You’ve gathered the necessary data details from your suppliers and are ready to analyze your product metrics. Your channel customers and end-users want safer products which perform well, and using safer materials reduces risks for your company. Analyzing at the chemical, product or portfolio level will provide you with different levels of information. Let’s look these three ways to help propel safer product creation.
Retailers such as Costco, Walgreens, CVS, Target, Home Depot, REI and others are stepping in to ensure the products they sell on their shelves are providing end-consumers with safer products and creating their own chemical policies. For example, Walmart is asking manufacturers to move away from eight high priority chemicals. If you sell to more than one of these retailers, keeping your chemical compliance records straight can be burdensome.
With Toxnot’s portfolio analytics, it’s easy to visualize which products can still be sold to which retailer- and which products contain a chemical (or more) listed on different retailer’s lists.
The example below shows which chemical components of one product (a nail polish) show up on three different retailer's priority chemical lists. You can customize the Priority chemical lists and your dashboard so you're only viewing what's important to you.
You can compare two products in Toxnot, to visualize and understand the human and environmental health benefits of a product re-design.Your internal team will be proud of their accomplishment and your channel customer will be pleased to be able to sell your product.
Let's suppose your team redesigns a chair, substituting a red-listed chemical for a safer one. Share your results with stakeholders using a visual comparison to readily show your improvements. Below, a traditional chair contained a chemical to be avoided, and the redesigned chair does not. Plus, you can label your product as preferable to gain more channel customers.
Is there an obvious chemical of concern that can be substituted, to make the greatest overall positive impact? Is that chemical prevalent throughout your product line? Once you’ve found preferred chemical alternatives, report on the baseline versus new chemical information, and document which toxic chemicals were removed from your products. In Toxnot, you can easily view the hazard profile differences between chemicals, products and across entire product lines.
Some hazardous chemicals provide enough of a benefit to a product (water-proofing, preservatives, etc.) that a safer alternative cannot be easily substituted. In this case, other options include:
One great example of understanding that a safer alternative was not readily available and taking a step back to consider a different solution is Dow. They successfully replaced BPA inks with a new technology utilizing thermal imaging paper- avoiding BPA altogether. It's a huge undertaking, but a cost-benefit analysis may prove it's worth it. You want to stay in business and provide customers products they can use. Avoid becoming irrelevant; be proactive and redesign around hazardous chemicals as needed.
Toxnot provides the tools to compare chemical hazard profiles and understand where you can improve your products- setting you up for success with materials health management. Which products of yours could use some chemical house-cleaning? Try Toxnot for free today and find out.