BASF PRODUCTS ADDED TO CHEMFORWARD PORTFOLIO, INCREASING ACCESS TO SAFER CHEMICALS

BASF Products Added to ChemFORWARD Portfolio, Increasing Access to Safer Chemicals

As an Industry Manager for Industrial Petrochemicals at the world’s largest chemical company, BASF’s Patrick Harmon spends his time at the crux of safer chemistry -- making effective products that are also safer for human and environmental health. The business case is clear: BASF’s customers formulating and selling products made from the company’s chemicals are eager to verify claims of safer chemistry and help their customers make good decisions about what they are putting in the marketplace. 

And while plenty of companies and organizations promote lists of restricted substances — guides for suppliers and promises to customers that their products avoid some specific chemicals known to be harmful or regulated — the consequences of making a change without a thorough chemical hazard assessment can be costly to the entire supply chain. 

“If you’re going to replace something well studied and well known that works very well, you need to be sure you’re replacing it with something that actually makes an improvement,” Harmon said.  

If not, a product manufacturer can spend a lot of time  reworking a formulation, only to find out “the alternative they selected is itself on the hot seat with regulators,” he said. “What’s really important is informed substitution. It’s important to know that the alternative is better than the restricted substance.” 

While Harmon had found adequate methods, such as GreenScreen, for evaluating chemicals, he still saw the need for a tool to compare different products across the marketplace at a much greater scale than is currently available. When he learned that ChemFORWARD was working to accelerate and streamline the amount of high quality information about chemical hazards and alternatives available to the marketplace, he got involved, sponsoring assessments for a collection of safer plasticizers to add to the organization’s portfolio of alternative plasticizers. 

“There had been mostly brands and retailers involved,” Harmon said. “It becomes important, when talking about chemistry, to have chemical companies involved.”  

The BASF plasticizers join a collection of alternatives to ortho-phthalate plasticizers. The The ortho-phthalates  include some of the world’s most widely used ingredients used to manufacture plastic products, but some have been linked to reproductive and developmental toxicity in rats and many are now being regulated.

ChemFORWARD’s portfolio gives information on more than 24 human and environmental hazard endpoints including multiple exposure routes, presented in a unique platform which makes the data accessible and actionable for a variety of users, from a high-level overview to deeply granular data tables. And by offering the data by subscription, ChemFORWARD creates a structure for many users to share the cost of a comprehensive collection of high quality assessments performed and verified by independent professional toxicologists. (A free trial portfolio allows anyone to test drive the platform.)

BASF uses a Sustainable Solutions Steering methodology to evaluate the impact of its portfolio over sustainability criteria from health and safety, biodiversity and renewables to climate change and downstream cost savings. The company’s benchmarks for these criteria are intended to steer its portfolio to increased sustainability. 

“It is very encouraging to have BASF’s participation in our value chain collaboration,  demonstrating that objective, transparent and verified data can be useful for chemical suppliers to validate and amplify their safer alternatives while providing broad access to the rest of the value chain,” said Stacy Glass, ChemFORWARD’s executive director. “This is a model we will replicate across multiple industry sectors.”

ChemFORWARD is a science-based, non-profit value-chain collaboration working to advance safer chemistry in product design and manufacturing by expanding access to verified, actionable chemical hazard data and alternatives. The effort brings together leading brands, retailers and other organizations working to empower the value chain with high quality, actionable chemical hazard data, leading to better decisions and creating better outcomes for humans and the environment. 

“As a world, over the coming years, we face some challenges,” Harmon said. “Chemistry isn’t going to solve all of those, but it will be critical to solving many of them.“