4.1 This guide outlines sustainability factors for manufacturers to consider when comparing alternative chemicals or ingredients across the life cycle of a product.
4.2 Methods exist for the evaluation of chemical hazards for product-chemical pairs. These methods are referenced in several regulatory, non-regulatory, and green building schemas and should be conducted as part of an analysis of this type.
Note 1: Evaluation methods include, but are not limited to, Clean Production Action’s GreenScreen for Safer Chemicals,5 The United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Design for the Environment (DtE) Alternatives Assessment Criteria for Hazards Evaluation (Safer Choice) methodology and the National Academy of Sciences’ A Framework to Guide Selection of Chemical Alternatives.8 Regulatory schemas include laws such as the Safer Consumer Products Rule9 in California or the Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals (REACh)10 regulations in Europe. Green building schemas include the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)11 system by the USGBC, which references these indirectly through third-party certifications. However, neither these assessment tools nor the various schemas that reference them have set guidance for using the data in making decisions on which products and ingredients are ultimately the most sustainable.
4.3 Similarly, many tools exist for measuring economic viability, such as value-models and cost analysis. There are also many tools and techniques for measuring social acceptance of products such as sales trends, voice of the customer and many other types of surveys.
4.4 This guide acknowledges the need for determining a baseline for comparing the performance (environmental, economic, and social) of an existing product-chemical pair in a product with the possible/potential alternatives. As such, when using this guide, companies shall use the same study boundaries for the original baseline case and for all alternative options under assessment. Further, when feasible, the same assessment tools should also be used for all options being analyzed.
4.5 Sustainability is a very holistic and encompassing concept. As such, many factors cross all three attributes of sustainability. While factors may be assigned one way in this guide, it is recognized the user has discretion to assign them to whatever attribute(s) they deem appropriate when performing this analysis. However, the user should consistently categorize among all analyses for the purpose of easy comparison.