Safer and less-toxic products are needed to protect human health, reduce carbon dioxide emissions, stop pollution and halt the degradation of biodiversity. A circular economy can only be truly sustainable when products don’t contain hazardous ingredients. For these reasons, chemical companies need to have full control of their product ingredients, and know the answers to how their products serve society and a more sustainable world. Companies need to walk their talk by ensuring safer products right from the design stage, and actively marketing them.

The approach to these issues is paramount to create a foundation for healthy profits in the future, as well as to avoid costly last-minute substitution forced by regulation. The chemical industry needs to make sure it can deliver safer alternatives, as well as make increased use of renewable resources, while also reducing its waste generation.

The sources we have used to collect data for this category are the companies’ sustainability reports and websites, as well as third-party verified products on Marketplace, ChemSec’s platform for safer alternatives, and the Cradle-to-Cradle product platform.

Criteria and calculations in this category

1. Does the company have a definition or a concept of what they consider to be a safer solution?
2. How big a share of the global sales is generated by the company’s safer solutions?
3. Does the company have a commitment not to develop or market new products containing hazardous substances?
4. Does the company commit to increasing the share of sales of safer solutions?
5. Number of verified safer solutions (Marketplace, C2C).
6. Does the company disclose the share of R&D expenditures targeted towards the development of safer solutions?

If a company’s criteria for safer substances do not even exclude REACH Candidate List substances, no points are awarded in this category, while points are deducted if the Candidate List is the only criterion. Additional points are awarded if SVHC, REACH persistence, or SoC criteria are applied.