Jun 20, 2015

The $1.1 trillion question: What’s your chemical footprint? | GreenBiz

chemical footrpint project corporate supply chain toxic
The Chemical Footprint Project has attracted supporters like Staples and BNP Paribas to push the issue of corporate chemical management.

Look no further than the financial and reputational travails of Lumber Liquidators for a stark example of the risks companies are exposed to when they have toxic chemicals in their products and supply chains.

From February to May, the stock price of Lumber Liquidators plummeted 70 percent — and its CEO resigned — amid concerns that the company's laminate flooring products contained unacceptably high levels of formaldehyde.

The formaldehyde fiasco highlights a challenging question for investors and purchasers: How can they better understand the chemical risks of the companies they invest in or purchase from?

Frameworks do exist for evaluating individual products on the safety of their chemistry, such as the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep database and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Safer Choice label. There is also anecdotal evidence of successful chemical management initiatives from companies as diverse as Apple and Zara.

But we still lack metrics to assess and compare the chemicals management performance of companies individually or within a sector. While we have ways to measure other sustainability indicators, such as carbon and water footprints, we lack a common metric for measuring a company's chemical footprint.

That absence of standardized metrics feeds an ongoing accountability problem when it comes to corporate chemical management.
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The $1.1 trillion question: What's your chemical footprint? | GreenBiz
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