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Green
Purchasing-Prohibited Chemicals Lists
In This Section
Short-List Option
Because of the complexity of assessing and determining the environmental and health characteristics of the thousands of chemicals in modern products, you may wish to start by adopting a short list of products that are known health and environmental hazards recognized by multiple agencies – for example mercury, lead, naphthalene and formaldehyde. For reasons of transparency and accountability you will wish to footnote appropriate references for the materials you wish to restrict. See Comprehensive Chemicals Lists below for some useful references.
Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center adopted this approach to toxic substance reduction – creating a limited list of highly toxic chemicals whose purchase is allowed only with the permission of the Safety and Environmental Programs office. Those wishing to purchase these chemicals must justify their choice and demonstrate that there is no acceptable alternative before permission is granted. If permission to purchase is granted the mount purchased must be limited to what will be used for the purpose specified.
Comprehensive Chemicals Lists
If you wish to take a more comprehensive approach, you can base restrictions on an existing list developed by a government body charged with protecting public health and/or the environment. Such agencies include the CDC, ATSDR, OSHA; US, UN, OECD and EU environmental agencies, and international treaty organizations, among others. Some very useful lists are:
EPA Priority Chemicals List Identifies persistent bioaccumulative toxins considered by EPA to be crucially important to reduce and eliminate.
California Prop 65 list Identifies reproductive toxins and carcinogens. To use this link, click on “go to download area” on the landing page, then choose the most recent version of the full list – which is offered in PDF and spreadsheet formats on the download page.
IARC list Lists substances reviewed for carcinogenicity. Target categories for elimination could include Known Probable and Possible carcinogens -- Groups 1, 2A and 2B.
OSPAR list These chemicals are considered high risk to marine environments, but the list is useful because it identifies substances that are not well tested with regard to human toxicity or other environmental impacts, but are know to be toxic to aquatic life, which could be a sign of broader toxicity.
RoHS List These chemicals are targeted for elimination from electronic products sold in Europe (with certain exemptions) by July 2006. You may wish to adopt this list as a guideline for your purchasing of electronic equipment, even in categories such as certain medical diagnostic machines that are exempted from RoHS.
How to Implement
You can use these lists in different ways:
- Disclosure: You can ask vendors for disclosure of any of these chemicals in their products, and then review the products using that information to compare and contrast (Ask your GPO if they have already done this – and whether they can inform you of their findings)
- In-House Purchasing Restriction: You may wish to prohibit or restrict purchase or use of products containing certain chemicals– for example, products containing significant amounts of known carcinogens, if you are a cancer care center, or known respiratory irritants if your facility has had indoor air quality problems
- GPO Communication: Ask your GPO to require and make public disclosure of certain chemicals or classes of chemicals when they specify products, so you can rest assured they are not contained in the products you buy on contract. H2E can assist them with identifying and developing disclosure requirements for chemicals of concern
Keep in mind that there may be categories of product where you will want to allow certain of your restricted chemicals – for example mercury-containing fluorescent bulbs, which create huge energy savings and have no mercury-free alternatives yet, or formaldehyde for lab uses, even though you may prohibit it in building materials. You may wish to establish a specific exemption for such obvious products, but also to develop an exemption procedure that allows staff to purchase specific chemicals for necessary uses with case-by-case permission.
Untested Chemicals
The lists above offer very useful insights into the impacts of many chemical constituents of products. However, their scope is limited.
There are an estimated 80,000 chemicals in commercial use today, many of which are not fully tested for environmental and health impacts. A 1997 study by Environmental Defense (ED) “Toxic Ignorance” judged that less than 29% of high volume chemicals – those produced or imported in the US in quantities of more than 1 million pounds per year- had completed health hazard testing in sufficient detail to characterize their health risks.
Yet these chemicals were already produced and potentially released in huge quantities. Incorporated into products and used in manufacturing, they could be released to the environment or expose end-users. In 2003, ED reviewed progress made toward testing high volume chemicals and found that though progress had been made, numerous aspects of many chemicals already identified as high volume (over the 1 million pound mark) remained untested, and many new chemicals had reached the 1 million pound mark since inception of testing and had not yet been tested for many of the basic health endpoints. more
New chemical compounds or formulations are developed constantly – and our current system of testing and regulation is inadequate to evaluate and prevent harm from those chemicals. Often we realize harm is occurring only after countless people and the environment at large have been exposed to a given chemical’s effects. Unfortunately, this also means that alternative chemicals substituted for substances that we know are problematic can turn out to also have harmful effects that were not anticipated.
One method for avoiding such uncontrolled exposures and releases is for purchasers to specify a preference for products whose chemical constituents have already been fully tested for toxicity and environmental impacts. H2E and Health Care Without Harm are working with several GPOs and health systems to develop policies and specification language that address this crucial knowledge gap. Contact H2E's Champion Coordinator to find out how you can make use of this work in your own purchasing.
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