Dow's Product Safety Assessments Offer Safety Information
The Dow Chemical Company recently published its 200th Product Safety Assessment (PSA) at Dow.com. As part of its 2015 Sustainability Goals, the company committed to make publicly available safety assessments for its products globally. Written in non-technical language and covering topics such as basic hazards, risk and risk management, the PSAs are intended to offer the public general information about chemical products or product families. PSAs complement Dow's existing practices to make material safety information known to customers to ensure safe handling and that the products will meet safe conditions of use.
In addition, Dow is committed to helping to lead the Global Product Strategy, the global chemical industry's initiative to enhance product stewardship best practices within the industry and throughout the product chain. The Global Product Strategy is the industry's contribution to the United Nation's Environment Programme's Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM), which has established a goal to ensure safe global chemicals management by 2020.
"Chemical products support 95 percent of manufactured goods and provide many benefits to society, and Dow is committed to managing them responsibly," said David Kepler, executive vice president and chief sustainability officer at Dow. "The global chemical industry has made substantial progress in implementing its product stewardship commitments under the UN's Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management, but there is still much work to do."
Approximately 60 percent of Dow's high-priority compounds are now represented by a PSA, well ahead of the industry's average of 26 percent of high-priority compounds that have a publicly available summary.
"In 2006, Dow was the first chemical company to make non-technical language summaries of our product safety assessments accessible to the public," said Greg Bond, corporate director of Product Responsibility. "We now have 200 PSAs published and are expanding the scope of our 2015 goal with the addition of Rohm and Haas businesses and products. Our efforts to develop and refine our PSA format as well as enhance our writing efficiency will pay off as we accelerate our efforts to produce PSAs for the more than 800 product families we now offer."
With annual sales of $58 billion and 46,000 employees worldwide, Dow is a diversified chemical company that combines the power of science and technology with the "Human Element" to constantly improve what is essential to human progress.