On March 26, 2026, South Korea's Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment (MCEE) opened a public consultation on a complete rewrite of the Regulation on Business Operation and Management of Hazardous Chemicals, the administrative rulebook that sits under the Chemicals Control Act . The consultation runs until April 15, 2026. Companies that make, import, sell, store, transport, or use hazardous chemicals in Korea should review the draft, as it sets out clearer permit, declaration, and facility management duties that will shape their compliance path.
The rewrite follows the amendments to the K-CCA Enforcement Rules that took effect on August 7, 2025. By recasting the whole regulation, MCEE aims to standardise how regional environmental offices handle hazardous-chemical business licensing and to give enterprises a single, actionable compliance route for the permits and declarations that hazardous-substance operations require.
The regime splits operators by how much they handle. The table below shows which activity pushes a business into the permit track and which leaves it on the lighter declaration track; both thresholds are fixed substance by substance and announced by the authority.
Permit Versus Declaration
|
Trigger |
Compliance route |
|
Handling a hazardous chemical at or above its lower handling limit |
Business permit |
|
One-off transport of more than 1 tonne of hazardous chemicals |
Business permit |
|
Handling between the minimum and the lower handling limit |
Business declaration |
To spare companies duplicate paperwork, the rule cascades an approved status across related activities. A manufacturer does not need separate sales, storage, transport or use permits for the chemicals it makes; a sales-permit holder need not seek separate storage or transport permits for goods it sells; and a storage-permit holder moving consigned stock, or a use-permit holder moving or storing what it consumes, is likewise covered. A parallel cascade applies to declarations, so an operator that has declared for one activity is not re-declared for an incidental one.
The thresholds also drive change management. Raising storage or transport capacity by 50% or more, or switching the chemicals handled, triggers a pre-change permit modification or, for declarants, a modification declaration within 30 days, extended to 60 for administrative changes such as a change of legal representative. Regular facility inspections and safety assessments remain standing duties on top. Reagent vendors and commercial sellers without dedicated handling facilities are drawn into the same framework, so the practical to-do is to map each site's chemicals and volumes against the thresholds, confirm the permit or declaration that applies, and feed back to MCEE before the April 15, 2026 deadline.
