It started as a dialogue about "ingredients of concern" in cosmetics and other personal care products, orchestrated by rival retailers Target and Walmart.

Three years later, that ongoing conversation — facilitated by the Sustainability Consortium and Forum for the Future, and representing 18 industry stakeholders — has produced an ambitious series of recommendations that guide principles of sustainability for this class of consumer goods and how these metrics should be disclosed.

"The combination of good intentions and having key customers be involved and stick with it made it simpler to justify the time and resources required for this," said Matt Kopac, manager of sustainable business and innovation for the Durham, North Carolina-based Burt's Bees, which is owned by Clorox. "It would have been easier to spend less time, if we didn’t have the brands who were showing leadership in the room." 

Forum for the Future focused on identifying and refining the areas of focus from the heterogenous stakeholders, while TSC is handling the technical aspects of the resulting rating system.

Not everyone in the room for that first meeting opted to move forward with the collaboration, but the group’s existence is already having a ripple effect in the sense that the conversation about chemicals has been elevated to much higher prominence, said Georgia Rubenstein, lead system change designer for Forum.

As the toolkit rolls out this year, that will trigger even more "clear market signals" about the direction the industry is following. "This is so far beyond compliance," Rubenstein said.

There were definitely some rough patches, which threatened to collapse the effort. It took a long time for the participants to agree on a common definition of "toxicity" and how to tackle antimicrobial preservatives. Ultimately, the group opted to adopt the work being done on preservatives by another organization.

The new approach won’t significantly impact Seventh Generation’s processes significantly, but it will require the organization to document better and be clearer with some of its policies, Wolf said. "One of the nice things about the BPC criteria is that they are not put through as absolute," he said. 

That’s important because the retailers represented by the TSC group represent just one slice of the channels selling BPC products. For perspective, they represent less than half of the overall sales volume for Seventh Generation, Wolf estimated.

It will be particularly important to get companies with a major e-commerce presence, including Amazon, on board, Kopac said. "It would be a positive and important step to bring them in, also a slew of other retailers who are getting the same messages from consumers," he said.

Source:Green Biz

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Picture credit to:Hide Obara