Product Stewardship
Introduction
Product stewardship involves an integrated approach to products, materials and services management designed to assess, minimise and eliminate the environmental and health related impacts of products. As part of our commitment to sustainability, we appreciate that all the chemicals we use must be managed responsibly. Our product stewardship systems are aligned to a key goal in the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development to ‘use and produce chemicals in ways which will lead to the minimisation of significant adverse effects on human health and the environment’.
The company is committed to product safety and conducts systematic and rigorous evaluations of both new and existing products. The process involves characterisation of any risks associated with product use, a determination of the related risk management measures and coupled mechanisms to effectively communicate this information outside the company.
Product Stewardship Performance
A systematic product responsibility reporting scheme conforming to the Global Reporting Initiative Sustainability Reporting Guidelines has been introduced to monitor the performance of Johnson Matthey’s operations. No notifications of significant health effects at end user level involving Johnson Matthey’s products were reported by our businesses in 2008/09. In addition, no major incidents or environmental releases during product transportation and distribution were recorded. On 22nd December 2008, Johnson Matthey BV Colour Technologies was fined €3,500 for an instance of non-compliance with hazardous material transportation rules. There were no incidents of non-compliance resulting in a warning by an official body. During the year there were four incidents of non-compliance with codes of practice relating to product hazard communication information. These were self detected in the businesses and resolved internally.
We have continued to implement a rolling programme to maintain best practice in our product stewardship systems across all our businesses and operations. During 2008/09, a further three compliance specialists were recruited to our corporate product stewardship teams to support our efforts.
As part of our commitment to further reducing the incidence of occupational illnesses attributable to chemical exposure and improving workplace occupational hygiene and chemical containment programmes, a global oversight committee has been established to steer development of voluntary exposure guidelines. This approach is aligned with industry best practices to manage chemicals lacking official limits and builds on our existing systems for these chemicals. During 2008/09, 46 new internal workplace exposure guidelines have been developed across the group.
Product Stewardship Targets
Our product stewardship targets are to:
- Continue to drive improvement in product sustainability and effective product stewardship in both the supply chain and in our own operations.
- Work towards enhanced product sustainability as part of our overall corporate sustainability programme with a particular focus on managing restricted substances, the use of optimisation strategies during new product introduction and the application of green chemistry in product design. This continues to support our commitment to avoid substances of concern in the development of new technologies and to phase out these substances in existing products wherever feasible. The use of systematic selection mechanisms will also be applied to help identify alternatives with preferred profiles in terms of human health and environmental safety.
- Promote the use of objective hazard ranking techniques and related exposure control targets in relation to our chemical products and process intermediates. These will be applied in Johnson Matthey’s workplaces and more widely in our product stewardship and risk management activities throughout the supply chain.
- Continue to focus on reducing employee exposure to hazardous substances in the workplace.
Animal Testing
In common with all companies developing and marketing new substances, Johnson Matthey is obliged by international legislation to make toxicity information available to assure product safety for humans, wildlife and the environment. We always attempt to limit testing and avoid redundant studies by undertaking collaborative work with industrial partners where it is established that suitable data does not already exist. If in vivo studies are unavoidable, it is ensured that such work complies with applicable laws, regulations, licensing and welfare codes.
Johnson Matthey has adopted the ‘3Rs’ approach to increase reliance on properly validated alternative methods which reduce, refine or replace the use of animal testing. We are now increasing the use of the latest integrated (intelligent) testing strategies (e.g. in vitro assays, computer modelling of effects and test waiving submissions).
The group does not manufacture any cosmetics or consumer goods and any testing needs are therefore aligned to regulatory requirements for industrial chemicals. As a consequence of our collaboration work, adoption of the 3Rs principles and use of integrated testing strategies, the testing we commission is limited to a very small scale. Johnson Matthey only uses fully accredited contract research organisations and does not undertake any in house testing. Any testing required as a result of the introduction of REACH will be carried out within industry consortia.
Johnson Matthey shares current public and political concern over animal testing and we only commission tests when absolutely mandated by law and if no alternatives exist. We remain optimistic that advances in toxicology science will enable us to further minimise animal testing, while continuing to protect human health and the environment now, and for future generations.
