Chemical Week - November 4/11
Driving the adoption of safer chemicals
Sotirios Frantzanas 2024-11-08 07:12:17
SCI Fund aims to enable replacement of hazardous chemicals with safer alternatives
The Safer Chemistry Impact (SCI) Fund (Washington, DC) is a blended capital initiative with seed funding from Apple Inc. and Google LLC. The fund recently released a report titled “Accelerating the transition to safer chemistry: Establishing a collective vision & impact metrics,” which includes a first-of-its-kind metrics framework to measure and drive the adoption of safer chemistry across industries.
The purpose of the SCI Fund is to generate capital that will drive global investment in safer chemicals and chemistry alternatives, Bill Walsh, director of the SCI Fund, told CW. The main objective of the fund is to integrate safer chemistry metrics and tools for evaluating progress across four consumer-facing supply chains within the next five years, Walsh said.
“By adopting data-driven solutions, we aim to systematically target chemical hazards and replace them with verified, safer alternatives on a large scale. Our vision is to launch this as an initial five-year project, aiming to gather approximately $15 million in contributions,” Walsh said.
The project builds on the success of ChemForward (Washington, DC), an organization offering a platform that enables companies to explore a range of verified, safer alternatives and collaborate to identify specific functional uses for replacing chemicals that are targeted for regulation or present known challenges within industries, he said.
The SCI Fund aims to scale the ChemForward platform, specifically to create a “chemical hazard data trust” that will make ChemForward’s hazard repository of verified safer alternatives more widely accessible and manage the platform with a consortium of stakeholders interested in its long-term viability, security and quality.
The primary focus of ChemForward was originally to create a shared dataset on safer alternatives to specific chemicals of concern, Stacy Glass, co-founder and executive director of ChemForward, said. “When we set out to create the shared repository, our users expressed a clear need: they knew which chemicals to avoid but not what to use instead. Thus, we directed our efforts toward evaluating safer alternatives to specific chemicals of concern, collaborating with various collectives and stakeholders,” Glass told CW.
ChemForward has grown its database significantly in the past six years, and through processing large datasets, it can assign a hazard band using a straightforward A, B, C system for safer chemistry, with Ds and Fs indicating chemicals to manage or avoid, and question marks highlighting data gaps, Glass said.
ChemForward recently analyzed thousands of ingredients in the beauty and personal care sector, revealing widespread use of safer chemistry with many A, B and C ratings, while also pinpointing areas with Ds and Fs that require attention, Glass said. The analysis also identified high-frequency data gaps that necessitate further investigation, she said.
“We address these gaps in partnership with the entire supply chain. While chemical suppliers possess this information, our goal is to provide a neutral platform for them to share and verify their safer raw materials,” Glass said.
Dow Inc.’s beauty and personal care business and the sustainable personal care and cosmetic ingredients designer Inolex Inc. were “participating suppliers” in Chem- Forward’s beauty and personal care project, according to ChemForward.
The SCI Fund aims to build on the momentum ChemForward’s collaborative value-chain projects have created to accelerate these efforts at scale, Glass said. In addition to beauty and personal care, ChemForward’s projects cover the consumer electronics, packaging and built environment value chains, Glass added.
A chemical hazard data trust is one of the four components of the SCI Fund. Impact programs, a docket of programs and projects to activate systems change across supply chains, is another component, Walsh said. Impact programs will be selected, funded and evaluated based on their contribution to the metrics of the SCI Fund, he said.
“Our inaugural request for proposal [RFP] seeks collaborators to conduct a baseline assessment in a specific consumer product sector, identifying problematic chemistry and prioritizing safer alternatives,” he added.
A third component is a knowledge hub, which will offer science-based, data-driven communications, providing industry-specific data and case studies and empowering chemical users and manufacturers to implement changes across supply chains, Walsh said.
The fourth component, highlighted in the SCI Fund’s report, involves developing metrics to establish and track progress, leveraging sector-specific data to gain insights, set goals and quantify advancements, Walsh said.
The fund aims to establish a baseline metric, called “metric zero,” for each sector, Glass said. Each sector can determine its own meaningful data boundaries, she noted. The SCI Fund’s first RFP focuses on establishing these baselines, seeking participants from consumer-facing supply chains, she said. “We aim to implement this in four consumer-facing supply chains over the next few years,” Glass added.
It aims to develop five additional metrics that will focus on data activation, Glass said. “Data alone does not drive change; it must have integrity, longevity, and be supported by robust science and technology. We aim to reduce data gaps by increasing chemical hazard assessments and amplifying market opportunities. We need to encourage the entrepreneurial and R&D communities to develop solutions for these gaps,” she added.
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