AIHce 2015's Stewardship Program Proves Popular
The Product Stewardship Society is presenting a conference-within-a-conference here in Salt Lake City with popular sessions throughout the AIHce 2015 meeting.
SALT LAKE CITY -- Many AIHce 2015 attendees are checking out the #Stewardship2015 sessions taking place during the larger conference. The Product Stewardship Society is presenting this conference-within-a-conference here in Salt Lake City with popular sessions throughout the AIHce 2015 meeting, with presenters discussing the challenges of complying with REACH, GHS, and other classification schemes for chemicals of concern.
Occupational exposure limits, the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act and OSHA HazCom Standard, and REACH are prime topics of concern for product stewards, but advocacy-based lists and state regulations in Washington State, California, and Maine also are useful and important to monitor, Robert DeMott, Ph.D., DABT, principal toxicologist for ENVIRON International, told the audience during a June 2 session titled "Product Stewardship in the Era of Hazard-Based Ingredient Listings: Responses for the New Reality." Robert Skoglund, Ph.D., CIH, DABT, senior lab manager for 3M Company, and Linda Dell, M.S., senior epidemiologist at ENVIRON International, were DeMott's co-presenters.
They advised their audience to be prepared to communicate the differences between hazards and risks -- hazard is about the chemical, that is, it is a property of the chemical, while risk is about people, DeMott said -- and to monitor sources such as EPA's Safer Choices, the American Chemistry Council's recent paper comparing various tools' assessment of seven chemicals of concern, California's Safer Consumer Products regulation, the National Research Council's Framework for the Evaluation of Chemical Alternatives, and advocacy lists such as SIN (Substitute It Now! and ChemSec) and Skin Deep (Environmental Working Group.)
"Hazard doesn't make a product risky," DeMott said, adding that lists for scoring chemicals' hazard levels "are very useful, make no mistake."