Sustainability of chemical compounds is often ill described (if at all). To truly green our chemical footprint we first must quantify the environmental and health footprint of chemical enterprises. Most chemicals in commerce are chemical products i.e., mixtures (even so-called pure chemicals as technical grades often contain up to 5% impurities.) Hazard and risk assessment methods for mixtures are few and far between. How then to assess the greening of an enterprise that distributes dozens or even thousands of products?  As part of the ESG dynamics, chemical sustainability i.e., the impact from chemicals and how to measure these across hundreds or more products, is a daunting, but necessary task. We need an index that tracks the potential risk of an enterprise’s total inventory as it greens over the coming years. Note here the dichotomy between risk and hazard, where environmental health measures risk as the product of hazard and exposure, i.e. quantity matters (most systems consider only hazard i.e. don’t distinguish between test tubes and tanker trailers). Our ChemESI (Chemical Environmental Sustainability Index) metric measures both hazard and risk across numerous chemicals. The resulting ChemESI Scores for single chemical and facilities are expressed such that they can be summed across chemicals and indeed facilities to wrap up into a single corporate ChemESI. But what about growth – when growth occurs in greener chemical inventory, a company can both grow and improves its ChemESI. Given the lead-time for developing true green alternatives to existing chemicals, intermediate substitution of less hazardous “analogues” may drive initial ChemESI reduction. Exposure here is measured as the total of chemical X within a facility. The hazard portion is less straightforward – although many hazard assessment/ranking systems exist, they generally do not allow compounding effects into a single score. There is however a hazard assessment system that is globally embraced: the so-called GHS (Globally Harmonized System) chemical classification system. A metric was developed based on the various endpoint ratings. Such metrics are then pooled across endpoints using a weighting system to result in a single hazard score for each chemical. Facility ChemESI’s can thus be established by simple summing of chemical specific risk estimates.

ChemESI – a chemical sustainability metric

Fall 2022 abstracts, posters, and presentations will launch in mid-September.

ACS Fall 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.