Staples, Marriott, Dignity Health, Trillium Asset Management and other US businesses representing more than $50 billion in investment and purchasing power will require vendors, suppliers and builders to use a new tool that measure the use of harmful chemicals in products and production processes. The initiative will begin June 17, according to organizers of the Chemical Footprint Project.
The Chemical Footprint Project is an online assessment tool for publicly benchmarking corporate chemicals management and profiling leadership companies that launched late last year. Now, businesses that backed the project have committed to asking suppliers and other companies that work with them to go online and determine their chemical footprint score.
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 consulting firm Pure Strategies.
The CFP is the first initiative to publicly measure overall corporate chemicals management performance by evaluating:
Other organizations have also been working in the area of chemical toolkits. In November, 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. ChemSec launched in October 2014 SINimilarity, a tool for identifying SIN-like chemicals to assist companies in avoiding non-sustainable substitutions.
