Chemical Industry to Develop ‘Green’ Product and Process Standard

Chemical & Engineering News - Chemical companies large and small are eager to become greener. They want to be able to select greener starting materials and use cleaner chemical processes to make environmentally preferred products. But there are no authoritative marketplace criteria to identify green, greener, or greenest. And for those who think they are green, there's uncertainty over the best way to communicate the supporting information.

To that end, the American Chemical Society's Green Chemistry Institute (GCI) is spearheading an effort to create the Greener Chemical Products & Processes Standard. This standard will provide data to allow anyone to evaluate the relative environmental performance of chemical products and their manufacturing technologies. "We are building a multiattribute, consensus-based standard with third-party verification that a company can certify against to say that it has a greener product or manufacturing process than a competing product or a technology that it aims to replace," Peoples explains.

The process is being administered by NSF International, a global expert in standards development. The end goal is to have the standard issued by the American National Standards Institute. A draft of the standard is nearly complete and is expected to be released for public comment over the summer. The plan is to have final approval by the end of the year. Hat Tip: Environmental Leader