The Biweekly Pulse: 27th February – EU CSRD, EU ESPR, and Chemicals Updates
The Pulse was originally posted on 4th March, 2026. Further regulatory developments may have occurred after publication. To keep up-to-date with the latest compliance news, sign up to our newsletter.
Check out the latest 2026 Regulatory Compliance Updates with The Pulse, your biweekly source for global regulatory insights!
This Week’s Trending Sources in C2P
- Roundup of New Radio Approval Procedures Introduced in 2025, White Paper, February 2026
- EU: 2026 Annual Single Market and Competitiveness Report, Communication, January 2026
- EU: Bio-based Plastics in a Sustainable and Circular Bioeconomy, Report, February 2026
What is Our Content Team Talking About?
Omnibus Content Amendment Finalized – Revised Content of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)
by Hannah Janknecht, Senior Regulatory Compliance Specialist
The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive requires large companies to publish annual sustainability reports based on the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). It aims to standardize sustainability data by requiring third-party auditing and the use of a common reporting framework to ensure transparency for investors and the public.
Adopted by the EU Parliament and EU Council on 14 December 2022, the CSRD builds on the previous Non-Financial Reporting Directive.
Since its adoption in 2022, the CSRD has however undergone significant changes as part of the EU Commission’s first Omnibus package, proposed in February 2025. The first part of this package, the so-called ‘Stop-the-Clock’ amendment (Directive (EU) 2025/794), entered into force on 17 April 2025, making changes to the timeline of the CSRD. The second part, the so-called ‘Omnibus Content Amendment’, was finalized by the EU Council on 24 February 2026. Please note that the following summary incorporates both updates; however, an official consolidated version of the CSRD including the recent content changes has not yet been released by the EU.
Scope and Timelines of the CSRD
Both the ‘Stop-the-Clock’ amendment and the Omnibus content amendment have made significant changes to the thresholds and reporting timelines for companies in scope of the CSRD. Listed small and medium-sized companies are no longer in scope of the CSRD. The thresholds for public and non-public companies have been raised to companies with at least EUR 450 million annual net turnover and 1000 employees on average.
The following thresholds and deadlines apply:
For financial years starting between 1 January 2024 and 31 December 2026 inclusive, the following companies are required to report:
- Large public companies that employ an average of more than 500 employees during the year.
- Please note that Member States may exempt undertakings and issuers with less than €450 million annual net turnover and less than 1,000 employees under national law for the years 1 January 2025 to 31 December 2026.
For financial years starting on or after 1 January 2027, the following companies are required to report:
- Undertakings which exceed a net turnover of EUR 450 million and the average number of 1000 employees during the financial year.
- Parent undertakings of a group which exceed, on a consolidated basis, a net turnover of EUR 450 000 000 and the average number of 1000 employees during the financial year.
- Issuers as defined in Article 2(1), point (d) of Directive 2004/109/EC which are undertakings, which on their balance sheet dates, exceed a net turnover of EUR 450 000 000 and the average number of 1 000 employees during the financial year.
- Issuers as defined in Article 2(1), point (d) of Directive 2004/109/EC which are parent undertakings of a group which, on its balance sheet dates, exceed, on a consolidated basis, a net turnover of EUR 450 000 000 and the average number of 1000 employees during the financial year.
For financial years starting on or after 1 January 2028, EU subsidiaries and branches are required to submit reports covering their third-country parent undertaking, if the third-country parent undertaking has an annual net turnover above €450 million in the EU, and at least one EU-subsidiary or branch that generates more than €200 million annual turnover.
Mandatory Reporting
Companies under the scope of the CSRD will have to report according to the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). The first set of ESRS were published on 22 December 2023 and apply to companies regardless of which sector they operate it (sector-agnostic standards). Central to these standards is the requirement to disclose information about how the entity’s activities affect certain sustainability matters including climate change, biodiversity, company workforce, communities and consumers. Companies are not required to disclose every single sustainability topics or metrics covered in the ESRS. They need to conduct a “double materiality assessment” to identify which metrics must be disclosed by reason of being material to their business. EFRAG issued guidance to help companies understand the ESRS and conduct the double materiality assessment required under the CSRD. The guidance can be found in C2P under ‘EU: Materiality Assessment Implementation, Guidance Document, May 2024′.
To facilitate reporting, EFRAG also published a list of ESRS datapoints (EFRAG IG 3). The datapoints present, in Excel format, the complete list of all disclosure requirements and related application requirements in the ESRS, except for ESRS 1 (General Requirements), as it does not set disclosure requirements.
The Omnibus content amendment requires EFRAG to produce a simplified, revised version of the ESRS. The draft simplified ESRS were submitted to the EU Commission in December 2025. The EU Commission is due to finalize the new ESRS within 6 months after the entry into force of the Omnibus content amendment. The new ESRS are intended to be applicable for the financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2027.
The original text of the CSRD finalized in 2022 required the Commission to produce sector-specific ESRS for high-risk sectors. The adoption of mandatory sector-specific ESRS was eliminated during the Omnibus process, but sector-specific guidance documents might be adopted based on company demand.
Since the CSRD now excludes listed small and medium-sized undertakings (SMEs) from the mandatory reporting obligations, the requirement for the Commission to adopt mandatory standards for them has been removed. Instead, the Commission is now empowered to adopt voluntary sustainability reporting standards for these companies. These voluntary standards will use simplified language and a ‘think small first’ modular approach. Until these are adopted, undertakings can use the voluntary standard for SMEs (VSME) based on Commission Recommendation (EU) 2025/1710.
The revised CSRD contains a so-called ‘value-chain cap’. Companies in scope of the CSRD are prohibited from requiring information from protected undertakings that exceeds the content of the voluntary sustainability reporting standards (to be adopted by the Commission). Protected undertakings are those undertakings in a reporting company’s value chain that do not exceed an average of 1,000 employees during the preceding financial year. Protected undertakings have a statutory right to refuse to provide any information that goes beyond these established limits. If a reporting company chooses to request information beyond these limits, it must explicitly inform the protected undertaking of the specific extra information requested and their legal right to decline.
Submitting Sustainability Reports
The sustainability information must be included in a dedicated section of the company’s management report. The management report must be prepared in the XHTML format electronic format specified in the European Single Electronic Format (ESEF Regulations). The reported information within the management report must also be tagged in accordance with a digital taxonomy (the framework and structure of which is still being developed by EFRAG). The digital taxonomies enable the marking up (‘tagging’) of sustainability reporting in machine-readable XBRL format. Undertakings are not required to mark up their sustainability reporting until the specific rules for such mark-ups are formally adopted by the Commission.
EU parent undertakings of a large group must report sustainability information on a consolidated basis. Certain conditions must be met as regards the content of the management report and publication of the sustainability information by the parent company. Likewise, a subsidiary or branch of non-EU undertakings are exempt from the obligation to prepare a sustainability statement at the group level if they are included in the consolidated sustainability report of the parent company. The sustainability report must be subject to assurance and prepared in accordance with the ESRS for certain third-country undertakings adopted by way of Commission delegated act.
Parent undertakings that are financial holding undertakings may choose to omit consolidated sustainability information if they do not involve themselves in the management of their subsidiaries and those subsidiaries operate independently.
Assurance Requirements
Companies subject to sustainability reporting under the scope of the CSRD must obtain an assurance opinion on the sustainability statement included in their management report. The assurance must be carried out by statutory auditors or Independent Assurance Services Providers authorized by Member States. Assurance must be provided based on the limited assurance standards to be adopted by the EU Commission by 1 July 2027. The previous requirement for the Commission to adopt reasonable assurance standards by 1 October 2028 has been removed from the CSRD.
Entry Into Force
The CSRD came into force on 5 January 2023.
EU Member States are required to implement the CSRD in national law by 6 July 2024.
The amendment to the CSRD (Omnibus content amendment) was finalized by the EU Council on 24 February 2026. Member states are required to align their national laws with the Omnibus content amendment within 12 months after the entry into force of the amendment.
What Are Our Experts Talking About?
OSOA, the EN IEC 63000 Revision, PFAS in Minnesota and the Flame Retardant Strategy
by Design Chain Associates (DCA)
One Substance, One Assessment
Two years after the initial drafts were released, a trio of regulations were released in mid-December 2025 by the European Commission (EC) reattributing the task of chemical assessment from a variety of directives and regulations to the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). As noted by the European Economic and Social Committee, “The ECHA will take over tasks that have so far been carried out by the Commission, supported by ad hoc committees and external consultants.” For the sake of this column, we’ll focus primarily on how this affects the RoHS Directive, 2011/65/EU.
The Commission has used several external and independent consultancies to help them primarily in these two areas:
- Evaluation of new exemption applications as well as exemption renewal applications
- Identification of potential additional substances to restrict
The most frequent of these, related to exemptions and primarily to renewal applications, has challenged the Commission since the first tranche of RoHS 2 renewal applications hit over a decade ago. It took years to get determinations on some of the 80 or so exemption renewal applications they received. They significantly underestimated the amount of concurrent work that a common date for exemption renewal across all exemptions would result in. Not that this solution directly addresses that problem, or some other critical problems. But it does address the meta-problem of coherence in assessing a single substance across multiple applications and regulations and managing that data in a single-source-of-truth database.
Regulation (EU) 2025/2455 establishes a common data platform on chemicals. The objectives of this regulation are “… to ensure the efficient delivery of consistent hazard and risk assessments of chemicals where those assessments are required by Union legal acts, in order to achieve a high level of protection of human health and the environment, enable the development and use of safe and sustainable chemicals, ensure the proper functioning of the single market for chemicals, improve the Union’s citizens’ knowledge about and trust in the scientific basis for decisions taken under Union legal acts on chemicals and to contribute to the replacement and reduction of animal testing wherever possible.”
Obtaining this information today in a coherent and consistent form is challenging at best. This will serve as a single source of chemical information for use by EU regulatory agencies, including the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), the European Environment Agency (EEA), the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA). As it will be publicly available, this should also be a boon to manufacturers who need more information about substances to help them determine whether they may be present in their products and, if they are, what potential toxicological issues may be present.
Directive (EU) 2025/2456 amends the RoHS Directive and reattributes scientific and technical tasks to the ECA. These tasks are specifically listed in Article 5 – which covers the granting, renewing and expiration of exemptions – and Article 6 – which covers the review and amendment of the list of restricted substances listed in Annex II. Historically – and until August 13, 2027 – the Commission has had to bring in external consultants to review and advise on these issues. While keeping the responsibility internal to the Commission by having the ECHA be responsible makes sense from the chemical perspective, ECHA may still need to hire external consultants to advise on application-related issues since they’re not experts on that aspect of the chemical substances’ use. I expect, however, that they will try to develop a degree of expertise internally at the JRC.
Interestingly, the new verbiage for Article 5 includes time limits on both ends of an exemption-related application. Time limits are defined at each step for the applicant, the Agency and both standard REACH Committees: the Committee for Socioeconomic Analysis and, where relevant, the Committee for Risk Assessment. An additional step is inserted where ECHA “shall communicate those draft opinions to the applicant and allow the applicant the opportunity to comment within 4 weeks of that communication” (section 4a(e)). Most interesting to me is the time limit of 9 months from the date of a completed application to the rendering of a draft opinion by the Commission. This step in the process has often been allowed to drag on, for years in some cases, particularly since the removal of the requirements that the Commission decide on an application for renewal no later than 6 months before the expiry date of the existing exemption (see Directive 2017/2102, Article 1(4)(c)). I’m not sure what has changed that makes them think this will be achievable now when it wasn’t before.
Finally (and less relevant to the electronics industry), Regulation (EU) 2025/2457 amends several existing regulations in order to reattribute scientific and technical tasks to ECHA and to improve cooperation among Union agencies in the area of chemicals.
While I believe this will take the Commission in a more holistic and coherent direction in their management of chemical risks across applications and regulations, I don’t believe it will resolve some of the fundamental issues I raised last month with EU RoHS. This does not help make the implementation of Article 5 any more sensible – the Commission’s term for what I was trying to say regarding the return on investment of the continued bifurcation and narrowing of exemptions is “proportionality.” That term is not found in the RoHS Directive. It also does not provide tools for the Commission (or Member States) to enable them to identify candidate substances that would be exclusive to EEE, such that their restriction by RoHS makes more sense than their being addressed by either POPs or REACH (or some other mechanism).
Yes, You Do Need Stinkin’ RoHS Test Requirements
On December 18, 2025, the EC quietly issued Commission Implementing Measure C(2025) 8725, directing the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation (CENELEC) to extensively revise EN IEC 63000:2018, the “harmonized standard” for EU RoHS.
The direction given to CENELEC demands what amounts to a complete rewrite of the standard. No longer will the standard reflect industry best practices (which seem to have – as noted in my previous column – been quite successful in greatly reducing the amounts of the ten restricted substances in EEE), but will prescriptively demand analytical test results in the case of an “indication that there is a risk of jeopardizing or impairing the objectives of Directive 2011/65/EU.” It will require the standard to define technical requirements for determining supplier risk. This will absolve manufacturers of having to use their experience, knowledge and expertise in determining risk.
The EC now believes that they are more competent at identifying supplier risk than the manufacturers themselves (yes, manufacturers are represented on the TC111X technical committee of CENELEC that will be responsible for producing this revision, but they are accountable to the EC). This amounts to a 180º about-face by the Commission from their stance when RoHS 2 first came into being in 2011.
While there certainly continues to be products entering the EU market that are NOT RoHS compliant (the vast majority of which appear to be manufactured by no-name companies in the Peoples’ Republic of China), this relatively small number of goods can, I believe, be addressed more efficiently and effectively by working directly with industry associations in the local manufacturing community or the manufacturers themselves to educate them about the requirements. As opposed to making everybody pay for the failure of the few.
One final point: testing is valid for only the lot of material subjected to the test. It has no bearing on or meaning for the next lot. Process control in the electronics supply chain is key to ensuring consistently compliant material. When trust is at a premium, test is an excellent tool for identifying potential issues – if the results are properly understood and acted upon as needed (that often doesn’t happen to this day, in my experience). But it’s no panacea and replacement for knowing your suppliers.
Quick Takes
Minnesota: The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s PFAS Product Reporting and Information System for Manufacturers (PRISM) is now up and available. Manufacturers (and their agents and representatives) can submit PFAS in product reports and pay related fees (the one-time reporting fee is $800). Links to both PRISM and a supplemental guide are available on the Reporting PFAS in products page. Reports are due for product currently shipping into Minnesota by July 1. Note that all information not identified as a trade secret will be available to the public so be sure to review your data for proprietary or confidentiality status prior to submission.
European Union: On November 11, 2025, the European Commission requested ECHA to prepare an Annex XV restriction dossier and issue a call for evidence on certain non-polymeric aromatic brominated flame retardants (ABFRs). The scope includes three ABFRs that are already classified as REACH SVHCs, at least one of which is relevant to EEE:
- CASRN 84852-53-9: 1,1′- (ethane-1,2-diyl)bis[pentabromobenzene], aka decabromodiphenyl ethane or DBDPE
A number of additional ABFRs will be further evaluated in this process and are also subject to the call for evidence, including:
- CASRN 79-94-7: 2,2′,6,6′-tetrabromo-4,4′-isopropylidenediphenol, aka tetrabromobisphenol A or TBBPA
The call for evidence is looking for
- Stakeholders’ reactions to the restriction options being considered by ECHA
- Compliance costs of the restriction options and other economic impacts
- Information on alternatives
- Other impacts (e.g. social impacts, on trade, etc.)
Information on other topics, including hazard and risk information, can also be submitted in response to this call for evidence.
While there are technical and cost-related challenges to moving away from ABFRs, I repeat my admonition to review other methods and solutions to achieve flammability-related product safety – fire enclosures made of non-combustible materials, lower power, GreenScreen® Benchmark 3 or 4 flame retardants etc. Make sure your safety engineers study and understand IEC 62368-1, Clause 6, “Electrically-caused fire.” Maybe they can identify ways to reduce cost and toxicity as well.
What Are Our Clients Asking About?
What is the Implementation Date of the Disclosure of Information on Unsold Consumer Products Under Article 24 of the EU ESPR? What Format Should be Used to Report the Information?
Answered by Cristian Barroso, Regulatory Compliance Specialist
Large companies are already subject to the disclosure requirements in line with Article 24 of the EU ESPR Regulation. The first reporting period corresponds to the first full financial year following the entry into force of the ESPR Regulation [18 July 2024].
The new standardized format will apply from the first full financial year after 2 March 2027.
For previous financial years, no specific format is required; however, Article 24 clearly defines the information to be disclosed:
- The number and weight of unsold consumer products discarded per year, differentiated by product type or category;
- The reasons for discarding those products;
- The proportion of discarded products delivered, whether directly or through a third party, for each of the following operations: preparing for reuse (including refurbishment and remanufacturing), recycling, other recovery (including energy recovery), and disposal; and
- The measures taken and planned to prevent the destruction of unsold consumer products.
Accordingly, in line with Article 24 and the ESPR FAQ [Q. 130], it is my understanding that it is up to economic operators to determine how to disclose the required information for the relevant financial years prior to the application of the standardized template. The only requirement is that such information must be “in a clear and visible manner on an easily accessible page of their website”.
Finally, take into consideration that companies subject to ESG sustainability reporting in accordance with the CSRD may also include this information as part of the sustainability report.
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