Apple-backed Fund Launches Hazardous Chemicals Roadmap
New metrics allow investors to factor chemical risks into ESG strategies with more precision.
A group backed by Apple and Google has released a framework designed to help investors and businesses address one of the gravest environmental threats facing humanity: chemical pollution.
The Safer Chemistry Impact (SCI) Fund is a multi-stakeholder initiative designed to provide blended finance to organisations and projects working to make chemical use safe. Its new roadmap, entitled ‘Accelerating the Transition to Safer Chemistry’, lays out a pathway to achieving this goal.
“Chemical pollution rivals carbon as an existential threat,” the report begins, arguing the issue has yet to receive anything like the regulatory attention or investment levels drawn by planet-warming carbon emissions.
While some governments have moved to regulate the vast array of chemicals in use – including through the REACH regulation in the EU, and a clampdown on the use of so-called “forever chemicals” in the US – experts warn our understanding of chemical risk remains at a dangerously early stage.
The new roadmap aims to help close this knowledge gap.
Breached boundaries
It draws on the ‘planetary boundaries’ framework, developed at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, which identifies nine limits which must not be crossed if the planet is to remain a safe operating space for humans.
Of the nine, the ‘novel entities’ boundary – which measures pollution by manmade chemicals – has strayed furthest beyond the safe level. The biogeochemical flows boundary – which covers the cycle of natural chemicals including phosphorus and nitrogen used as fertilisers in agriculture – has also been breached.
The roadmap from SCI Fund aims to respond by creating a system that allows investors, businesses and governments to measure, act and report on use of hazardous chemicals with precise common standards similar to those applied to greenhouse gas emissions.
“Pollution was once understood mainly as a localised problem of dirty air and water near industrial facilities,” Bill Walsh, Director of the SCI Fund, said in the report’s foreword.
“Today, whether it be the PFAS chemicals contaminating almost half of US tap water, chlorinated compounds desecrating mother’s milk even in remote Arctic regions, or endocrine disrupting chemicals implicated in declining sperm counts of men across the globe, chemical pollution is understood as a global crisis that rivals climate change in its potential to trigger irreversible impacts on Earth’s ecological and human health.”
The roadmap is designed to provide investors with a “standardised way to assess chemical impacts as part of the ESG performance of companies, enabling them to make more informed investment decisions”.
It can also be used by companies to create goals for reducing chemical hazards, track their progress, and communicate their achievements to stakeholders; and by policymakers to develop suitable standards and regulations.
Five steps
The roadmap begins by calling for a harmonised rating system of hazardous chemicals, building on ratings created by ChemFORWARD, a science-based non-profit that was the recipient of the SCI Fund’s first grant earlier this year.
From this, it follows five steps: understanding the leading ideas related to safer chemistry metrics; developing a vision for the next three to five years; refining and validating a framework for safer chemistry impact metrics to guide this transition; identifying priorities for the deployment of capital to strategically accelerate progress; and quantifying the replacement of toxic chemicals with verified safer chemistry.
A key part of the process is creating ‘chemical hazard assessment’ (CHAs), the report said. It described this as creating “a systematic process of assessing and classifying hazards across an entire spectrum of endpoints and severity”.
It requires establishing a consistent, approved methodology, ensuring there are enough qualified assessors to apply the methodology to individual chemicals, and a robust ongoing quality assurance programme, including peer review and a technical challenge process.
The first of these metrics is what SCI Fund calls ‘metric zero’, which identifies and categorises chemicals in a given supply chain or industry and from which companies will be able “to set individual actions and goals that could contribute to the broader industry effort”.
The roadmap aims to reach metric zero across at least four separate consumer-facing industries within five years.
The subsequent five metrics include: establishing and maintaining quality processes to guide the efficient creation, verification, maintenance, and interpretation of CHAs; demonstrating reduction in strategic data gaps for specific use cases; validating and amplifying the market opportunity for safer chemistry innovation; facilitating larger collaborative efforts to drive safer chemical identification and adoption along the supply chain; and demonstrating adoption of safer chemistry.
The study looks at case studies in industries including electronics, cosmetics, and building materials.
“This science-based, data-driven collaborative effort has revealed that chemical hazards are knowable and the number of chemicals we are dealing with is manageable,” said Stacy Glass, a Member of SCI Fund’s Advisory Board.
“While shared data is an enabler, collaboration is the accelerator. Working with this new framework, we can systematically reduce and one day eliminate chemical pollution.”
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