Abstract
Chemical and product manufacturers, spurred by recent environmental and sustainability initiatives, are seeking to embrace alternatives assessment to identify suitable alternative chemicals that are safer and more sustainable for use in consumer and/or specialty products. In this process, it is important to understand potential tradeoffs concerning final product design and redesign decisions. The objective of the present study is to characterize such tradeoffs using a set of six factors affecting product design: business strategy, economic considerations, functionality and performance, health/environmental endpoints, public perception, and regulatory factors. These factors were further disaggregated into 33 attributes distributed across the six factors. We assessed (i) tradeoff weights for each factor and (ii) the degree of influence of factors and attributes on a recent product design or redesign using a survey targeted at chemical and product manufacturers. Results from 33 completed surveys show that two factors are statistically different from equal weighting across the six factors: health/environmental endpoints and regulatory factors. Important attributes (and their factors) include: product price (economic considerations), product performance (functionality and performance), meeting desired specifications (functionality and performance), and company reputation (public perception). Principal component analysis yields nine principal components explaining 79% of the variance in the attribute scores dataset. These components load heavily on attributes such as public awareness of human and environmental health concerns, company reputation, product performance, and product price. The broader implications of our study include a realization that the context of the decision may dictate how business and economic concerns may be addressed differently than health and environmental endpoint concerns with the goal of navigating decision tradeoffs among manufacturers.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the Health and Environmental Sciences Institute (HESI)’s Sustainable Chemical Alternatives Committee, a collaborative group of scientists from academia, government, industry, and nonprofit organizations, with expertise in Alternatives Assessment (AA), who helped design and distribute the survey presented in this work. The authors also thank Derek Muir, Environment and Climate Change Canada; Peter Fantke, Technical University of Denmark; Molly Jacobs, Lowell Center for Sustainable Production; and Suzanne Davis and Diana Phelps, California Department of Toxic Substances Control, for their contributions to the manuscript. The following organizations also helped with the distribution of the survey: American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute, American Chemistry Council, City of Los Angeles Industrial Waste Management Division, Consumer Specialty Products Association, Green Chemistry and Commerce Council, HESI, Japanese Chemical Industry Association, and Toxics Use Reduction Institute. This work did not receive any financial assistance from any funding organization.
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Rao, V.M., Francis, R.A. & Tanir, J.Y. Analyzing chemical substitution decisions among chemical and product manufacturers. Clean Techn Environ Policy 21, 395–411 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-018-1643-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-018-1643-y