Centre for Chemistry and Technology

The Project

The OPCW Laboratory and Equipment Store was inaugurated in 1996 in the town of Rijswijk, which is just outside The Hague. Initially, the work of the Laboratory and Equipment Store focused primarily on supporting the OPCW’s demilitarisation activities and missions, routine inspections of industrial facilities for verification purposes, and international cooperation and assistance activities.

In recent years, however, the work of the Laboratory and Equipment Store has changed and grown significantly to reflect States Parties’ changing and growing requirements. Currently, these include responding to the emergence of new chemical weapons threats, which require the development of new and improved verification tools and expanded capabilities to conduct non-routine missions, and providing greater support for international cooperation and assistance activities. 

The growing and evolving activities of the Laboratory and Equipment Store, however, have led to increasingly severe space constraints in the Rijswijk facility, which is a rented facility that has no possibility for expansion. Moreover, the facility’s infrastructure is aging as no major infrastructure upgrades have been undertaken since the OPCW’s arrival.

To meet the future needs of the Laboratory and Equipment Store, in 2017 the Technical Secretariat began to study options for upgrading their capabilities. Between September and November 2017, the Technical Secretariat prepared a report describing the need, initial estimated cost, and initial estimated timeline for a project to construct a new facility for the Laboratory and Equipment Store. The Needs Statement was presented to State Parties at the Twenty-Second Session of the Conference of the States Parties in November 2017, and the project to construct the new ChemTech Centre began.