Nike, Lululemon, Patagonia and Target Support ChemForward’s Safer Chemistry Industry Baseline

The transition to safer chemistry in the apparel and footwear industry will rely on a proactive approach based on collaboration and data sharing. That’s one of the key findings of a new report from safe chemistry nonprofit ChemForward.

The report was created in partnership with Nike, Lululemon, Patagonia and Target.

“The number one distinguishing factor in our work is a coalition of the willing,” said Stacy Glass, CEO and co-founder of ChemForward. “These four brands came together to partner and say, ‘Let’s see what’s there.’ That’s the most important moment, and now we’re leveraging and sharing that.”

ChemForward analyzed 15,000 safety data sheets from manufacturers that included trade secrets and undisclosed data. Those sheets included 43,898 substances used in production of apparel and footwear, with 38,326 chemicals identified via a recognized CAS registry number.

While those numbers sound daunting, the team at ChemForward discovered that when they eliminated duplicates, the actual number of unique chemical profiles was only 2,829.

“That’s empowering to people who want to try to make a change, especially when we’re talking about carbon reduction,” Glass said. “We realized we have less than 3,000 chemicals, and we already know a fair amount about them.”

Of the 87.3 percent of those chemicals that were disclosed in to ChemForward, 69 percent were deemed safer substances and 15.8 percent were chemicals of concern with D or F hazard band grades. Just over 12 percent of the chemicals were not disclosed, and Glass said that’s where opportunity for greater transparency lies.

“The biggest problem was the unrecognizable chemicals,” she said. ”We all expected that to be confidential or proprietary business information, but that only accounted for about 2 percent of those chemicals. The remaining almost 11 percent were poor quality issues that could be improved. It made us hopeful that it’s not all about proprietary information—in many cases, we just need better quality.”

The willingness to be open and share data will play a critical role in safer chemical management and usage not only in the apparel and footwear industry, but across other sectors, as well.

“With chemical hazard and risk assessment, 99.9 percent of the substances in this data set were found in other industry sectors that ChemForward has worked with,” said Libby Sommer, co-author of the report. “So it’s not only a matter of data- and cost-sharing within this industry, but across industries.”

Sommer said that the chemical hazard data trust—which the report’s metrics are built upon—is set up so that companies from across different industry sectors can share the cost of doing a chemical hazard assessment, as well as maintaining those assessments to ensure they’re up to date with current science.

“They can do this at a fraction of the price that it would cost to do so independently or even in an industry consortium,” Sommer said. “It’s very important to have cross-industry collaboration.”

Ultimately, ChemForward’s report emphasizes the importance of taking a proactive approach to chemical management. That means not only identifying uncharacterized chemicals, but also performing full hazard assessments to determine their safety for use.

“The percent of safer chemicals is just a new metric—you can’t say that something’s safer based on a list,” Glass said. “We have to have that chemical hazard assessment that shows we have enough data of a high enough confidence that indicates moderate- to low-hazard risk.”

At the same time, there’s no one-size-fits all for chemical hazard risks, and each substance must be evaluated in terms of application, exposure, life cycle and other factors that can impact hazard levels.

“We really need to think about the exposure and the risk,” Sommer said. “This is a hazard-first, but not a hazard-only project. Risk and exposure assessment start with hazard characterization, and having that built from a place of shared understanding and cost is valuable to many in the industry so that we’re all working from the same understanding of the potential impacts of this chemical.”

Glass said that she hopes the report helps companies see safer chemical management as more attainable and less daunting than total chemical numbers might lead them to believe.

“I hope that people find this empowering,” she said. “The number of chemicals is manageable, we already know a fair amount, and a good portion of that is safe chemistry. And there’s only a small sliver of those Ds and Fs where safer alternatives don’t currently exist—that enables us to make a market-validated call for innovation and engage chemical suppliers to solve the problems that remain.”