Chemical Management Tool Launched

Target, Staples, Kaiser Permanente and the US Green Building Council are among the organizations that joined together today to launch the Chemical Footprint Project, a metric for publicly benchmarking corporate chemicals management and profiling leadership companies.

The CFP will enable purchasers to preferentially select suppliers and investors to integrate chemical risk into their sustainability analyses and investments. The CFP results enable brands to market their progress and success in using safer chemicals.

The Chemical Footprint Project was founded by the environmental nonprofit Clean Production Action, the research institute The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and the sustainability consultancy Pure Strategies.

The CFP is the first initiative to publicly measure overall corporate chemicals management performance by evaluating:

• Management Strategy
• Chemical Inventory
• Progress Measurement
• Public Disclosure

Other steering committee members for the project include representatives from Boston Common Asset Management, Trillium Asset Management, Partners Healthcare, ChemSec, Dignity Health, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Investor Environmental Health Network.

Other organizations have also been working in the area of chemical toolkits.

Last month the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety & Health Administration released a step-by-step toolkit to help businesses eliminate or reduce hazardous chemicals in the workplace.

In 2008, ChemSec developed the Substitute It Now or SIN List to highlight chemicals that were likely to be subject to future EU regulation. Then, this October, ChemSec launched SINimilarity, a tool for identifying SIN-like chemicals to assist companies in avoiding non-sustainable substitutions.