Product Stewardship

Product stewardship involves an integrated approach to products, materials and services management designed to objectively assess and then minimise or 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’.

Johnson Matthey maintains its long standing commitment to product safety and conducts systematic and rigorous evaluations of both new and existing products. Our product stewardship management systems focus on the characterisation of any risks associated with product use, a determination of related risk management measures and mechanisms to effectively communicate this information outside the company.

Our Performance

A systematic product responsibility reporting scheme (conforming to the Global Reporting Initiative Sustainability Reporting Guidelines) is used to monitor the performance of our operations and maintain surveillance of the company’s products. No notifications of significant health effects at end user level involving our products and no major incidents or environmental releases during product transportation and distribution were recorded in 2009/10. Two minor regulatory infringements related to container marking requirements in Germany occurred in our Vertec business resulting in a combined penalty of €1,056 imposed during January 2010. Our heavy duty diesel catalyst business in the USA received one notice of violation concerning a mislabelled product and one other linked non-penalty notification of non-compliance from the California Air Resources Board. During the year there were a total of five self detected incidents of non-compliance with standards or codes of practice covering product hazard communication which were resolved internally by the businesses involved.

Further progress has been made on strengthening the core management systems, IT tools and competencies across the group’s product stewardship teams. During 2009/10, three more compliance specialists were recruited to corporate product stewardship teams to support these efforts.

Johnson Matthey’s businesses have management systems in place which assess the health and safety impacts of products during their various life cycle stages. This includes coverage of:

• The product concept and research and development stage. This activity is undertaken centrally or by businesses as appropriate.
• Manufacturing and production.
• Storage, distribution and supply into markets.
• The in-use service life phase.
• The end of life or reuse phase.

The group’s product sustainability programmes are particularly focused on the selection of substances with superior profiles in terms of their potential impact on human health and the environment. During the year several businesses have updated their local restricted substance management programmes which are used in directing their choice of substances for new product development and for setting targets for the replacement of substances of higher concern.

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