problems, a number of skin diseases, severe allergies, asthma, chronic obstructive lung disease, croup, brain swelling, eye pain following eye surgery, superior vena cav ...
is 200-003-9. N
1 is 2, N
2 through N
5 are 0, and N
6 is 3.
:
The remainder is 9, which is the check digit.
There is a set of 181 ELINCS numbers (EC numbers starting with 4) for which the checksum by the above algorithm is 10 and the number has not been skipped but issued with a checksum of 1.
EC Inventory
The EC Inventory includes the substances in the following inventories. The content of these inventories is fixed and official.
List numbers
European Chemicals Agency
The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA; ) is an agency of the European Union which manages the technical and administrative aspects of the implementation of the European Union regulation called Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restrict ...
(ECHA) also applies the EC number format to what it calls "List number".
Registered substances
at European Chemicals Agency
The European Chemicals Agency (ECHA; ) is an agency of the European Union which manages the technical and administrative aspects of the implementation of the European Union regulation called Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restrict ...
(ECHA) The number are assigned under the REACH Regulation without being legally recognised. Hence, they are not official because they have not been published in the Official Journal of the European Union
An official is someone who holds an office (function or mandate, regardless whether it carries an actual working space with it) in an organization or government and participates in the exercise of authority, (either their own or that of their s ...
. List numbers are administrative tools only and shall not be used for any official purposes.
See also
*
* European chemical Substances Information System
* CAS registry number
A CAS Registry Number (also referred to as CAS RN or informally CAS Number) is a unique identification number assigned by the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), US to every chemical substance described in the open scientific literature. It inclu ...
References
External links
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ec Number (Chemistry)
Chemical numbering schemes
European Union law
Regulation of chemicals in the European Union