Assessing your chemicals more efficiently
At Enhesa, Betsy Murry has worked closely with companies supporting their chemical assessment work and supply chain transparency initiatives. Taking onboard valuable feedback from our users, Betsy and the product team continue to create new tools and refine solutions to make them highly useful. Here, we identify some of the key challenges for assessing chemicals and how to address them.
The challenge starts with knowing how to approach chemical assessment in the first place.
4 challenges for assessing chemicals:
1. Which method to use?
There are many ways companies can assess or understand their chemicals to determine high priority and safer chemistries including list screening, testing, supplier questionnaires, Safety Data Sheets (SDSs), Chemical Hazard Assessments (CHAs), exposure and risk assessments.
2. What chemicals are in each product and how much do you need to know?
In many cases, companies don’t know the full extent of the chemicals that are in their products. They may have insight based on what is disclosed on supplier questionnaires or Safety Data Sheets (SDSs) but this doesn’t include all the chemicals used in their products and processes. The question is, ‘how much do they need to know?’
3. What do “safe” chemicals look like?
Not everyone agrees on the best way to assess chemicals or what constitutes “safe” chemicals.
4. Do you have the resources?
Regardless of the method for assessment, these processes can be difficult, expensive, tedious, and time consuming. Do you have the resources needed to meet your goals?
Assess is like a crystal ball
Assess user feedbackAt Enhesa Sustainable Chemistry, we focus on two key parts of sustainable chemistry:
- Understanding the chemicals used in products and processes
- Understanding the impact of those chemicals on humans and the environment
We believe that Chemical Hazard Assessments provide the most informative and proactive approach to understanding the impact of chemicals and moving toward safer chemistry. An important goal of ours is to create efficiencies for our customers.
List screening and CHAs: problems and challenges
With an increase in regulatory and media attention to the chemicals in products and processes and their impacts on humans and the environment, it’s become a need for companies to access critical information, to make informed decisions about the chemicals being used.
List screening is where most of our clients start. It‘s a powerful first step to informing you if the chemicals you’re using or sourcing are regulated, restricted, or known to be “safer”. In many cases, list screening is a requirement. Despite the benefits, there are common challenges with list screening that our clients have shared with us:
- List screening can be a tedious process
- Lists change frequently and it’s hard to keep up with changes
- Lists tell you what is already known, restricted, or regulated, but not what’s coming
- It’s easy to fall behind and feel like you’re playing catch up whenever lists are updated
- It’s hard to know what chemicals are “safe” based on list screening alone
Chemical Hazard Assessments help you understand the impact of a chemical on humans or the environment but similarly, companies have expressed frustrations around CHAs, for example:
- They require expertise to do and, often, to understand
- They take a lot of time
- They can be expensive
- They need to be maintained
- They aren’t required
Accessing critical information
Even for teams with their own CHA process, there are many areas to focus on and resources can be stretched.
Our team has been building our Chemical Data Repository for nearly a decade, focusing on list screening and Chemical Hazard Assessments. Their expertise has led to a huge amount of data and value – with over 500 lists that the team has reviewed, expanded to include hidden CAS RNs, maintained, and even created, with additional insights on 300,000 CAS RNs with up to 23 endpoints assessed for each. Each assessment is carefully conducted, reviewed, summarized, and maintained so our users can access critical information about the chemicals they use to make decisions more confidently.
We have evolved our solution with improved data entry, screening, review, organization, and sharing of these chemical assessments to make the process easier and more efficient.
The SciveraLENS team has supported dozens of brands and hundreds of suppliers, learning what they need and how they use the information they gather. Assess pulls that together in a simple module with:
- Quick screening for one to hundreds of CAS RNs
- Instant access to both summarized and detailed assessment results
- Notifications when assessments are updated that impact your chemicals of interest
- Ways to easily organize, tag, and group your data
This new modularized approach to SciveraLENS allows you to access the tools you need more effectively and for us to continue to build and improve our solutions based on your needs.
With Assess, we’ve heard feedback that list screening is easier, and our users are reassured knowing they aren’t missing important information. One of our users said Assess provided “regulatory tracking without any effort”. Coupled with CHAs, another user said “Assess is like a crystal ball” allowing users to “future proof” their businesses more efficiently.
Chemical assessments made easy
Find out more about Assess and how it helps you make chemical assessments quicker.