Product Stewardship is the shared responsibility for understanding, managing and communicating the impacts to human health and the environmental through the life cycle of chemical products. This life cycle involves the development, production, use, distribution and end-of-life management of products. Thus, companies and their partners are better enabled to develop and promote safe and sustainable use of their products.
Product stewardship has long been part of the ACC Responsible Care initiative. Despite this commitment, it’s clear that there continues to be public concern about the safe management of chemical products. To help address these concerns, improve product stewardship actions throughout the chemical industry and to increase public awareness and confidence that chemicals in commerce are safely managed, ACC members implement the Global Product Strategy (GPS) through Responsible Care.
The GPS was launched in February 2006 and require companies to implement new ways to manage and communicate risks about their chemical products. These new actions are fully integrated into the Responsible Care requirements and management systems. To track the implementation of GPS, ACC began in 2008 to collect performance information in three areas of product stewardship.
Prioritizing Chemicals
Each ACC member must prioritize its chemicals according to risks, specifically designating high priority chemicals, using considerations such as uses, exposures, toxicity, production volumes and other relevant factors. To help the public understand how each company completes its prioritization and the considerations used, ACC requires companies to report on the availability of its prioritization process.
Public Availability of Health and Safety Information for Chemicals
Once chemicals are prioritized, companies are expected to conduct detailed risk characterizations for these products according to their respective priorities. These risk characterizations consider the risks, uses and life cycles of the chemicals and results in management measures to assure the safe use and handling of a company’s chemical products. A critical management measure is making health and safety information available to the public. This is also one of the cornerstones of GPS. Therefore ACC also asks its members to report on the public availability of product stewardship summaries for their chemicals.
As part of Responsible Care’s commitment to continual improvement, the American Chemistry Council’s Board of Directors in November approved a set of aggregated performance targets for member companies. The goal for Product Stewardship is to have 100% of high priority chemicals covered by publically available product stewardship summaries by 2012.
