RBA Chemical Platform
A chemical data collection, assessment, and reporting platform to identify chemicals of concern within supply chains, evaluate compliance with material restrictions, analyze chemical management risks, and enable risk-based chemical management due diligence.
The RBA’s Chemical Platform is a web-based solution designed to support RBA member companies and their suppliers with identifying, assessing, and managing chemical management risks within their supply chains. The platform enables standardized collection of chemical usage and control data with a centralized chemical product database, an automated Safety Data Sheet (SDS) parsing feature, customizable facility product line configurations, and roundtrip API integration with RBA-Online.
Advancing Responsible Chemical Management
Trends such as population growth, urbanization, globalization, and digitalization are driving the growth of chemical-intensive sectors like electronics, automotive, pharmaceuticals, and textiles. While these advancements fuel progress, they also heighten the need for responsible chemical management conduct to mitigate risks and transition toward more sustainable materials and practices. Companies face growing expectations to proactively manage and address chemical management risks throughout their supply chains, as well as new and evolving sustainability regulations.
Key Benefits
The Chemical Platform includes many features and benefits for streamlined chemical management risk identification, assessment, and management across supply chains:
- Chemical Data Collection and Reporting: The platform provides a standardized approach for rapid and controlled collection of chemical consumption data, including chemicals in products, manufacturing process chemicals, and more. Facilities can populate their chemical inventories, define their product lines, add chemical product consumption information, assess occupational health risks, and report data to customers and stakeholders.
- Risk Scorecards: The platform assigns overall risk scores to each facility based on chemical product usage and control data. Companies can develop customized facility-, company- and supply chain-level risk scorecards to summarize chemical consumption data and qualitative worker exposure risks into overall risk scores. This enables ranking and prioritization of chemical management risks among supply chain facilities for conducting risk-based due diligence.
- Chemical Screening: The platform enables companies to screen their facilities’ chemical inventories against numerous chemicals of concern lists to identify and assess conformance with various regulatory requirements, voluntary initiatives, ecolabel criteria, and material restrictions. Users can add their own unique restricted substances lists (RSLs) and manufacturing RSLs (MRSLs) for supply chain facilities to provide assurance against various material restrictions.
The RBA Chemical Platform was partially developed based on the Clean Electronics Production Network’s (CEPN’s) Process Chemical Data Collection (PCDC) Tool, an Excel®-based tool for collecting and reporting process chemical data that has been used by RBA members for several years. The RBA Chemical Platform utilizes the same data variables standardized by the PCDC Tool to streamline data collection and reporting practices and assess supply chain facilities’ overall chemical management risks.
The RBA Chemical Platform evaluates occupational health risks using the methodology of the RBA’s PCDC Risk Assessment Tool, an Excel® macro-enabled workbook that serves as a chemical safety and occupational exposure risk screening tool by pulling and analyzing data from completed PCDC Tool files. This methodology was improved upon in the RBA Chemical Platform through the integration of ChemFORWARD’s comprehensive chemical hazard assessments (CHAs) and Hazard Bands for better innate hazard ratings of chemical products. ChemFORWARD CHAs assess 24 human and environmental health endpoints across multiple exposure routes, following the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals (GHS)-based methodologies.
The RBA Chemical Platform has been fully integrated with RBA-Online, leveraging the secure infrastructure of its ISO 27001 information security-certified system for users to employ their existing company, facility, and trading relationships data as a foundation for collecting chemical management data. Through permissions and settings in RBA-Online, Chemical Platform users may be linked to their companies, facilities, and supplier facilities.
The RBA Chemical Platform enables RBA members and their suppliers to prioritize chemical management risks, mitigate worker exposures to toxic substances, and strengthen environmental sustainability. As regulatory requirements and stakeholder demands evolve, the RBA Chemical Platform will serve as an essential resource for characterizing industry-wide chemical consumption, understanding challenges to adopting safer chemistry, and driving continuous improvement.
RBA members and their suppliers can access the Chemical Platform via RBA-Online and contact the RBA’s Responsible Environment Initiative (REI) team at REI@responsiblebusiness.org for more information.
