Voluntary ‘PFAS-Free’ Certification Program Draws Industry Opposition by Diana DiGangi

May 17, 2021 GreenScreen in the News

In a recent interview with Inside TSCA, Shari Franjevic, program manager on the chemical-safety certification nonprofit GreenScreen For Safer Chemicals, said the group’s work reflects efforts to adopt the precautionary principle -- the idea that potentially unsafe chemicals should be limited or eliminated even in the face of scientific uncertainty about their risks -- even if only on a voluntary basis.

“I think that we have seen, over the last 30-plus years in this country, a failure of the risk paradigm,” Franjevic said. “The idea is that we can control the propensity to cause harm by controlling exposure, and the reality is exposure controls can and do fail, people use chemicals and products in unintended ways.”

In particular, she said, transparency on product ingredients is key to efforts to ensuring that individuals can make “informed decisions” on the products they buy even without more stringent risk rules from states or EPA.

“What's happening right now in the marketplace is that companies have no requirement to disclose up and down the supply chain, the actual chemicals that are in their ingredients that become products. So downstream users of chemicals, retailers, etc., actually can't make informed decisions, because there's lack of transparency.”

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